Recommendations

Measurement principles 

• Recommendation 1: The principles outlined by the Atkinson Review should remain the underpinning intellectual methodology behind the measurement of public services, both in UK National Accounts and public service productivity statistics. 
• Recommendation 2: There are instances where cost provides a weaker weighting metric than alternative approaches. These alternatives can and should be applied, but only where a clear case can be made against the principle that the alternative metric better reflects the value of the service than the relevant cost data. 
• Recommendation 3: The value of transfers can be used to weight together individual components within a service or in a quality adjustment but should not be a direct measure of output.   
• Recommendation 4: Where different weights are used within a service, the cost weighted activity index will still be used to weight in any elements which cannot be addressed with the new weighting approaches. When service level statistics are estimated, these should be aggregated in a cost weighted activity index to produce the national aggregates. 
• Recommendation 5: Adjustments should be considered to equivalise cost weights between services of equivalent value but different cost. 
• Recommendation 9: The weights used to bring together quality adjustment components need to, as closely as possible, reflect societal preferences in as objective a fashion as possible. 
• Recommendation 14: The ONS should continue to work with the devolved governments to understand the devolved service-delivery landscape and improve data coverage, quality and consistency in the UK measure of public service productivity. 
• Recommendation 26: The ONS should continue to work with other organisations undertaking development activity in the measurement of public service productivity for mutual knowledge sharing, adoption of coherence between estimates where possible, and transparency around differences in measurement. 

Recommendations implemented for the Spring 2025 ONS release of data

Healthcare 

• Recommendation 31: The ONS should implement abdominal aortic aneurysm, bowel cancer, breast and cervical screening services within healthcare outputs in Spring 2025.
• Recommendation 35: The ONS should use the Department of Health and Social Care Index of Services data to estimate dental activity growth from 1996 until 2006 and improve the method of linking this activity data to the current ‘Units of Dental Activity’ data source to avoid a discontinuity between data sources. 
• Recommendation 36: The ONS should ensure the overall weight of ophthalmic services and dental services is consistent with expenditure as reported in the Department of Health and Social Care annual accounts, and uprate historical NHS telephone and website services unit costs to account for NHS cost inflation.  
• Recommendation 37: The ONS should implement equivalised weights in Spring 2025. Where service weights are equivalised to account in productivity for cost-savings from moving services to lower-cost modes of provision, these should be incorporated in the non-quality adjustment measures. Quality adjustment should account for changes in value of services delivered that goes beyond cost-saving, such as improvements to the estimated health improvement from treatment. 
• Recommendation 38: The ONS should implement equivalisation of weights for ambulance services in Spring 2025.
• Recommendation 40: The ONS should adopt the improvement to remove excess bed days in Spring 2025. 
• Recommendation 43: The ONS should extend the application of the health gain quality adjustment, excluding the waiting times component, from elective to non-elective procedures in Spring 2025. 

Education

• Recommendation 50: The ONS should implement improvements identified for Education inputs in Spring 2025 related to salaries.
• Recommendation 52: The ONS should implement improvements to the quality adjustment of Education to better account for the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and to account for student well-being and Further Education attainment. 

Defence 

• Recommendation 58: A new method implementing a more granular direct measure of labour inputs into Defence should be applied.
• Recommendation 59: A UK National Accounts consistent intermediate consumption deflator should be derived and applied to Defence intermediate consumption spending, using the His Majesty’s Treasury Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting (OSCAR) data to weight components. 
• Recommendation 60: The Review recommends that the national accounts capital deflator should be applied to the Defence capital expenditure data, but the combined implied deflator of intermediate consumption and capital should be compared to the Defence contracts price index to determine whether subsequent manual intervention is then required. 

Policing 

• Recommendation 64: The ONS should apply bespoke Police and Immigration deflators to Central Government expenditure data used to indirectly measure intermediate consumption in Spring 2025.
• Recommendation 65: The ONS should implement more granular salary data into its direct labour measure for Police, incorporating salary information for individual police ranks (including Uplift officers) in Spring 2025.
• Recommendation 66: The ONS should incorporate Northern Ireland workforce data into its direct labour measure for Police in Spring 2025. 

Public Order and Safety

• Recommendation 79: The ONS should apply bespoke intermediate consumption deflators to expenditure data in all Public Order and Safety service areas, with the exception of fire.
• Recommendation 80: A new method implementing a direct measure of fire service labour inputs into Public Order and Safety should be introduced, expanding in future years to cover devolved governments. 
• Recommendation 88: Timeliness data by case type should be used to produce a more granular quality adjustment that aligns with the improved Crown Court output measure. 
• Recommendation 89: A straight linear interpolation should be applied to the re-offending quality adjustment applied for 2018 to 2021 where the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the normal provision of data. 
• Recommendation 90: Court quality adjustment weights should be revised to be 40% recidivism and 60% timeliness. 

