Our business plan for this last year has had a much greater outward focus than in the past, and our stakeholders have confirmed that the priorities we set out for 2023/24 continue to resonate strongly. We have decided that these priorities should persist into the coming year.

While we will double down on these priorities this year, as we approach the end of our strategic plan for 2020 to 2025, we plan to work closely with stakeholders to lay the foundations for the next 5 years. We plan to run an energised engagement programme with a series of events, and we will be getting out and listening to as many people as we can as we look towards the future.

The coming year will be important for other reasons. The General Election has been called for 4 July 2024. Over the last 18 months, we’ve established the principle of intelligent transparency – ensuring that, when the UK Government makes statements using numbers to explain a policy and its implementation, it should make the underlying analysis available for all to see. We want to see intelligent transparency applied by all parties engaged in the election, using quantitative analysis to support statements. We are using our regulatory framework and flexing our capacity to support transparency and openness, and responding publicly to any misuse of statistics and data we see.

We will also deliver the outcomes of our review of the Code of Practice for Statistics this year, refreshing the Code and publishing a third edition. We’ve been running a hugely engaging call for evidence around the Code and our core principles of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value – which are now well embedded within official statistics and increasingly universally across other forms of evidence. The time is right to ensure that the Code remains relevant given the changes we’ve seen in the data landscape, increased desire for statistics from users and changes in the ways statistics producers are working.

A recommendation of the Lievesley Independent review of the UK Statistics Authority is that the UKSA establish and deliver a Triennial Statistical Assembly with the remit of determining the UK’s needs for statistics through a wide consultative process, including an annual public lecture from the Chair of the UKSA. Our annual State of the Statistical System report will play a key role in providing OSR’s view on the performance and challenges facing the statistical system, the areas of progress and innovation, and our recommendations for advancing the system.

While we want to continue to move beyond supporting good statistics production – building partnerships and supporting wider voluntary application of the pillars of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value – the state of UK statistics will rightly continue to take up a lot of our attention. We are doing a significant amount of work on the quality of economic and labour market statistics and other areas where we are seeing significant transformation, like population and migration statistics.