Conclusion

Looking to the future, we believe that the people and organisations within the UK statistical system should harness the momentum of the last year. The UK statistical system should seek to become more:

• Responsive and proactive in its delivery of statistics, horizon-scanning to identify and fill future and/or existing data gaps. It should consider how best to use better infrastructure and RAP to improve the efficiency and sustainability of its processes.
• Timely in its delivery of data and statistics, balancing the need for timeliness with accuracy and reliability, coherence and comparability, considering user need.
• Collaborative, with data sharing and data linkage the norm and with data sharing and data linkage taking place in a secure and ethical way to really add value and deliver the public good.
• Clear and insightful in its communication and presentation of statistics and data, with statisticians and analysts directly involved in the communication of statistics and data to the public.
• Transparent and trustworthy in its communication of data and statistics. Transparency is the default, with the pillars of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value embedded across all statistics and data.

We hope that the examples set out in this report will help to provide positive case studies and drive improvement across the UK statistical system to help with this.

Later this year, we will be publishing more detailed lessons learnt from the pandemic for Health and Social Care statistics and a review of data on Children and Young People during the  COVID-19 pandemic. These reports will provide further insight to help inform future developments in these areas.