Our story of 2023/24
We will publish a full annual report for 2023/24 in July 2024, but it is important that in looking forward to the coming year, we look back and evaluate how we have performed, in the context of our high-level priorities and 5-year strategy.
Support and challenge producers to innovate, collaborate and build resilience
At the beginning of 2023/24 we said that we wanted to be more consistent in balancing our responsiveness with applying strategic foresight and investing in deep dives – with a particular focus on scrutiny of economic statistics and issues of quality.
Throughout 2023, we have continued to respond to a high public interest in statistics. OSR’s work covered a huge range of issues such as confirming the National Statistics Designation of Scotland’s Census, Data Linkage, looking into statistics relating to Welsh Government 20 mph speed limit and confirming National Statistics Accreditation of Statutory Homelessness in England. At the same time we have shifted our priorities away from delivering high volumes of Compliance Checks towards more strategic programmes of work. For example, we started to deliver a new series of assessments using a newly developed assessment framework that focuses more intensively on the quality of economic statistics (Producer Price Indices, Profitability of UK Companies).
We have also established programmes to oversee the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as it seeks to transform key statistical outputs including the Labour Force Survey and International Migration.
In our State of the Statistical System Report, we reported that the UK’s statistical system continues to perform strongly, responding to different social and economic issues in an agile way. But we also noted that the system was experiencing increasing resource challenges. We committed to activities which will support statistics producers to develop and build resilience, for example, a blog series with practical advice on balancing scarce resources across a portfolio of statistics.
To ensure our own Code of Practice for Statistics remains relevant and able to effectively support producers as they and the external environment evolves, we conducted a review of the Code. We publicly invited feedback on all aspects of the Code, alongside a programme external events and stakeholder engagement, to gather evidence on how the Code can be further strengthened.
Champion the effective communication of statistics to support society’s key information needs
Our wide-ranging outputs and high-profile public interventions achieved our ambition to safeguard statistics that serve the public good, supported by our intelligent transparency campaign. At the start of 2023/24 we were ambitious to inject more pace into our interventions programme, stepping into public debate in a timelier way to clarify how statistics should be interpreted. Our management data indicates that we are seeing definite gains this year and we continue to challenge ourselves.
This work will be even more important as we approach a General Election. The election will have a significant impact on our work – electoral campaigns, where parties vie with each other for the electorate’s support, typically involve some of the most prominent uses of statistics in the public eye.
We wanted in 2023/24 to focus on factors supporting public confidence in statistics – for example, promoting better communication of statistics. We are in the early days of our Communicating Statistics programme but one of our most significant reports in 2023 was on Revisions to GDP. While we recognised the effectiveness of ONS’s approach to revising GDP, we set a number of requirements to improve communication. In 2024, we will support ONS in implementing these requirements – the last Quarterly National Accounts of 2023 showed that ONS has already taken steps forward.
Throughout 2023 we have been working on two issues related to sex and gender identity in data and statistics – updating our regulatory guidance, and a review of statistics on gender identity based on data collected in the 2021 England and Wales Census.
Our new guidance provides a framework for the statistical system to support the effective collection, use and communication of statistics on sex and gender identity. We have published an interim report on the gender identity statistics from the 2021 England and Wales Census which set out our findings based on the question testing, quality assurance, communication and engagement with users undertaken by ONS. Our final report will be published in early 2024/25.
Build partnerships to champion good practice principles for data and analysis that inform the public
At OSR, we support good evidence that informs the public. Our main focus is on official statistics. But we also recognise the role that evaluation plays in providing insight into what works in government policies and programmes. We have been developing our work to support the transparency of evaluations, in partnership with the Evaluation Task Force.
We set out our Areas of Research Interest (ARI) in 2023. These are framed around our vision of statistics that serve the public good. We set out research questions we are interested in learning more about, what we can offer researchers and how we decide who to collaborate with. The questions have resonated well with the research community.
We have been building on our Analytical Leadership work, considering how this can be enabled across all professions. Our published report sets out the findings from our review, and drawing on case studies, it looks at how analytical leadership can be demonstrated and enabled across government. It is relevant for all who want to foster a stronger, data-driven culture in their organisations, offering actionable suggestions for people in different professions and levels of seniority.
We are seeing an ever growing list of organisations who are voluntarily adopting the Code of Practice and we announced the latest winners of the Statistical Excellence in Trustworthiness, Quality and Value Award (run in a partnership with the Royal Statistical Society and Civil Service World). OSR will continue to grow the use of the Code of Practice for Statistics, drawing on ideas and feedback gathered as part of our Code Review.
More to do
Much of the work we have been doing in 2023/24, and the priorities we are seeking to address, will continue to inform our plans for the coming year. We have also carried out a gap analysis to understand what elements from our 5-year strategy – in its final year – require more from us as the regulator, and more broadly from the statistical system. We identified the following which inform our plans:
- data linkage and ethics
- granularity of data, including regional and local data
- producers engaging with and listening to a broad range of users to understand their needs
- anticipating and responding to data gaps
- weaknesses in coherence and comparability