The state of government statistics
Our reflections on the state of official statistics
On 28 June 2023, we published the latest in our annual series of reports that set out the Office for Statistics Regulation’s view on the current state of government statistics. The State of the UK’s Statistical System 2022/23 highlights examples of statistical producers doing things well which we would like to see continue into the future, and the improvements we would like to see to ensure statistics and data better serve society’s needs. Key themes include: public demand for relevant data and statistics; quality risks; producer resource challenges; communication and misuse; intelligent transparency; and UK comparability. We also reflect on progress on the areas raised in last year’s report.
Our capability as a regulator
Our maturity as a regulator is at the heart of determining our success. To deliver the outcomes and impact we want to have we must be ambitious and continuously improve our capability – of our people; our processes and systems; our strategic approach; and our intelligence. We identified priority activities for 2022/23:
Partially met: Publishing updates to our website has continued, our focus in recent months has been facilitating the transition to a new platform, which has limited other web development. Transparency, accessibility and smoother user experience are key goals for the new site and remain as priorities for 2023/24. Partially met: Our focus this year has been on the OSR induction process, but we have not been able to make all the progress we planned in our other priority development areas – feedback, confidence to challenge, and line manager support. We rated strongly as an organisation in many aspects of the 2022 People Survey with an overall 74 per cent employee engagement score but for learning and development we understand there is more to do (64 percent). A strong focus on building team capability will continue in 23/24. Partially met: Already covered above.Prioritise making our opinions and judgements transparent and easy to find and improve the public’s access to OSR.
Develop our people to have the confidence and skills to drive improvement autonomously.
Focus on embedding a culture and infrastructure for gathering and sharing insight.
Resourcing
In 2021/22, we delivered an underspend of around 10 per cent on our £3.1m budget. This can broadly be attributed to vacancies. In autumn 2022, we escalated the difficulties in recruiting to key posts to be managed closely by our senior leadership team as part of our strategic risk profile. We made a number of innovations in how we manage our recruitment and promote our vacancies, which has led to a good number of posts being filled. Recruitment remains challenging, with a competitive labour market for the skills we are seeking, and we will need to continue to invest time in attracting the right people. As the same time, moving into 2023/24 we will need to absorb inflationary pressures within our baseline budget and live within our means, and so vacancy rates will need to be managed closely.
Managing Risk
Our corporate risks are focused in four areas that are critical to our strategic intention as an independent regulator to best serve the public good:
- Our relevance
- Our voice
- Our independence
- Our capability
Our relevance
Risk: We do not have credibility as a regulator.
Status: Green. Robust mitigations in place. We have good evidence of how we have retained our relevance as a regulator in the last year – for example, with work around excess deaths, fuel poverty, modern slavery and statistical literacy. We identified that we needed to do more to engage strategically to support our scrutiny of the statistics system and broader landscape which requires horizon scanning and networking. Our Director General for Regulation is leading an engagement strategy and our engagement around our business planning cycle this year has been more extensive than in previous years.
Maintaining our voice
Risk: We do not say the right thing at the right time.
Status: Amber. Robust mitigations in place but less than optimum. Overall, we are in a good position – our judgements are well received and we are calibrating our voice well. We would like to achieve greater visibility of our blogs, increase the pace of our casework responses and develop a consistent OSR position and voice on the communication of statistics – we have a programme planned for 2023/24.
Maintaining our independence
Risk: We are perceived by stakeholders not to be able to operate independently as a regulator.
Status: Amber: Robust mitigations in place but less than optimum. We have good evidence of increasing visibility and public confidence in our role as the statistics ‘watchdog’. We will inevitably be making sensitive judgements that leave us vulnerable to our independence being questioned but we are confident in our evidence-led approach grounded in the Code. There are current pieces of work that review aspects of ONS’s statistics that may lead stakeholders to be interested in, and seek assurance on, the degree of separation between the Authority’s production role (ONS) and us as the regulation arm (OSR). We are looking at how we describe and evidence separation, which will be useful in the light of the proposed Cabinet Office review of the Authority. And we are also ensuring our recruitment policy is consistent with our independence, in particular so we can be sure we remain able to recruit from a range of backgrounds.
Building our capability
Risk: We do not have the skills, tools and resources to regulate and uphold the Code.
Status: Amber: Robust mitigations in place but less than optimum. We have made good progress in many areas. Main area of concern is building capability through effective management and training due to various constraints on the team in the last year. The appointment of our new Deputy Director in April 2023 provides us with the leadership we need to prioritise developing a clear programme around our capability. While within the Authority we received a ‘green’ status for our financial management in 2022/23 we have zero appetite to spend beyond our budget and we are mindful of closely managing our expenditure to absorb inflationary pressures in the coming year.
The work of OSR has not been the subject of the Authority’s internal audit programme in 2022/23. We value the insights of Internal Audit and our senior leadership team met with the Head of Internal Audit (IA) for the Authority early in 2023 and we have agreed that IA will consider how OSR could be better covered in their programme so that relevant planned cross-Authority audits are widened to cover OSR rather than just relying on one planned audit a year – for example, on topics such as human resource management or statistical quality. IA will also consider if there will be a stand-alone audit of OSR in 2023/24 with the topic and scope linked to our strategic risk profile.
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