Introduction
Chair's foreword
This is our Annual Report and Accounts for the year 2023/24. This was a year, like those before it, when there was sustained pressure on the statistical system but, once again, colleagues at every level adapted and persevered to deliver and promote the proper use of statistics for the public good. The appetite for high quality insights derived from high quality statistics grows ever stronger.
Capturing the evolution of society and the economy is never straightforward and the impact of the Covid pandemic has continued to pose challenges. It has accelerated the longstanding decline in the response rates for face-to-face household surveys, including those we rely on most to understand developments in the labour market. And it has resulted in large changes in the size and composition of economic activity, complicating the production and communication of the National Accounts.
Meanwhile, financial pressures across the public sector have required the Office for National Statistics to prioritise its outputs and adopt new approaches to some of its most important work. Similar efforts have been required by statistical producers across Whitehall and the devolved administrations. Supporting colleagues through this change has not been the work of a moment – our experience shows it is necessary to be radical and ambitious to remain sustainable and inclusive.
In this testing environment, harnessing and exploiting existing administrative data has remained a key focus, including in the ONS’s recent consultation on the future of population and migration statistics. To make the most of administrative data we need better sharing and linking across government and more effective ways to make the fruits of that accessible. One important milestone was the granting of data processor accreditation to the Integrated Data Service in September 2023. But there is more to be done and the National Statistician is right to shine a spotlight on the partnerships that give us the chance to do the most impactful work. We cannot do it alone.
The Office for Statistics Regulation has had a highly productive year, supporting and promoting the virtues of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value that underpin the Code of Practice for Statistics. Its campaign for Intelligent Transparency in the production and communication of official statistics has been increasingly successful and widely recognised, to the benefit of users of all kinds who want to understand the evidence base for government decisions and the full picture behind statistical claims made by those in public office. It has taken up user concerns around statistical outputs without fear or favour, drawing on external expertise when useful and necessary. The OSR will soon consult on how to update the Code for the first time since 2018 to reflect changing user needs and the evolving statistical environment.
The Board of the Authority continues to offer support and constructive challenge to the ONS, the OSR and the rest of the statistical system. In July we said goodbye to my Deputy Chair Sian Jones and non-executive director Nora Nanayakkara. Both have been wonderful colleagues and have made a huge contribution since joining in 2016. So too has Rob Bumpstead, who departed as Chief of Staff in April, having spent 28 years helping shape the organisation. I wish them all the best in their future endeavours. I look forward to welcoming new non-executive directors later this year.
In March 2024, the Authority welcomed the publication of an independent review of the statistical system undertaken by Professor Denise Lievesley, a world-renowned expert in official statistics. I extend my thanks to Denise for her detailed work and careful consultation with different kinds of users, our international counterparts, and other stakeholders in addition to colleagues at the Authority. We warmly welcome her conclusions and will publish a detailed formal response later this summer.
One of Denise’s recommendations was the calling of a Statistical Assembly, bringing together a wide range of producers, users and other stakeholders to discuss how the system can best deliver for the public good. We are delighted to be taking this forward in partnership with the Royal Statistical Society and I hope that everyone with an interest in what the system can achieve will engage with it. It will help inform the priorities of the ONS and other statistical producers across government, as well as the refreshing of our five-year strategy, Statistics for the Public Good.
Let me conclude by offering my personal thanks to everyone working across the statistical system, producing, analysing and communicating a huge range of outputs that inform the public, policy makers and other decision makers. One of the great pleasures of chairing the Authority is to meet week-by-week with colleagues in the ONS, OSR, government departments, public bodies and the devolved administrations and constantly to be inspired by the integrity, dedication and professionalism that they bring to the task – statisticians working for the public good.
Sir Robert Chote
Chair, UK Statistics Authority
July 2024
Back to topChief Executive’s report
I am happy to present the UK Statistics Authority’s Annual Report and Accounts for the financial year ending in March 2024. This document meets our statutory obligations, providing transparency and accountability for the use of public resource. However, it crucially gives us an opportunity to reflect on the past 12 months focusing on the achievements and challenges of the organisation during that period. Overall, we continue to make substantial progress against our radical, ambitious, inclusive and sustainable strategic aims despite a challenging financial situation. This has ensured we focus and prioritise our activities on the most essential work in a sustainable and efficient manner. This has though meant in some areas, we have not achieved everything we had originally intended.
Public confidence in in Official Statistics continues to enjoy a strong reputation, with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) finding that 87% of respondents trusting the ONS and 85% trusting the statistics we produce. This was despite trust falling in other state institutions during the same period. Within this, we have also continued to play a crucial role in informing Government and the public on priority policy topics, including the continuing impacts of cost of living pressures, migration, economic growth, employment and insight into conflicts across the world. In doing so, we have continued to utilise novel data sources, collaborating with those in government and beyond to enable evidence-based decisions.
