Annex: Review against OSR maturity model

2020–2025: Our strategic impact

2024/25 marks the final year of our 2020-25 strategic business plan – Statistics for the Public Good, Regulating for Trustworthiness, Quality and Value. We are currently working with stakeholders and developing our strategic plans for the next 5 years, but we are confident that the themes of public good and TQV will continue to play very strongly.

As we come to the end of the 5 years, we are offered the opportunity to reflect on our strategic impact during the period. While we have had our critics, we have transformed as a regulator during this period.

When we published the strategy, it was early in the coronavirus pandemic, and we recognised how this influenced our strategy. The pandemic reminded us of the importance to the public of trustworthy, high-quality and high-value statistics and the important role we play as an independent regulator in upholding those principles, evolving to support a fast-changing environment. This not only applies to responding to an event like the pandemic but also to advances in technology and AI, growing demand for accessible data, evolving pressures on traditional data collection and so on. The pandemic also showed us what the statistics system can do at its best, and it was a core ambition that we support the statistics system to make this performance the norm.

How we have evolved

Legislation establishing the regulatory arm of the Authority was established in 2007. Since then, we have adapted to deliver increasing expectations against our remit. Since the last spending review, we have shifted from being seen as a ‘statistics watchdog’ to a ‘statistics system guardian’ – we are increasingly expected to have a critical view of data and evidence across government. However, we do have some critics who consider that we should continue to act in a pure watchdog role. We recognise this challenge but consider that we are more effective in supporting the public good of statistics by taking a wider, systemic role. Examples include:

Increasingly systemic in our judgements: The statistical system has changed over last 10 years – the risks are more acute and the opportunities more widescale. Through our real-time horizon scanning, our State of the Statistical System reporting and our Partnerships programme, we are increasingly giving a voice to these opportunities and risks (across issues such as data sharing and linkage) and work with the statistical system to address them.

Responsiveness to quality concerns across the system: There is increased demand for our assurance, which has resulted in our strengthened economic statistics Spotlight on Quality programme and a range of unplanned work – recent examples include labour market (survey response challenges), GDP revisions (communicating uncertainty), sex and gender (responding to societal issues), Scottish Census – (maintaining quality), court and tribunal statistics (maintaining quality).

Demand for casework interventions: Significantly increased during the pandemic (from 109 to 323 cases) and has not returned to pre-pandemic levels (sitting around 200 a year now) – increasing awareness and recognition of our role.

Acting proactively to prevent misuse of statistics: Our intelligent transparency campaign was developed to prevent misuse of statistics by ensuring that government data are transparent and accessible. The role of this campaign has been recognised by PACAC, who recommended we “publish an annual report card on departments’ compliance with its guidance”.

Increasing parliamentary and stakeholder demands: PACAC’s report, Transforming the UK’s Evidence Base, recommended that OSR play an enhanced role in highlighting data gaps across the UK, preparing reports on data gaps and coherence in the UK. The Royal Statistical Society vision for public statistics said the role of OSR is crucial in any solution to public statistics, and welcomed OSR’s research programme into how the official statistics system can serve the public good. The recent Statistics Assembly also raised potential new demands for OSR work, for example on AI.

To keep up with these demands, we have increasingly needed to prioritise our regular reviews of statistics. This means we are building a debt of official statistics that we have not been able to review in some time.  While prioritisation will always play a part in how we regulate, and we do not expect to review all statistics with a high frequency, there is a risk attached to the debt we are building. This is informing our review of the regulatory model as part of our OSR 2.0 programme, to ensure we are balancing our systemic and responsive approach with delivering the core regulatory work of assessments and compliance checks.

Our maturity and performance

We built a performance framework around our four 5-year strategy ambitions based on a maturity model.

Building public trust in evidence: We are acting strategically, drawing together lessons from regulatory work including casework and making those lessons available to help producers deliver. The new Code will be an opportunity to be even more effective in supporting the system.

Making greater data available in a secure way for research and evaluation: We have made significant progress on supporting data linkage and sharing, with strong published outputs – for example, a review of data sharing and linkage across government, and a follow-up report. We can report a lot of follow-up activity with producers, though frustratingly, systemic change feels out of reach because of barriers within government. We will continue to convene, support, advocate and warn on specific areas where we think we can have a useful impact. In doing so, our goal is to help government, researchers and the private sector move towards a future where data sharing and linkage is widely and safely employed for the public good. We are also developing a lot of partnerships – for example, with the Evaluation Task Force (ETF) – a joint Cabinet Office-HM Treasury unit providing specialist support to ensure evidence and evaluation across government. ETF has asked OSR help ensure compliance with the Evaluation Registry, which acts as a home for all government evaluations, for improved accessibility and transparency.

Enhance understanding of social and economic matters: We have continued evidence of responding to societal areas of interest and are very responsive in casework. We are not yet at a systemic level of maturity; for example, the new government’s focus on missions is still emergent and there is a risk that our planned work is not focused on the most relevant issues in the short term.

Clarity and coherence of communication for maximum impact: This would be our main area of relative concern. We have not yet drawn together all our strands into a coherent strategic position on what good communication looks like, how we influence good communication and what we do when we have concerns. To address this, we are reviewing how we draw together our knowledge of best practice on communication.