James Benford to Ed Humpherson: ONS response to OSR’s assessment of the July 2026 Surveys and Economic Statistics progress update
Thank you for your response to our July 2026 quarterly update on Surveys and Economic Statistics, and for the constructive way in which colleagues at the Office for Statistics Regulation have continued to engage with the ONS’s work to improve surveys and economic statistics.
We welcome OSR’s recognition that the July update marked a further important step in our response, with stronger leadership, greater transparency and a clearer approach to managing the integrated Surveys and Economic Statistics portfolio. We also welcome your intention to move to annual OSR assessments of progress. Your initial recommendation that the ONS should provide regular quarterly updates has helped us strengthen the way we report progress, risks, dependencies and delivery confidence to users, and we will continue to build on that approach. After the October update we will reflect on the timing of future releases to ensure the best possible interplay with the ONS’s annual business planning process and related communications there.
Since the July update, there have already been some encouraging early signs of further progress.
- We have continued to strengthen operational performance and resilience through interviewer recruitment. The size of the face-to-face field community has now reached its target minimum level of 875 heads at the beginning of September with work continuing to reach 915 throughout the autumn.
- We also completed the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) readiness assessment in August, which provided a clear, evidence-led stocktake of progress. The key conclusion was that transition should remain data-led, with current focus on maintaining a credible path to a safe transition in 2027 while recent design and methods improvements continue to feed through.
- The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings sample has been moved fully to digital by default collection, reducing respondent burden and making it easier for businesses to complete. This has resulted in data being received earlier than in previous years and the highest ever response rate achieved for the survey.
- In August we also published detailed articles and an accessible blog on the upcoming impacts on our economic estimates as part of the annual Blue Book and Pink Book publications. Our changes this year include the impact of using a new data source, the Annual Survey of Goods and Services, where we now have far more detail about what services, and in some cases manufacturing of products, are being undertaken by companies primarily operating within the services sector. This has improved our estimates for activity in the service sector and the overall level of GDP in the economy.
- It is also encouraging to see continued improvements in staff engagement in our recent internally run pulse survey.
We recognise that important areas remain to be developed further. You are aware of the LFS operational incident in May that we disclosed publicly as soon as practicable and ahead of the first affected LFS release in July. Our analysis of the impact of the incident found a minimal impact on headline estimates in both our July and August publications. We have completed in August a lessons-learned exercise, which will publish on 15September. We have put in place a structured improvement plan to strengthen governance, assurance and performance monitoring across telephone operations, and are embedding the lessons more widely across social surveys. These actions are driving both a recovery in the achieved sample size for the LFS and a broader strengthening of our operational processes.
We will continue to strengthen future quarterly reporting by setting out clearer survey targets and thresholds, including for achieved sample sizes. We anticipate the work on targets will not be complete for the October update so will look to communicate in the first 2027 update. We are also progressing the costing work described in the July update, building a more disaggregated view of the costs associated with delivering surveys and economic statistics, including indicative estimates for our most critical outputs and hope to include this in our October update. This work is strengthening our portfolio management and will help users better understand the trade-offs that inform prioritisation and delivery choices.
We also welcome OSR’s ongoing interest and support in our work to improve the quality of data sources provided to us by government departments. Cross-Government Statistical Service (GSS) work to improve the use of administrative data in official statistics is progressing through the GSS Administrative Data Steering Group, with a focus on mapping end-to-end data journeys, identifying risks and strengthening capability across government. This is being shaped collaboratively with departments across the GSS, supported by engagement with senior leaders and Heads of Profession. ONS is also working closely with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in support of this agenda and HMRC’s internal statistics review. We are particularly grateful for your continued input and oversight into HMRC’s internal statistics review, which is critical for ONS trade and public sector finance statistics.
Yours sincerely,
James Benford