A central part of this collaboration has been the development of our shared partnership with the Joint Data and Analysis Centre (JDAC) in Cabinet Office. This has focused on providing urgent insight for key emerging government priorities especially in times of crisis. This has led to the establishment of a permanent surge team of analysts within the ONS which can flexibly move into the National Situation Centre as required. The domestic and international implications of conflict in the Middle East have been a central focus, working with novel shipping data to explore economic impacts. We have also been focused on ensuring the best data and analysis informs national security work.
Following our record 97% response rate to the 2021 Census, we have continued to successfully release insights on various topics over the past year. For example, for the first time we have published the labour market status of veterans, working with the Office for Veteran Affairs, as well as statistics on the centenarian population in England and Wales, partnering with Age UK. These releases have been enhanced by new interactive tools that enable comparisons across the population for several variables such as health, education, and employment, allowing non-technical users for the first time to extract insights from multivariate Census data previously held in spreadsheets. The release of our Explore Subnational beta statistics service has complemented this, allowing users to compare up to three local authorities on key indicators, such as pay and life expectancy, against the UK average.
One of the most significant achievements of the past year has been our progress towards publishing our recommendation on the Future of Population and Migration Statistics (FPMS). This has involved a series of engagement events with academics, ministers, government departments and wider users as we iterate our approach. As we work towards publication later this year, work continues now on securing the remaining data flows required to realise our vision of an administrative based census. Data sharing has also been a key focus of Professor Denise Lievesley’s review of the UKSA which was published in March 2024. We are now carefully and proactively considering her recommendations and will respond to these in detail after the conclusion of the pre-election period.
Our economic statistics transformation continues at pace, working towards the inclusion of new retailer scanner data in our price statistics from March 2025 – this will see us using over 30 million price points each month digitally. Since March 2024, we have been already using real-time data from private rental prices at a more detailed geographic level and 300,000 second hand car prices directly from Auto Trader. However, the labour market has presented more significant challenges over the past year. We, alongside several other National Statistics Institutes globally, have experienced falling response rates especially among younger individuals. This led to a challenging situation where we had to withdraw the Labour Market Survey for two months whilst we used administrative data in its place. There has since been a significant investment in boosting the response rate and sample, leading to its reintroduction and continued improvement. Focus remains on enhancing the quality of the LFS whilst ensuring that the Transformed Labour Market Survey (TLFS) is as effective and innovative as a replacement.
We have also focused on driving improvements in how we communicate uncertainty in our statistics during the last year. The need for this work was reinforced by our communication of revised GDP figures in September 2023 which received negative publicity despite the statistics being accurate. We have focused on improving our external communications with additional media briefings, webinars, innovative pre-recorded video content, refreshed social media and a new partnership with the Science Media Centre. This was successfully used for our November 2023 migration releases with significant positive feedback. Combined with an ongoing focus on quality, this sets us up well to continue ensuring that our data, statistics and analysis inform our users in the most effective way.
Having successfully achieved accreditation under the Digital Economy Act (DEA), the Integrated Data Service (IDS) has been pivoted in the past year to focus on delivery, utilising its position as the first cloud native trusted research environment accredited under the Act. Datasets, users, and projects are now continuing to grow and the first research output has now been produced. The challenges with data sharing across government has limited progress in some areas but as we work to make greater use of administrative data, we are working closely with government to ensure there is strong leadership to unblock cultural, system and technological barriers. The formal transition from the Secure Research Service (SRS) to the IDS for users will now be slightly delayed whilst we focus on meeting the needs of government analysts on that platform.
Given our constrained financial environment, we have been resolutely focused on prioritising to focus on our core output priorities, with a new business plan for 2024/25 already published. This has been combined with ongoing efficiencies and savings made through streamlining outputs, revised commercial approaches, automation, and reducing the costs of corporate services. The retention of key skillsets among our people within this context continues to be a focus for which the additional cost of living payments provided a welcome boost. Broader morale in the ONS has inevitably also been affected to a degree by the changes to Civil Service hybrid working expectations, including a successful ballot by the PCS Union in favour of strike action.
It is privilege to highlight some of the incredible work across the ONS and the wider UK Statistical Authority, supporting our mission to deliver statistics for the public good. In the context of resource constraint, we must be sustainable and efficient whilst continuing to be creative in finding ways to be ambitious, inclusive and radical. As we look ahead to the next financial year, our priorities will undoubtedly involve effective engagement with government and ministers, delivering on survey transformation, continuing to improve economic statistics, progressing the FPMS recommendation, further delivery of the IDS to support data linkage and analysis across government, and implementing the recommendations of the Lievesley Review.