Taxation 

• Recommendation 93:The ONS should ‘revenue-adjust’ direct measures of Tax Administration output whilst developing, with HMRC, appropriate quality adjustments, including using factors such as the ‘tax gap’ to reflect the difference between the desired and achieved levels of tax collected, customer satisfaction and call waiting times. 
• Recommendation 94: The ONS should publish provisional estimates of Tax Administration productivity in Spring 2025 and adjust the “Other” grouping accordingly.  

Social Security Administration 

• Recommendation 102: The ONS should measure the output of the administration of Universal Credit and its predecessor legacy benefits using a benefit-weighted index to account for the allocative efficiency of the transition. This measure should be seen as provisional whilst undergoing further testing. 
• Recommendation 104: The ONS should adjust the output of Universal Credit administration for changes in the number of entitlements included in payments, to account for the heterogeneity of cases.
• Recommendation 105: The ONS should apply a quality adjustment in Spring 2025 based on existing Department of Work and Pension fraud and error rates. 

Recommendations for future work 

Concepts and methods 

• Recommendation 6: Further consideration should be made of which services are considered as preventative services. An imputed valuation for the preventative service A should then be used where this is the product of the probability in reduction in use of service B and the actual cost of service B. 
• Recommendation 7: For pre-selected preventative services where high quality data on impact of downstream services can be found, the probability weighted cost of these downstream services can be used as a proxy valuation of the preventative services in the cost weighting methodology. 
• Recommendation 8: For latent capability, further research is required to identify instances where this method could be piloted using high quality data. 
• Recommendation 10: Further research should be undertaken to consider the potential to use alternative weighting regimes proposed for quality adjustment in replacing cost weights, as per recommendations 3 and 9.
• Recommendation 11: The ONS should exploit methods developments around technology and other deflators to improve the measurement of volume input and output in public services, and continue to seek out methods improvement.
• Recommendation 12: Further research should be undertaken to consider the potential and value or necessity to apply an adjustment to account for labour inputs undergoing training. 
• Recommendation 13: The ONS should consider how best to reflect private sector productivity growth within the measurement of public service productivity, where this captures private sector delivery of services. 
• Recommendation 15: The ONS should further investigate the feasibility and user need for devolved metrics on public services productivity, particularly the education sector in collaboration with the devolved governments. 
• Recommendation 16: The ONS should continue to improve annual and quarterly public service productivity estimates to take account of available quality adjustment data and, where this is not possible, keep nowcasting models under annual review to provide the most accurate and timely data possible. 
• Recommendation 17: The ONS should continue the roll-out of publication of service estimates on a quarterly basis having started with the largest sector (Healthcare) in February 2025. 
• Recommendation 18: The ONS should replace the current ‘contribution to growth’ compilation method with ‘chain volume measures’, and then implement reconciliation of the quarterly estimates with the annual estimates each year, in order to align with the UK National Accounts protocols and improve coherence and understanding for users.
• Recommendation 19: The Quarterly cumulative Average Growth Rates (QAGR) method should be applied to provide more timely nowcast estimates for annual estimates as further research is undertaken to evaluate the efficacy of alternative methods in the light of the coronavirus pandemic.  The performance of the QAGR model should be evaluated on an annual basis. 
• Recommendation 20: The ONS should proceed with best practice improvements to align quarterly and annual production statistics. 
• Recommendation 21: The ONS should keep under review whether there is convergence of the HM Revenue and Customs expenditure data and the ONS Government Expenditure on Research and Development Survey estimates to allow future consolidation of the two data sources. 
• Recommendation 22: The ONS should incorporate the methods and data developments from this Review into the UK National Accounts as part of its implementation of the 2025 System of National Accounts revision, in line with decisions made by the National Statistician. 
• Recommendation 23: The high level ‘roadmap’ developed by this Review for incorporation of quality adjustments, and improvements to public sector output in the UK National Accounts should be reviewed and maintained by the ONS as part of wider strategic planning of the implementation of the System of National Accounts 2025 develops. 
• Recommendation 24: The ONS should continue to influence the United Nations Classification of the Functions of Government Review to maximise the opportunity for improved future categorisation of departmental expenditure (underpinning inputs measurement) via the HM Treasury Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting system. 
• Recommendation 25: The ONS should work with HM Treasury to plan for future upgrading of the Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting system to enable implementation of the revised Classification of the Functions of Government. 
• Recommendation 27: Although not a high priority, the ONS should explore the feasibility of improvements to the measure of the ONS’ productivity, to provide a measure that is adequate to feed into the estimates of total public service productivity. 

