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In an article for CEDA's 'Political and Economic Newsletter', Watson and Callus suggested that the unemployment rate is a misleading indicator of the health of the labour market. It fails to provide a useful indication of the quantity of employment available, nor does it reveal anything about the quality of that employment. It disregards the time dimension (labour market flows) and the space dimension (State and regional variations) of the labour market. That article suggested that a set of alternative indices was required to capture the health of the labour market and that these indices should encompass both quantity and quality measures. The time and space dimensions are beyond the scope of this article, which is concerned with how one could build a set of Health of the Labour Market (HLM) indices based on the quantity and quality dimensions. The pragmatic details of building a set of HLM indices (guidelines for these indices, items in the indices, indicators of the kind of work) are addressed and some fundamental conceptual questions are raised.