2. Introduction

Statistics shape our understanding of the world and help us make important decisions. The increasing availability of data has the potential to support this aim, but having more data does not necessarily mean having better statistics, or more useful statistics. Similarly, just because statistics exist does not mean they will be used. If statistics are to fulfil their potential, their production and use must be supported and safeguarded. Doing so requires understanding the potential uses of statistics and how they can be achieved in service of the public good. This may be especially important in maintaining trust in official statistics  (see Morgan and Cant, 2019). Indeed, Allin (2021, p.14) described trust being sometimes seen as the ‘unique selling point’ for official statistics.  

This literature review examines the role of official statistics in UK public policy (referred to throughout as ‘policy’). Official statistics are statistics produced by crown bodies (or those acting on behalf of crown bodies) or which are specified in statutory orders. This review forms part of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR)’s broader research programme (see OSR, 2024). 

OSR is dedicated to upholding the trustworthiness, quality and value of statistics and to protecting the role of statistics in public debate. To achieve this goal, OSR independently regulates official statistics: we assess whether they comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics, promote the adoption of the Code’s principles more widely and intervene when issues with statistics have been identified. However, the scope of OSR’s vision goes beyond this. Ultimately, we aspire for statistics to serve the public good. Our research programme supports this vision by improving understanding of how official statistics can serve the public good. 

As part of this research programme, we have published multiple outputs considering a wide range of perspectives on the public good. A complementary OSR research project has begun to explore this topic by focusing on how individual members of the public perceive and use statistics. While statistics can serve the public good directly through individual use, this review posits that their use to shape well-informed, rigorous and robust policymaking also represents an important dimension of how statistics can serve the public good. As such, it seeks to scrutinise how official statistics influence policy development and implementation within the UK. By presenting this information, we seek to help statistics producers and those working in policy to ensure official statistics are used more effectively throughout the policy lifecycle. In doing so, we can achieve our aim of statistics serving the public good. 

Initially, this review aimed to explore the ways in which official statistics have shaped the formulation, development and evaluation of UK policies. However, upon analysing relevant literature, a more important narrative emerged concerning the potential facilitators of, and barriers to, the effective use of official statistics in policymaking. Consequently, we restructured the review to focus on this area. 

Following a brief outline of the some of the ways in which official statistics have demonstrably affected UK policy, this review discusses the facilitators of, and barriers, to the integration of official statistics in policymaking. These include factors that relate to people (such as analytical capacity and collaboration) and factors that relate to production (such as user engagement, relevance, frequency and timeliness, and accessibility). 

An explanation of how we conducted this review, including how we used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to facilitate the process, is included in the methods section in Appendix A. OSR does not have extensive memberships to journals and journal access sites (for example, Web of Science and PsychInfo), so only those papers that we could access online for free were reviewed. Any papers for which an abstract only was available were excluded from consideration within this review. This decision to exclude papers for which we only had access to an abstract aimed to ensure that the full paper could be scrutinised. Thus, while this review aims to provide a thorough survey of the literature, it is not exhaustive. Despite this limitation, we are confident in the conclusions drawn throughout the review.