Dear James,
We have today published our response to the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s second quarterly progress report on its Plan for Economic Statistics and Survey Improvement and Enhancement Plan. Our response assesses ONS’s progress in addressing the findings of OSR’s systemic review of its economic statistics, including our interim and final report, and the recommendations of the Devereux review.
We note that the ONS report shows both continuing progress and sets out ongoing challenges. We particularly welcome the increased transparency on progress against milestones, on prioritisation, and on the ongoing challenges. However, we believe transparency could be further improved, and we welcome the proposal to introduce a set of outcome-based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
On specific issues:
- We acknowledge the restoration of the achieved sample size for the Labour Force Survey to near pre-pandemic levels but also note the continuing challenges faced in restoring response rates across social surveys as a whole.
- We also note other key challenges, particularly delays to the Transformed Labour Force Survey and slower than anticipated progress with the Statistical Business Register, a key enabler of transformations and improvements to key statistics.
In our response to the first quarterly update, we recommended that ONS should:
- Provide more succinct and accessible quarterly summaries, focused on prioritised user-facing milestones, with clearer information on progress, risk and changes to planned delivery timescales.
- We judge that this has been partially met
- Include more-disaggregated information on the costs of major outputs to support informed stakeholder engagement as part of its business planning processes.
- We judge that some progress has been made, but more needs to be done
- Report further on progress with quality reviews, workforce recruitment and retention, and replacing the legacy systems that underpin core economic statistics in the next update.
- We judge that this has been fully met
We will be in a better position to make a comprehensive assessment of progress after the next quarterly update, in July 2026.
We expect that our future responses to ONS progress reports will focus solely on delivery rather than also on presentational matters. We intend to review the periodicity of our responses to ONS quarterly updates as a regular rhythm of reporting and delivery are established.
Yours sincerely,
Ed Humpherson
Director General for OSR
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