ONS response and maintaining progress

Introduction

Simultaneously with the publication of the Devereux report, ONS published improvement plans for economic statistics and for the associated surveys. These plans – the Plan for Economic Statistics and the Survey Improvement and Enhancement Plan for Economic Statistics – responded both to the requirements that had been placed on ONS in our interim report and to the recommendations in the Devereux report.

ONS plans for economic statistics

In the Plan for Economic Statistics, ONS clearly acknowledges the quality issues that have arisen.

The plan sets out proposed improvements to the ONS’s ‘common capabilities’ that form the foundation for high-quality statistics (these are the indexes, classification systems and registers which drive survey designs and enable data linking; surveys; and collection systems for non-survey data) and to ONS’s core economic statistics.

In the plan, ONS’s core economic statistics are grouped into five statistical themes: labour market, prices, public sector and balance of payments and trade, and their aggregation with other data to create the National Accounts (and calculate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other headline indicators). The plan provides detailed plans for each theme.

For labour market statistics, a particular challenge has of course been the sharp decline in response rates since the pandemic, exacerbated by capacity constraints within the field force of interviewers. ONS plans to continue its transition to the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) with its plan for the way forward, which has been endorsed by key stakeholders and is set out in the recent Labour Market Transformation: update on progress and plans publication.

Detailed plans are set out for improving GDP and the balance of payments, reflecting the context of changing international macro-economic statistical standards (IMSS), such as the new System of National Accounts (SNA25). These changes aim to ensure that economic statistics better reflect the modern economy. Adopting these new international standards within the UK National Accounts requires changes across the common capabilities and statistical themes described above.

Core population statistics also play a vital role in compiling economic statistics. Population estimates and projections are used in economic statistics as denominators and informing survey weights. They underpin productivity and GDP per capita estimates. The plan therefore also includes proposed improvements to population statistics, including the 2031 census.

In the plan, ONS recognises the urgency with which its challenges need to be addressed and sets out new proposals for additional expenditure of £10m (including funding for around 150 skilled people) on core economic and population statistics. This investment will be reflected in a re-prioritisation of the original business plan, including the rapid deployment of skilled people to the work from other areas of the office. In addition, ONS has committed to additional investment in later years to support the effective implementation of the System of National Accounts (SNA25) changes and updates to associated International Frameworks.

The plan set out clear and time-bound milestones for developments across its common capabilities and core economic statistics. It also described how ONS assesses the quality of its core economic statistics and how ONS plans to address associated issues and risks.

In the Survey Improvement and Enhancement Plan, covering both social and business surveys, ONS addresses more fully the urgent need to respond to recent challenges faced by its social surveys and describes an associated re-prioritisation aimed at sustaining social surveys into the future.

The plan outlines a strategy and roadmap to restore confidence in ONS survey operations, to enhance data quality, to (re) build resources and capability, and to modernise systems and methodologies. Key developments include progress towards the completion of the transformation of the Labour Force Survey and the development of a new Statistical Business Register, both of which form cornerstones of the over-arching Plan for Economic Statistics. The survey improvement plan includes a range of milestones against which progress can be measured during the current year, 2025/26.

In November 2025, Darren Tierney, ONS permanent secretary, wrote to Penny Young, deputy chair of the Statistics Authority, setting out the next steps ONS is taking to re-prioritise its activities. These steps include prioritising quality over quantity, by stopping, reducing, and slowing activities in areas judged to be of lower priority. This will enable the increased focus on core outputs, including prices, GDP, the labour market and population.

ONS plan to focus on consolidating outputs across the statistical system as a whole, with reviews covering health, crime and subnational statistics.

In a recent speech James Benford noted that ONS has also initiated an organisational “reset” including changes in organisation structure, new governance arrangements, and the launch of a new 3-year business planning process. In the same speech he pointed to ONS leadership’s commitment to cultural change, with greater emphasis on transparency, and a firm intention to build trust and encourage challenge.

Expectations for maintaining progress

Following the publication of the plans, in August 2025 OSR wrote to the new ONS Director General for the Economic, Social and Environmental Group, James Benford. OSR confirmed that the plans met “OSR’s immediate requirements as a plan of activities to restore confidence, ensure strategic transparency and enhance focus on the quality of data inputs”.

However, OSR also noted that it expected further actions from ONS over the longer term to continue building confidence. These further actions include the following:

• ONS should meet its commitment to publish a data sources strategy, as recommended by the Statistics Assembly. The data sources strategy should set out a clear, if evolving, road map for the data sources used in the preparation of economic statistics, covering the integrated role of administrative and survey data.
• ONS should include within its plans data on the resources allocated to, and between, individual core economic statistics. This should include the production of ongoing outputs and planned developments. This information should be sufficiently detailed to inform stakeholder engagement on the trade-offs ONS faces in its prioritisation. Over time, we would hope to see this approach applied across the range of ONS activities.
• Further proposals on quality, including providing increased challenge through a prioritised programme of quality reviews, should be set out in future versions of the plans.

OSR considers that the plans, and the development of future iterations, particularly with these enhancements, should form the basis for more-effective stakeholder engagement, as it will set the consideration of options for developing individual economic statistics in the context of overall resource availability and the inevitability of trade-offs.

James Benford responded, welcoming our judgement and acknowledging early progress at ONS. ONS also committed to our request for public quarterly reporting of progress against the milestones, with the first report expected to be published before Christmas. This frequency of reporting will be reviewed, subject to delivery and the views of stakeholders.

Sir Robert Devereux has also welcomed the strategy as set out in the plans and noted that the approach has several important properties: it is focused on core economic statistics, it is comprehensive (covering all the elements of statistics production from registers and classification, through data collection and validation, to production and dissemination), and it is honest that some necessary improvements will take time to deliver, while setting out specific short term actions.