Annex 1: Recommendations of the Bean Review

Recommendations: Measuring the economy

• Recommended Action 1: ONS/UKSA should develop a programme to address established statistical limitations transparently and on the basis of an assessment of costs and benefits.
• Recommended Action 2: UKSA should continuously seek to identify shortcomings in its economic statistics, both inside ONS and across departments, through a rolling programme of NSQRs, drawing on both internal and external expertise.

• Recommended Action 3: Institute an ambitious work programme to evaluate the quantitative implications for the measurement of economic activity associated with the digital economy.
• Recommended Action 4: In conjunction with suitable partners in academia and the user community, ONS should establish a new centre of excellence for the analysis of emerging and future issues in measuring the modern economy.

Recommendations: ONS capability and performance

• Recommended Action 5: ONS should take action to ensure that the primary objective of statistical producers is to meet user needs, by encouraging staff to: understand better how their statistics are used; be more curious and self-critical in identifying statistical issues; collaborate with users and experts; and create a culture of rewarding innovation.
• Recommended Action 6: While building up the capability of its operation in Newport, ONS should also increase its London profile in order to facilitate stronger engagement with users of economic statistics, as well as expanding its engagement with users across the rest of the UK.
• Recommended Action 7: Statistical releases should contain clear and prominent commentary on the quality of those statistics, noting any significant limitations and also highlighting any scope for misinterpretation.
• Recommended Action 8: Users and commentators should be more alert to the limitations of economic statistics and economics courses should pay more attention to the problems of economic measurement.
• Recommended Action 9: ONS should continue to develop its new and greatly improved website in order to ensure that its full range of statistics can be easily accessed and viewed.

• Recommended Action 10: Remove obstacles to the greater use of public sector administrative data for statistical purposes, including through changes to the associated legal framework, while ensuring appropriate ethical safeguards are in place and privacy is protected.
• Recommended Action 11: Exploit new methods for collecting data and explore the scope for using information gathered by private sector entities in the production of economic statistics, nowcasting and one-off studies of emerging measurement issues.
• Recommended Action 12: Ensure ONS’s technology and data systems are capable of supporting the flexible exploitation of very large data sets.
• Recommended Action 13: Build ONS’s capacity to clean, match and analyse very large data sets, including through the recruitment of a cadre of data scientists.
• Recommended Action 14: Establish a new centre for the development and application of data-science techniques to the production of economic statistics.

• Recommended Action 15: Increase the economic expertise within ONS and implement a smart and effective system for quality assurance and sense checking across the production of all economic statistics.
• Recommended Action 16: Introduce recruitment and training schemes to raise analytical skills across ONS, including offering opportunities for specialists to progress in their careers by contributing to research and development of value to the organisation.
• Recommended Action 17: Support the greater use of microdata by ONS and approved researchers by improving the available metadata, and simplifying approval processes, while continuing to respect confidentiality issues.

Recommendations: Governance of statistics

• Recommended Action 18: The government should delegate to UKSA the power to decide that a piece of data be classified as an official statistic; high-profile releases of management information by departments should be treated as official statistics and be compliant with the Code; UKSA should decide whether official statistics should be assessed against the Code for the purposes of National Statistic status.
• Recommended Action 19: The independence of departmental statistics Heads of Profession should be reinforced, with any abuses highlighted by the Independent Regulation and Evaluation Office (see Recommended Action 24 below); there should be a formal role for the National Statistician in the appointment and performance management of the Heads of Profession.
• Recommended Action 20: In the event of greater use being made of administrative data in producing economic statistics, UKSA should, after consultation with other departments, put in place suitable policies governing their use, together with the appointment of an independent person or body to oversee their application and adjudicate on any difficult cases.
• Recommended Action 21: UKSA should provide a more nuanced assessment of the status of a statistic than is conveyed by the binary National Statistic designation.
• Recommended Action 22: ONS should establish an effective and transparent process for prioritising and allocating resources, supported by better management information.
• Recommended Action 23: A high-level group comprising representatives of HM Treasury, the Bank of England and other key stakeholders and users should be established to facilitate frank and open discussion with the UKSA Board.
• Recommended Action 24: The UKSA regulatory function should be subsumed within a new ‘Independent Regulation and Evaluation Office’ (IREO) charged with assessing the trustworthiness and quality of official statistics as well as ONS’s effectiveness; the head of the IREO would report to the UKSA Board and publish an annual assessment of ONS performance and the whole statistical estate.