Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), Ed Humpherson, recently spoke at the “Independence of Official Statistics International Conference” hosted by the French Statistics Authority in Paris, exploring how the work of OSR maintains public confidence in official statistics. The full transcript is below.
My aim today is to provide some context to the work of the Office for Statistics Regulation in the UK.
We are part of the UK Statistics Authority.
The UK Statistics Authority exists to promote the public good of statistics. It is the governance board for the UK’s national statistical institute, the Office for National Statistics. This is the UK’s most important producer of statistics, especially on the population and the economy. But it is not the only producer – in fact, in addition to the main departments of state and the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, there are around 100 further producers of official statistics across the UK.
And the Authority has a separate regulatory office, called the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), that sets and upholds the standards for official statistics – not just for the statistics produced by the national statistical institute, but for all those produced by other government bodies.
I am head of OSR and so I will focus on OSR’s work today.
OSR exists to enhance public confidence in official statistics. Confidence in official statistics can be harmed in different ways:
- A lack of independence in the production of statistics. This can undermine the basic trustworthiness of the statistics.
- Shortfalls in the quality of statistics, for example because the data sources are not reliable as indicators of underlying real-world phenomena.
- Misinterpretation of statistics in public discourse – whether because they are communicated inappropriately by statistics producers or misused by political actors in debate.
OSR has several tools to address these harms.
By far and away the most important is the promotion of norms of good statistical behaviour. We do this through the Code of Practice for Statistics, which OSR maintains and promotes. This Code is similar to the European Code of Practice in its content. There are two significant differences: first, the UK Code is more explicit about its philosophical framework – which focuses on user experience and perception of the Trustworthiness, Quality and Value of statistics: or TQV as it is known. Focus on TQV means that the entire language of the Code sets and reinforces norms.
The second difference is its scope. The Code covers the ONS as the main statistical institute. It also covers all the main government departments: health, work and pensions, environment, home office (internal affairs), justice and so on. It also covers the administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – and all of the separate public bodies mentioned above.
It is sometimes said that this means the UK has a very fragmented system.
That’s not how I look at it. In fact, I think the UK has a very coherent system with the Code and OSR as its glue.
What the large number of producers shows is that we aim to ensure that all statistical publications by government comply with the same standards. We don’t want citizens to receive a two-speed service, where there are official statistics from the ONS and mere “information” or “data” from other departments. We want it all to be done to the same standards – the standards of the Code.
So, promoting norms is our first tool. The second tool is our assessments. This is where we review whether official statistics comply with the Code. We conduct and publish rigorous assessments – you can see them all on our website. These assessments can either conclude that:
- The statistics comply in full with the Code – and therefore can be called accredited official statistics (AOS).
- The statistics comply in part, and we will set requirements for improvement within a given time frame.
- The statistics do not comply in material ways, in which case we remove the accreditation.
This removal provides a powerful signal to users about the TQV of the statistics, and acts as a powerful incentive to producers to improve their work. To give a sense of the volume:
- There are around 800 AOS.
- In 2024-5, we suspended the accreditation of 15 AOS, many of them because of their reliance on the Labour Force Survey, which has suffered from challenges around the representativeness of its survey results. And in 2025-6, we suspended a further 23 AOS.
The third tool is the most subtle, but very important.
We support the work of professional statisticians in producers. In all producers there is a head of profession for statistics who has important responsibilities under the Code to uphold standards and reach professionally sound decisions. We form strong alliances with these producers and see our interventions as enhancing their role – even where we are telling them that they have areas for improvement.
Finally, we use our voice to stand up for the appropriate interpretation of statistics.
At times, this can involve us making public statements about the way statistics have been used by prominent politicians. This reinforces the standards of public use, but requires careful judgement, experience – and a blend of diplomacy and escalation.
Let me summarise. The UK system is characterised by:
- An overarching focus on the public good provided by statistics.
- OSR developing the Code of Practice as the glue that holds a very wide number of producers together. This advocates the norms of good statistical practice.
- And we support these norms through the power of accreditation and professional leadership, and OSR’s public voice as a champion of statistics.