Healthcare 

• Recommendation 28 The ONS should evaluate the benefits and costs of switching from Finished Consultant Episodes to the person-level data provided by the Hospital Episode Statistics for measuring hospital output in England. 
• Recommendation 29: The ONS should review, together with the Department of Health and Social Care, how the data needed for the quality adjustment for healthcare services should be produced or commissioned in the future. 
• Recommendation 30: The ONS should continue to work with the NHS to improve data on NHS-funded services contracted from the independent sector. 
• Recommendation 32: The ONS should monitor the quality of National Cost Collection activity data for England for abdominal aortic aneurysm, bowel cancer, breast, and cervical screening services, and transition to using these data when they are of adequate quality to bring it in-line with expenditure data used. 
• Recommendation 33: The ONS and Department of Health and Social Care should explore sourcing data for other preventative activities, such as glaucoma screening for inclusion when data permits. 
• Recommendation 34: The ONS should continue to engage with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to assess the feasibility of including abdominal aortic aneurysm, bowel cancer, breast, and cervical screening services in the healthcare output measures for the devolved governments in the future. 
• Recommendation 39: The ONS should continue to explore the feasibility of applying the improvements on handling equivalent treatment across different modes of provision made for England to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 
• Recommendation 41: The ONS should keep under review whether incorporation of an adjustment for unnecessary A&E admissions would be feasible, material and proportionate. 
• Recommendation 42: The ONS should continue to monitor the development of patient satisfaction surveys conducted by the ONS, the Care Quality Commission and others, with a view to further expanding the quality adjustment for patient experience in the future. 
• Recommendation 44: The ONS should continue to work with the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS to identify additional cases of lower-cost services being substituted for higher-cost services. 
• Recommendation 45: Further research should be conducted to continue to explore the feasibility of improving and expanding the existing Healthcare quality adjustment for waiting times. 
• Recommendation 46: The ONS should explore how to improve the measurement of preventative services in Healthcare output, including commissioning a literature review of data sources to ensure consistent application across the range of preventative treatments.
• Recommendation 47: The ONS should continue to investigate whether aspects of the incentives in NHS Payment Scheme can be incorporated in the relative weighting of different services in Healthcare productivity. 
• Recommendation 48: The ONS should explore approaches to disaggregate the Healthcare service, to allow the relative performance of different components of this large service to be better understood. 
• Recommendation 49: The ONS should actively explore working with NHS Wales to access its health data and develop stronger productivity metrics for Wales.

Education 

• Recommendation 51: The ONS should continue to review if Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings remains the best data source for labour data for Education, or whether alternative sources may be preferable.
• Recommendation 53: The ONS should continuously engage with the Department for Education over indicators of student well-being.  
• Recommendation 54: The ONS should work with the devolved governments to improve Education data sources as far as possible. 
• Recommendation 55: The ONS should, as part of its research agenda, continue to explore the links between Education, the current Education quality measures, health expenditure and human capital acquisition, with specific attention to labour market returns, to better understand the output of these. 
• Recommendation 56: The ONS should engage with academic researchers and stakeholders to understand if the impact of grading policy on Education productivity is substantial enough to warrant further research. 

Defence 

• Recommendation 57: As input to the United Nations Review of the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) the ONS should recommend that COFOG 2.1 Military defence should be split as follows: 
  • Division: 02 – Defence 
    • Group: 02.1 – Military defence 
      • Class: 02.1.1 – military defence of which contains operations of land forces 
      • Class: 02.1.2 – military defence of which contains operations of air forces 
      • Class: 02.1.3 – military defence of which contains operations of sea forces
• Recommendation 61: The ONS should continue to explore the direct measurement of Defence output with Ministry of Defence and other experts following the publication of this report. 
• Recommendation 62: The ONS should continue to work with Ministry of Defence to explore the potential of using their new readiness measure within the calculation of Defence outputs, and to continue to develop appropriate methods. 

Policing 

• Recommendation 63: The ONS should endeavour to source more granular police workforce data for Scotland.
• Recommendation 67: The ONS should continue to explore with Home Office the potential to run an England & Wales Police Activity Survey as part of ONS’s survey portfolio. 
• Recommendation 68: The ONS should explore the potential to source police activity data for Scotland and Northern Ireland. 
• Recommendation 69: The ONS should continue to collaborate with key police partners on appropriate methods to develop and weight different types of output activity. 
• Recommendation 70: The ONS should draw together existing data sources for Police ‘public safety and welfare’ activities and develop a plan to fill data-gaps. 
• Recommendation 71: The ONS should commission a literature review of the impact of crime prevention activities which fall under the Police ