Introduction

Our vision

Statistics should serve the public good

What do we mean by serving the public good? Statistics published by public sector bodies should be produced in a trustworthy way, be of high quality and provide value by answering people’s questions. In this way, they promote accountability, help people make choices and inform policy.

Statistics should therefore serve a wide range of users. When they meet the needs of these users, they serve the public good. But they do not always fulfil these ambitions. Their value can be harmed through poor production, a lack of relevance and coherence and misuse. It is our role as a regulator to minimise these problems.

What we do

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) provides independent regulation of all official statistics produced in the UK and aims to enhance public confidence in the trustworthiness, quality and value of statistics produced by government.

We are the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority, being independent from government ministers and separate from producers of statistics, including the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

We set the standards that official statistics must meet in the Code of Practice for Statistics. We ensure that producers of official statistics uphold these standards by conducting assessments against the Code. Statistics which meet the standards are given accredited official statistics status, indicating that they meet the highest standards of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value. We also report publicly on systemwide issues and on the way that statistics are being used.

Our governance

Our Director General reports directly to the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority. To ensure independence from ONS, the Director General has no reporting line to the National Statistician and is an Additional Accounting Officer with budgetary responsibility for OSR.

OSR’s strategy and business plans are agreed by the Regulation Committee, which comprises the Director General and a number of Non-Executive Directors from the UK Statistics Authority. The Committee recommends OSR’s plans and budgets for approval by the main Authority Board.

The 2024 Independent Review of the UK Statistics Authority highlighted the critical role of OSR in monitoring the use of statistics in public debate and intervening where necessary. The review endorsed the Authority’s approach of operating with two distinct executive offices (ONS and OSR), and in October 2024 we published a statement which set out clearly and transparently how the separation of OSR from ONS is achieved in practice.

Longer-term outcomes that we seek

Our 2024/25 priorities

Our 5-year strategic plan is crystallised into annual priorities and deliverables. This allows us to take a flexible approach to emerging challenges facing the statistics system. Our priorities for 2024/25 were:

• Support and challenge producers to innovate, collaborate and build resilience
• Champion the effective communication of statistics to support society’s key information needs
• Build partnerships to champion good practice principles for data and analysis that inform the public

Within these priorities we identified some important areas that would influence our year:

• The UK General Election, and our intention to emphasise the principles of intelligent transparency to the political parties
• Our review and refresh of the Code of Practice for Statistics, building on 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 being used across other forms of evidence
• Our intention to focus on the quality of economic and labour market statistics, and other areas where we are seeing significant transformation, especially population and migration statistics

Our story of 2024/25 in numbers

Support and challenge producers to innovate, collaborate and build resilience

• 9 assessment reports published, including a series of Spotlight on Quality assessments for economic statistics.
• 29 accreditation decisions made this year, including 5 new accreditations and 15 suspensions of accreditation.
• 12 compliance checks completed this year: 8 confirming continued OS accreditation and 4 informing developments of statistics by the producers.
• 6 strategic reviews were published this year, including The Quality of Police Recorded Crime statistics for England and Wales and progress updates on labour market estimates from the Labour Force Survey. We also completed our Systemic Review of ONS Economic Statistics, which was published in early April 2025.

Champion the effective communication of statistics to support society’s key information needs

• 219 casework cases considered by OSR and the UK Statistics Authority in 2024/25 compared with 231 in 2023/24.
• Just under 60% of cases were generated by members of the public, up from 53% in 2023/24. We had the same number of cases raised by parliamentarians as in the previous year (17 cases), and internally generated cases were down from 18% to 11%.
• Of the 131 cases raised with us by a member of the public, we recorded 39 as being duplicate concerns, primarily relating to election leaflets and polling data during the general election, and a smaller group relating to bovine tuberculosis reporting.
• We had a cluster of cases relating to harms associated with problem gambling; these resulted in further regulatory work and increased our closure times while this work was completed. However, the average time to close a case reduced again this year compared with the previous year – median 10 days (-4) and mean 19 days (-3).
• Our election response team considered 70 cases related to the election and over 100 campaign claims. We published our judgements on 5 occasions, across topic areas including party spending claims, disability, child poverty and polling statistics.
• 6k views of the election pages on our website, including guidance and the ‘What to Look out for’ page, with the news piece calling for transparency in election claims being the most viewed.

Build partnerships to champion good practice principles for data and analysis that inform the public

• Our Code website had 15,000 engaged sessions with 4,300 page views of the Code consultation which launched in October 2024. During the consultation period, we held 20 Code sessions with official statistics producer organisations and attended 5 analyst cross-department group meetings. We spoke at 4 stakeholder committees and held 9 stakeholder bilateral meetings. We received 61 formal responses to the consultation.
• 27 official statistics producers have now published statements of voluntary compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics for non-official statistics outputs. 17 non-official statistics producers have published statements, the latest being Cardiff University for its National Violence Surveillance Network Data.
• Our 5^th annual award for Statistical Excellence in Trustworthiness, Quality and Value was given out, in partnership with the Royal Statistical Society – the 2024 Award was to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) for what is thought to be the first dashboard of its kind on fertility treatments and outcomes. The UK Health Security Agency was also highly commended for its dashboard on respiratory viruses.
• 12 pieces of regulatory research, development and guidance published, including a series of research pieces on Statistics for the Public Good.
• 32 blogs published, including 12 guest blogs – resulting in 15,700 views. The most popular blogs were ‘Data in the debate: The Role of Statistics in Elections’ and ‘Whose line is it anyway? Why the misleading presentation of statistics cannot be dismissed as just a matter of opinion’.