Foreword by the Director General for Regulation
I am very happy to share the 2024-25 Business Plan for the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR).
Last year I introduced a business plan with a much greater outward focus than in the past, and as we have engaged this year, 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, I’ve taken great pleasure from the enthusiasm from our stakeholders to engage with us over the next 12 months around our strategy for 2025 onwards. We will be getting out and listening to as many of you as we can as we look towards the future.
This year will also be important for other reasons. At some point, a General Election will be called. Over the last 18 months we’ve established the principle of intelligent transparency – ensuring that, when Government makes statements using numbers to explain a policy and its implementation, it should make the underlying analysis available for all to see. I expect to see that principle applied by all parties engaged in the election using quantitative analysis to support statements. We are not ‘fact-checkers’ by trade, but we will be 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. 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 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.
While we want to continue to move beyond supporting good statistics production – building partnerships and supporting wider voluntary application of TQV – the estate of UK statistics will rightly continue to take a lot of our attention. We are doing a lot 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.
Finally, I am really pleased to see the publication of Professor Denise Lievesley’s review of the UK Statistics Authority, including OSR, and I welcome the findings. We look forward to implementing all of her recommendations related to OSR.
If you have any further suggestions or questions to raise, about our plans for this year or beyond, please do contact us at regulation@statistics.gov.uk. We will always take your input seriously.