Our capability as a regulator

Overview

The change we want to see

Our maturity as a regulator is at the heart of our success. To deliver outcomes and impact, we must continuously improve our capability and capacity within resource constraints.

2024/25 in numbers

• A team of around 50 people operating across the UK (Newport, Edinburgh, London, Titchfield and Darlington) delivered our business in 2024/25. Our numbers were reduced by the end of the financial year to allow us to accommodate the in-year pay award and to set us up to operate within budget in 2025/26.

• We were operating with 4 vacancies by year-end, which we are now recruiting to fill – 3 Statistics Regulators and 1 Research Specialist. We continued to use contingent labour to provide flexibility. We have extended our Senior Copy Editor agency position for another year and have made our Senior Economic Advisor position permanent.
• Employee engagement rate in the Civil Service People Survey of 72% in 2024 compared with 75% the previous year, and 64% across the Civil Service.
• We operated within a £3.4 million baseline budget in 2024/25. We utilised £70k of a ringfenced £150k contingency to resource an increase in demand for our guidance and interventions around the UK General Election.

• The OSR website had 113,000 sessions initiated, with 66,000 engaged sessions (lasting longer than 10 seconds or having 2 or more screen or page views). Outputs with the highest views and engagement included our review of the statistics on gender identity during the England and Wales Census and our report on police recorded crime.
• We have 4,476 followers on X with engagement at 6%, above the standard for government accounts of 1.7%.  Highest numbers of impressions were for: importance of transparency in election claims; communicating uncertainty is a constant challenge for statisticians; examining topics in the proposed refreshed Code of Practice for Statistics; and response to @SEENinHealth about the NHS staff survey.
• Posts have generated 33,000 impressions on LinkedIn, with 20,000 LinkedIn users seeing our posts. Highest numbers of impressions were for: OSR delighted to speak alongside Government Communication Service at the Government Statistical Service Conference about ‘Enhancing trust in the communication of statistics’; Latest annual report that provides analysis of the UK’s statistical system, its current state, and its future direction (SoSS 2024); independently reviewed the actions Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has taken to address requirements from our recent assessment of Butterflies statistics.

OSR 2.0 capability programme

In 2024/25 we initiated a capability programme with the following core themes:

• OSR Strategy – to lead on establishing our strategy for the next 5 years.
• Individual Capability – to refresh our values, develop a capability framework for regulators and support career development.
• Organisational Capability – establish more flexibility in our organisational structure to allow us to better respond to regulatory priorities, building on our approach to the general election where a task force allowed us to respond to surges in demand.
• Developing our Regulatory Model – our regulatory work is increasingly systemic but is built on the foundations of our core regulatory assessments, compliance checks and reviews – we need a balanced model where we can assign resource appropriately.

The programme is ongoing but reached key milestones by the end of 2024/25, which are reflected in the following sections.

Our people

Values: We refreshed our values in 2024/25, involving the whole team in deciding how we aspire to operate:

Vigilant and Rigorous: we work carefully and proportionately to develop our judgement to improve and safeguard statistics.

Innovative and Adaptable: we inspire creative, agile and innovative cultures to empower meaningful and visible systemic change.

Fair and Open: we are curious and listen to stakeholders’ views to delivery transparent and just regulatory decisions.

When working with others, we will be respectful, kind, openminded and humble.

Organisational structure: We have concluded our review of organisational structure, and we have made changes to improve flexibility. We have reduced the number of domain teams from eight to six, merging topic areas. This will support us in evolving a less top-heavy structure and free resource for a new Cross-Cutting team, which will lead on some cross-cutting projects like our State of the Statistics System report and also increases our flexibility so we can pivot to support higher casework demand and any unexpected high-priority regulatory work.

Skills survey: We launched our skills survey in March 2023 to understand the overall landscape of OSR’s skills base in relation to the skills we need to deliver our business, and to identify strategic gaps to enable us to address them through recruitment and learning activities. Following the successful rollout of the survey and review of the data, we designed a programme of learning around 5 priority areas that we identified.

Job profiles: Under our capability framework, we have been producing standardised role profiles for each role in OSR. We have finalised the profiles for our regulators, and we are drafting profiles with our functions.  These profiles are to be utilised to inform recruitment for creating job adverts. Alongside this we also created our regulators skills framework and matrices to provide clarity on regulatory skills and to identify and address skill gaps within OSR.

Learning: We had a successful year for learning, with 54 training events arranged through our Learning Calendar, informed by the People and Pulse Surveys, our Skills Survey and our Corporate Governance Assurance Statement. Highlights included:

• A 5-part series of learning sessions with our Senior Copy Editor that aimed to elevate written communications in OSR, supported by new writing guidance and resources, including the OSR Writing and Style Guide.
• Team day and other sessions focused on wellbeing: personal resilience, OSR values, bullying and harassment, and psychological safety.
• 4 skills sessions on devolution, change management, workshop your workload in a week, and a managing your workload panel discussion. We also held sessions on risk management, portfolio management and Equality Impact Assessments. Programme management, project management and finance management are scheduled to follow.
• Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi (SCAD): We delivered a 7-day OSR-led seminar for international delegates on how to deliver a quality assessment programme. This seminar has since been reimagined and rolled out as a 4-day internal workshop on ‘How to be a Regulator’ and will be repeated annually as an induction event for new starters.
• 3 security-themed training sessions: avoiding phishing, online privacy and data security.

