The year ahead
Our latest business plan, published in April 2023, details our activities to help us deliver on the priorities you helped us shape, and our ultimate vision, that statistics should serve the public good.
Based on what we have heard from users and producers of statistics in our work, we are confident that those priorities still resonate very strongly, and so as we head into the final phase of our 5-year strategy we are going to be extending these themes in our business plan for another year.
We will be building on our progress this year and continuing to roll forwards our regulatory programme. Some activities will continue – like our economic statistics programme, and we will be focusing on new activities – like the Review of the Code – as well as making sure there is space in our programme to respond to issues as they arise – for example, increasing our efforts to support the public and advocate for intelligent transparency, should a General Election be called.
If you would like to suggest specific areas of statistics for us to include in our work programme, or if there is anything that you think we should be focusing on in the next 12 months, please contact our team or email regulation@statistics.gov.uk. We would be very happy to have a conversation around our plans.
As a reminder, the priorities are:
Support and challenge producers to innovate, collaborate and build resilience
We will champion and support statistics producers to build on the innovation, collaboration, and resilience they have displayed during the last few years. Our regulatory activities will see us promoting the sharing, linking and reuse of data. We will support statistics producers to maximise the value of their data and statistics through increased innovation and more collaboration. We will also focus on activities which will support statistics producers to develop and build resilience.
Champion the effective communication of statistics to support society’s key information needs
We will continue to champion the transparent release and use of data and statistics and argue for accurate and timely statistics to be available on the topics that matter most. Our regulatory activities will see us focus on how statistics producers communicate uncertainty, and how they mitigate and manage misuse of statistics and data. We will also focus our work on activities which support statistics producers to engage with, understand and meet the varying needs of a wide range of users of data and statistics.
Build partnerships to champion good practice principles for data and analysis that inform the public
We will continue our work outside of official statistics. Our focus will be on working with organisations, and with teams within government departments, who are not official statistics producers, but who produce and communicate data and analysis that are used in the public domain. These types of data and analysis are often likely to be perceived and used by others as if they are official statistics. We will continue our engagement with data influencers and data users to support us with this focus.
Increase our capability as a regulator
We will improve public access to us, making our opinions and judgements transparent and easy to find. We will continue to strengthen our people’s confidence, knowledge, and skills, and live our values authentically, and we will embed a culture and infrastructure for gathering and sharing insight.
Looking further ahead: What will matter to you most beyond the next 12 months?
With the end of our 2020-25 strategy fast approaching, we are taking stock and starting to look towards the longer-term future. If you would like to have a conversation with us about any gaps you see in our work, and your priorities for regulation of the statistical system, please email regulation@statistics.gov.uk. Use the same address if you’d like to register an interest in an event(s) we want to hold in 2024 to have energised discussions with our stakeholders about the next stage of our regulatory vision.