The importance of separation: Ed Humpherson addresses questions raised by the Lievesley review

In our latest blog, Director General for OSR, Ed Humpherson, speaks about how OSR’s separation from ONS is communicated

Since Professor Denise Lievesley published her review of the UK Statistics Authority, most attention has been on the Statistics Assembly. The Lievesley review considered the work of the UK Statistics Authority, and its first recommendation was that the Authority should hold a Statistics Assembly every three years. The Assembly should elicit and explore the priorities for the statistical system with a wide range of users and stakeholders. And the first Assembly will present a fantastic opportunity to have a wide-ranging conversation about statistics and enable a discussion about the strengths and limitations of the current statistical landscape in the United Kingdom. So, it’s not surprising that this recommendation has generated a lot of interest.

The Lievesley review raised other important issues. Some of these issues relate to OSR. In particular, she highlighted that OSR needs to improve how it communicates the separateness of its role from ONS.

Separation matters to us. Indeed, when we look at official statistics, we start by considering the trustworthiness of the governance processes used by the statistics producers – by which we mean the mechanisms in place to ensure and demonstrate that the statistics are free from the vested interest of the organisation that produces them – that they are the best professional judgement of the statisticians.

Similarly, it’s important that our decisions reflect our best professional judgement and that, in relation to ONS, we can make those judgements without giving any weight to ONS’s own organisational interests.

We have several arrangements in place to secure our separation from ONS. But if people don’t appreciate or understand them, they are not working. And the Lievesley review made clear that we need to better explain the processes that assure this separation to our stakeholders and the public. That’s why today we are publishing a statement that sets out, in formal terms, the arrangements that underpin our separation from ONS.

The key features of the statement are:

a summary of the governance arrangements, under which we report our work to a separate Committee of the Authority Board made up only of non-executive members and me – that is, with no membership role for ONS staff.

a summary of the arrangements for setting strategy and budget, which involve me and my team making our proposals directly to this Committee and to the Board, with no decision-making role for ONS staff
a confirmation of my own personal reporting lines, which mean that I do not report to the National Statistician in any way, but directly to the Authority’s Chair; and that I have regular meetings with the Chair without the National Statistician or any senior ONS staff attending

Please read the statement if you’d like to learn more about these arrangements.

But I’ll close with Denise’s own words. The most important features of any governance set-up are the budget and the performance management. And on this, she was clear:

“The existence of a small number of misunderstandings by users also appear to perpetuate, such as that the Director General for Regulation is line managed by the National Statistician (he is not) or that the National Statistician controls the budget of the OSR (he does not). Nor does the National Statistician attend Regulation Committee meetings.”

I hope the statement we are publishing today helps provide some reassurance and address the issues of perception identified by Denise’s review.