Governance

Recommendation 1: UK Statistics Assembly

The Authority will establish a UK Statistics Assembly to first meet on 22 January 2025, bringing together the widest possible community of users and producers across all sectors to discuss and give advice on the UK’s needs for statistics. The insights from the Assembly will be drawn together in a published report, indicating potential priorities and data gaps. This will inform delivery planning for the ONS and other official statistics producers in government departments and public bodies, as well as the Authority’s next strategy. The Assembly’s discussions will also provide valuable insights on areas of user concern on the quality of statistics and data gaps that can contribute to shaping the OSR’s regulatory work programme. It may also identify fresh opportunities for non-official statistics to be used to complement official ones for the public good. The ability of official statistics producers to implement proposals arising from the deliberations of the Assembly will of course depend on the availability of resources in each case.

Work on the composition and arrangements for the Assembly has been carried out in partnership with the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and further details will be published shortly.

As Professor Lievesley has pointed out, there is no existing template for such an exercise in other countries, so the Authority will consult stakeholders about the structure and cost-effectiveness of the first Assembly after the event in considering how to develop it in future.

The Chair will give an annual public lecture setting out the progress of the statistical system and priorities, drawing on the insights of the Assembly and the OSR’s annual State of the Statistical System report.

Recommendation 2: Director General for Methodology

The Authority agrees with the Review on the importance of technical methodological advice being considered at a senior level, and the need to collaborate with academic and international partners in this area. The Authority recognises that in light of current resource constraints and headcount restrictions, ONS does not currently plan to recruit an additional director general, but as part of routine long term succession planning will conduct an exercise to identify options for more effective representation of methodology within the senior leadership team. This will involve the ONS consulting other national statistical institutes (as identified by the Review) and professional groupings within government such as the Chief Scientific Advisers Network. ONS will also be informed by the outcome of Recommendation 8, whereby the Authority and the Cabinet Office will be considering the role and delegated responsibilities of the National Statistician. ONS will continue to draw on international experts as methodology advisors in the meantime, which will ensure robust and high quality methodological advice and bolster engagement with senior methodologists in other national statistics institutes.

The National Statistician continues to take expert technical advice from the Authority’s Methodological Assurance Review Panel (MARP) and the role of this group has grown in recognition of the demands discussed in the Review. In 2023, the Panel’s remit was formally expanded beyond research related to the census, to include change programmes across ONS. MARP has since provided advice on novel methods relating to statistics on excess deaths, on travel and tourism, and on labour market surveys. MARP co-opts additional subject matter experts as required, drawing on the advice generously given by the professional statistical community in the UK and internationally (for example, recent work by Australian experts Professor Ray Chambers and Professor James Brown on methods underpinning the Transformed Labour Force Survey).

Recommendation 3: Statistical legislation

Legislation is a matter for the Government and Parliament.

The Authority welcomes Professor Lievesley’s recognition that the Authority’s governance is working well and that the two executive arms (the ONS and OSR) are sufficiently operationally independent in practice. Reflecting this more clearly in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 would be desirable, but legislative change is not a priority for the Authority. Should the Government and Parliament wish to revisit the legislation, the Board would of course work closely with them to ensure any changes were appropriate and helpful.

To increase public understanding of the de facto distinction between the arms of the Authority, OSR will publish a statement on the operational separation between ONS and OSR. This will cover OSR’s separate business plan; separate Accounting Officer and arrangements for budgeting; and separate reporting lines to the Chair, the Regulation Committee, and Parliamentary Select Committees.

Recommendation 4: Pre-Release Access

The Authority supports the recommendation to the Government and devolved administrations to amend the pre-release access process. Equality of access to official statistics is a fundamental principle of statistical good practice, and the existence of pre-release access undermines trust in the official statistics system.

Pre-release access to ONS statistics ended in 2017. The ease with which Ministers and Departments adapted to this change shows that equality of access is practically achievable and need not limit the use of official statistics to support political communication.

Recommendation 5: UK-wide data

Full data harmonisation can only be achieved with input from the UK Government and the Authority will continue to work collaboratively with Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and other departments. The Authority also agrees with the Review that improvements in UK-wide data cannot be achieved without continuous collaboration with the devolved administrations to align priorities.

The Authority agrees with the Review’s assessment of the longstanding barriers to producing UK-wide data and their persistence. The Review rightly identifies that the roots of such barriers often arise naturally through the nature of devolved responsibility. The Concordat on Statistics has been vital to ensuring co-operation across both devolved and reserved statistics.

As noted by Professor Lievesley, a significant barrier to the GSS creating harmonised data is resourcing and funding of devolved administrations to collect data that they do not require for their own needs. Therefore, the Authority will make the case for funding arrangements that better support the development of UK-wide coherence in the next Spending Review. This will be inclusive of advocating for better arrangements on how statistics development in the devolved administrations is funded, to ensure that sufficient resources are available to make data comparable. Additionally imperative to achieving coherent UK wide data is the ability to share data across administrations. The Authority’s full position on the importance of data sharing is addressed under Recommendation 6.

In driving forward UK-wide data, the Authority is committed to collaborating with the devolved administrations and will make use of the existing mechanisms. Setting common standards is an important role already played by the Authority, however, the Authority recognises the importance of exploring with the UK Government and the devolved administrations an expansion of this remit to bring the setting and development of common standards to the fore of the UK-wide strategy involving all four nations, subject to funding.

A specific priority for co-operation and harmonisation will be the future production of coherent and comparable statistics on population and migration. The ONS will continue to share the methods and innovations it is developing and work in partnership across the UK to ensure the potential for more frequent and up-to-date population statistics is not limited to England and Wales.

The Code of Practice for Statistics sets out the need for statistics that are comparable between geographical areas. When producers develop new statistics, the OSR expect producers to build in user needs for UK-wide coherence from the outset, working in partnership across all parts of the UK. Through its regulatory work, the OSR will continue to call for producers to provide information to aid comparison across the UK and, where there is a clear user need, call for producers across all four nations and the GSS to develop comparable statistics.