Action Expected from ONS

While ONS has responded to the challenges with labour market statistics, stakeholders have expressed frustration with the slow response to data collection quality risks and other quality issues, and the lack of a clear, strategic public response to address them. ONS’s challenges with the Labour Force Survey have damaged users’ confidence in the organisation. However, the quality issues we have identified in this review, while serious and demanding of an urgent response, do not extend across the whole portfolio of outputs.

This report sets out requirements for ONS that are aimed at improving the quality of economic statistics and resetting stakeholders’ perception of these statistics through:

• Restoring confidence, by producing a fully resourced plan to recover its social survey operation and reduce risk in its business survey operation.
• Ensuring strategic transparency, by clearly setting out the core purpose of economic statistics and what can be achieved with available funding in its business plan, a strategic plan for economic statistics and a strategic plan for data sources.
• Focusing on the quality of data inputs, by implementing a prioritised rolling programme of regular reviews of individual surveys and other data sources.

Immediate requirements

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 to restore the confidence of its users within four weeks of the publication of this review. 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.

Requirements in the next 3 months

Requirement 2. Align Resources with Core Purposes: 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. ONS’s Strategic business plan: April 2025 to March 2026, published a few days before this interim report, makes an important contribution to this requirement.

Requirement 3. Develop a Vision and Strategy for Data Sources: 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. Implement a Systematic Programme of Quality Reviews: 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.

Our next steps

In the autumn, we will review ONS’s response to this report and publish our overall findings.

While this interim report has focused on data sources, the persistent challenges that ONS has faced in recent years in this area, particularly the escalating problems with response rates to household surveys and the limited progress with the use of administrative data, suggest that there may be organisation-wide issues. Although we have not directly looked at organisational culture in this review, and issues of efficiency and effectiveness are beyond the review’s remit, our discussions with ONS staff and users suggest some concern around the management and business processes through which resources are allocated and the ways in which ONS engages with senior stakeholders.

As we have been finalising this report, the UK Statistics Authority announced a review of ONS’s performance and culture to be conducted by Sir Robert Devereux. The review is likely to cover the organisation-wide issues, and we will consider its conclusions as we conduct follow-up work to our report.