What 2023 means for OSR

In our latest blog, Director General Ed Humpherson reflects upon the past year and sets out OSR’s priorities for the coming year. We are inviting feedback on these in order to develop our final 2023/24 Business Plan. If you have views on what the key issues in statistics are, please email regulation@statistics.gov.uk 

As the days shorten and the end of the year looms, in OSR we start turning our attention to the next financial year, starting in April 2023: to what we will focus on, what we want to achieve, what our ambitions are.  

This is a reflective and deliberative process: we don’t finalise our business plan for the 2023-24 year until April itself. And it’s also a consultative process: we want to hear from stakeholders about where you think we should focus our attention. 

How we develop our priorities

There are a range of inputs into our thinking. We start from our five year strategic plan, which sets out broadly where we want the statistical system to be by 2025, and how we will help the system get there. We form a judgement as to how close the system is to achieving this vision, and what we should focus on to help support it. 

We also draw on our annual state of the statistical system report (most recently published in July) on what it is telling us about what positive things in statistics we want to nurture and what challenges we want to address. And we also take stock of what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months: whether, in effect, we’ve successfully delivered last year’s priorities. 

But there are two further aspects to our business plan that are crucial. First, we can’t do everything. We are a small organisation, and necessarily we have to make prioritisation choices about where we can most effectively support the public good of statistics. And second, we can’t plan for everything. We have to respond to those areas that are salient in public debate, where statistics are helping or hindering public understanding. And we can’t always predict very well what those issues might be. To take an obvious example, our planning for 2020-21, taking place around this time three years ago, did not anticipate that we’d spend most of 2020-21 looking at statistics and data related to the pandemic. 

To help us make these choices, and to be better at anticipating what might be just over the horizon, we would like the input, advice and creativity of our stakeholders: of people who care about statistics and data, and who want to help us be as effective as we can be. 

Our 23/24 priorities

Today I am pleased to share with you our draft priorities for 2023/24. These are deliberately high level. We have not chosen our menu, selected our ingredients, and already got the cake ready for the oven. We want to leave lots of room for people outside OSR to make suggestions and raise questions. 

Our plan for next year has four high level priorities, all focused on different aspects of supporting change and transformation: 

• Support and challenge producers to innovate, collaborate and build resilience 
• Champion the effective communication of statistics to support society’s key information needs 
• Continue to widen our reach beyond official statistics and official statistics producers 
• Increase our capability as a regulator 

The keen observers among you might note that these are an evolution of last year’s priorities, rather than a wholesale change. We have had a good year, for sure; but as always, we will always strive to do more.