Our capability as a regulator
Overview
The change we want to see
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 and our capacity, often within resource constraints. We want our people to have the confidence, knowledge and skills to live OSR’s values authentically and deliver with impact. We want our regulatory judgements to be impactful, transparent and easy to find, particularly for those who need to make the changes in the system that we want to see. To enable us to work in this way, we will need to have the right tools and processes to develop our regulatory maturity.
2023/24 highlights
Our people and resources
- A team of around 50 people operating across the UK (Newport, Edinburgh, London, Titchfield and Darlington) delivered our business in 2023/24.
- We were operating with only 2 vacancies by year-end – making use for the first time of flexible contingent labour, including a Senior Copy Editor, and introducing a new Senior Economic Advisor. Resource constraints particularly impacted our Economics, Business and Trade domain and our Data and Methods team in-year.
- Employee engagement rate of 75% in 2023 compared with 64% across the Civil Service.
- We operated within a £3.4 million baseline budget in 2023/24 with a small underspend driven by lower staffing costs (as we filled vacancies) and reduced consultancy costs.
Access to our regulatory judgements and advice
- We had 731K total engagements with our website, down by around 200k from the previous year (largely due to engagement with our January 2023 response to concerns raised about ONS Deaths by Vaccination Status statistics). Publications with high engagement in 2023/24 included our Review of Mental Health Statistics in Northern Ireland and the assessment of the 2022 Census in Scotland.
- We have not identified any specific pattern to the type of outputs that generate the greatest interest – for example, between reports, correspondence or guidance but our high-profile interventions always generate spikes in traffic.
- 48% of engaged sessions with our website in 2023/24 were through direct access – typing in a URL or utilising bookmarks – and 34% were from organic searches through search engines (not paid).
- We had 5902 total engagements with our X/Twitter account. Posts with high engagement included our report on data linkage and our published findings on ONS’s revisions of estimates of UK GDP.
- We had 560 LinkedIn impressions with the topics generating greatest interest being how statistics inform people’s decisions and data linkage.
For 2023/24 we have initiated a programme to invest in our skills, people and processes to enable us to grow as a regulator, and we are making good progress in a number of areas – from revisiting our values as an organisation to developing strong analytics to guide our website and publications. We’ve placed focus on writing skills and the development of communication messages, and together with providing training, we’ve employed a temporary senior copy editor whose role includes strengthening our capability and helping to upskill our team.
We have also initiated work to identify our capability needs for the next five years, and a programme of work will be underway from early summer 2024 to support us in achieving our desired level of maturity.
Managing risk
We have identified, and manage, four areas of strategic risk – relevance; voice; independence; and capability. We assess that our risk exposure relating to our relevance as the regulator is reduced compared with the previous year as we are doing a good job of responding to emerging issues. This impacts our broader capacity but helps us to be a responsive regulator. On both voice and independence, we have also lowered the risk assessment this year as our voice is coming through clearly.
In addition, we identify more specific risk exposures that need to be managed at a senior management level. In 2023/24 we’ve identified and are managing risks related to finance (since resolved and closed), transformation of the statistical system, and the pending general election. We are developing a standardised approach to reviewing transformation programmes and balanced communication. We are preparing for a general election in a number of ways, including providing public-facing materials and building an internal task force.
We have scheduled deep dives on risk at our senior leadership meetings, and we have regular horizon-scanning sessions with the Regulation Committee.
Reviews of OSR
Sturgis Review
In January 2023, we commissioned an independent review of our regulatory work on the Covid Infection Survey (CIS). This was done in response to concerns from representatives of the community interest campaign group Better Statistics, who raised concerns over the adequacy of the regulatory oversight we provided for the CIS. Professor Patrick Sturgis completed his review in May. The Sturgis review concluded that we had done a good job of identifying the strengths and areas of improvements for the survey. He did, however, raise a number of areas where we could have better communicated our findings to ONS and improved on how we monitored ONS’s progress against the objectives. We responded positively to the recommendations, publishing both the report and the response.
Lievesley Review
Professor Denise Lievesley’s review of the UK Statistics Authority, including OSR, was published on 12 March 2024. Professor Lievesley’s independent review was conducted as part of the programme of Public Bodies Reviews. The review highlighted four recommendations and six suggestions for OSR. We welcome the findings and are committed to implementing all the relevant recommendations to continue to strengthen our capability as a regulator.
Internal audit of our portfolio management
OSR has a monthly Portfolio Review Board (PRB) which monitors the implementation of the OSR 5-year strategy and business plan, and the portfolio of activities that support delivery of our priorities. In 2023 we established programme boards for the first time to provide strategic oversight in important areas – for example: economic statistics; transformation of the statistics system; and building partnerships. Each of these programmes is sponsored by a member of our Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and reports to the PRB.
We need stronger mechanisms to help us deliver a flexible work programme – responding quickly to emerging issues and managing competing priorities for limited resources. We requested an advisory internal audit of our portfolio management approach in 2023, and we are currently implementing the findings from that audit, which we found very helpful. We have strengthened the governance and decision-making role of the PRB, and clarified the connection with our weekly SLT meetings, where a lot of PRB business is taken forwards. The audit trail for those meetings has been strengthened. We have also clarified the risk escalation from programmes to the PRB, and we have developed a skills matrix to help assign our people to best effect.
We have more work to do to progress the remaining commitments. Work is underway to update our criteria and approach to prioritising our work programme as well as a refresh of our portal of guidance on portfolio, programme, project and risk management. We have been limited by resource in 2023/24 and by the suspension of the development of a new automated workflow management system. The systems delay also means we have been unable to make the progress we would have liked on systemising our corporate intelligence, but we are working to develop alternative interim plans in parallel to working with the developers towards securing a restart.