Our regulatory model

Our regulatory model refers to the framework OSR uses to carry out oversight of official statistics. This includes how we monitor the statistical system, assess compliance with the Code of Practice and communicate regulatory judgements and impacts.

We have continually evolved and improved our regulatory model throughout 2024/25. This included clarifying and consolidating tools for how we carry out our regulatory work, developing clearer ways to communicate the findings and working with our data and methods team to test ways we could be more efficient.

A key output has been the development of a new approach to improve clarity and consistency in how we communicate our findings, which went live in May 2025.  This new approach aims to enhance the transparency of our regulatory findings and to make them more searchable using technology, thereby improving our ability to gain insights and maximise impact.

This work ensures our regulatory model remains remains fit for purpose in the context of evolving statistical practices and user needs.

Our technology

Our Data and Methods team has been at the forefront of our innovation. The flagship development in 2024/25 has been a new automated HorizonScan-AI Dashboard that is supporting our horizon scanning and delivering insights and efficiencies for our casework programme. An Automation Task Force is developing our Automation Strategy.

We have also taken part in a pilot study of the application of CoPilot within the Authority, identifying a range of ways to employ the technology responsibly to improve our productivity. We are awaiting a decision on whether the tool will be made available routinely in the future.

Managing risk

Management assurance

• Our Portfolio Review Board (PRB) provides oversight of the delivery and evaluation of our 5-year strategy and supporting business plans, our rolling regulatory work programme, finance and resource management, and risk management.
• We provide a detailed report to Regulation Committee twice a year on our performance (in addition to my more-regular updates). We also publish an Annual Report as an annex to the UK Statistics Authority Annual Report and Accounts, and separately on our website.
• We provide a Corporate Governance Assurance return to the Authority’s Risk and Assurance team.
• We are currently developing a refreshed set of KPIs.
• In February 2025, we initiated a project to develop a new automated workflow system.

Financial assurance

OSR delivered an approximate 4-per-cent underspend for 2024/25.

Risk assurance

• OSR delivers controls that support the mitigation of UK Statistics Authority overarching risk around Independence, Trustworthiness and Impact. This is achieved through its role as an independent regulator and the interventions made by the Authority Chair. OSR reviews and updates its controls for this risk on a quarterly basis.
• OSR has identified four long-standing areas of strategic risk – Relevance; Voice; Independence; and Capability. These risks are reported to each meeting of PRB with a status report and RAG rating for review and challenge, and twice a year to Regulation Committee. Projects and Programmes can also escalate risk to PRB via the SLT Sponsor and our Plan-on-a-Page process.

In 2024/25 we added three additional risks to the strategic risk log:

• General election (now closed): We developed mitigation strategies to help us respond to increased demand for our role as a regulator and to manage any potential pressures placed on our independent voice. Our work during the election period is described above.
• Capacity: This risk reflects the increasing demands for our regulatory role and the financial pressures on OSR, the Authority and wider public sector. We retain this risk for close management by PRB.
• ONS performance: The risk that our regulatory work is insufficient, or perceived to be insufficient, in responding to reduced confidence in the quality of ONS statistics, leading to regulatory, or perceived regulatory, failure.

Quality assurance

In September 2024 we received the results of an audit focused on assurance on the design and embeddedness of controls supporting consistency and fairness of judgements across casework and assessments. The outcome found substantial assurance – the framework of governance, risk management and control are adequate and effective. We are progressing recommendations to review guidance, training and our approach to monitoring our work.

We have developed an OSR Regulatory Quality Framework. The framework sets out a high-level overview of how OSR delivers and assures the quality of its outputs.

Reviews of UK statistics that are relevant to OSR

Lievesely review: Professor Denise Lievesley published her review of the UK Statistics Authority, which included important issues relating to OSR – in particular, that OSR needs to improve how it communicates the separateness of its role from ONS. Separation matters to us, and in October 2024 we published a statement that sets out, in formal terms, the arrangements that underpin our separation from ONS.

PACAC report: Transforming the UK’s Evidence Base: The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee published its report in May 2024. The report endorsed the Lievesely Review finding and recommended that OSR play an enhanced role in highlighting data gaps across the UK, preparing regular and public reports. The report also commended OSR on our intelligent transparency campaign and recommended we “publish an annual report card on departments’ compliance with its guidance, so that Parliament and external bodies might support it in holding departments to account and making the case for well-informed policy”.