Interim report approach, conclusions and recommendations

Approach to evidence gathering

OSR formed the judgements set out in the interim report by gathering evidence from four main sources:

• OSR’s own assessments of economic statistics, consisting of 26 assessments. Each assessment is an in-depth analysis of how far the statistics in question comply with the Code of Practice and provides a detailed and comprehensive picture of the statistics that it assesses.
• Stakeholder views, based on semi-structured interviews with 25 key stakeholders, and supplemented by evidence from the Statistics Assembly(attended by around 800 people), the Statistics Assembly report, and feedback provided by individual stakeholders in the course of OSR’s business, such as the Royal Statistical Society and the Better Statistics campaign.
• ONS staff views, based on focus groups and interviews with around 40 ONS staff, predominantly based in economic statistics and data sources.
• OSR’s analysis of financial and staffing information provided to us by the ONS finance team.

Conclusions

The interim report set out core findings (for a full description, please see the annex) and drew three key conclusions:

1. ONS must fully acknowledge and address declining data quality.

Despite good progress in some areas (for example, more-granular data on the economy from the Annual Survey of Goods and Services), ONS has faced significant challenges in consistently ensuring that data feeding into economic statistics are of high quality. Most notably, the long-term reduction in response rates to household surveys, including the Labour Force Survey, has severely impacted data quality. ONS has made progress in 2025 in securing improved response to the Labour Force Survey, but this long-term challenge has been associated with a decline in the quality and reliability of some of its key economic statistics.

Although response rates were a key focus of the interim review, we also sought more assurance that ONS has sufficient steps in place to regularly review and improve sample design and representativeness, bias, survey methodology and imputation.

2. Making progress with administrative data has been difficult

There have been some good examples of the use of administrative and big data sources in core economic statistics, including the introduction of VAT data into the National Accounts and rail and rental prices data into inflation statistics. However, overall progress in using administrative data from other government departments has been slow, reflecting in part practical and cultural challenges across government (including, of course, the costs of delivering data to ONS). Stakeholders highlighted that these broader challenges have been further hindered by the lack of a publicly available effective vision and delivery roadmap from ONS.

3. Greater strategic clarity of purpose and transparency on prioritisation would help reassure external stakeholders.

The interim report concluded that ONS could increase the confidence of its stakeholders by providing clearer explanations of the pressures and trade-offs it faces, the priorities it has set and the resource allocation decisions it makes.

The report found that insufficient investment had been a key factor in the data quality issues that emerged over recent years. However, it was harder to draw firm conclusions on the funding of economic statistics production overall.

The report also concluded that there had been a lack of transparency about what ONS regards as its core purpose for economic statistics and noted that ONS staff and stakeholders have expressed concern about the effectiveness of its decision making in allocating resources.

Requirements placed on ONS

The interim report placed requirements on ONS aimed at improving the quality of economic statistics and resetting stakeholders’ perception of these statistics.

Requirement 1

It is critical that ONS takes decisive action to restore confidence. ONS should publish a fully resourced plan to recover its social survey operation and reduce risk in its business survey operation. This plan should set out the risks that continued data quality challenges pose to economic statistics. Given the impact of these challenges on confidence in the statistics system, progress against the action plan should be regularly monitored by the UK Statistics Authority Board and should be publicly reported.

Requirement 2

The overarching annual ONS business plan should be explicit on how resources are aligned with its core purposes and outputs as a national statistical institute. ONS should implement a more transparent and engaged approach to the way it prioritises across its output of economic statistics. This work should include an annually updated strategic plan for economic statistics, with clear funding allocations and timebound commitments, to increase both transparency and accountability and to facilitate more effective engagement with its stakeholders on prioritisation.

The interim report noted that ONS’s Strategic business plan: April 2025 to March 2026, published a few days before the interim report, made an important contribution to this requirement.

Requirement 3

In addition to the recovery plan and drawing on the overall strategy for economic statistics, ONS should develop and publish a regularly updated vision and strategy for the data sources used to compile its economic statistics. This publication should include a “roadmap” setting out how the use of surveys and administrative (and other non-survey-based) sources will be developed in an integrated way, including the development of methods that combine data sources, as well as any barriers that ONS foresees and the support it needs from others to address them.

Requirement 4

ONS should take a more strategic and systematic approach to quality reviews of its data sources. ONS should implement a prioritised rolling programme of regular reviews of individual surveys and other data sources focusing on maintaining quality and considering issues such as the maintenance of samples, validation rules and keeping survey questions updated. ONS should consider how such a programme could be integrated with its existing approach to quality assurance and how quality issues are inter-related with other challenges, including those associated with ensuring appropriate levels of skill and the effectiveness of systems.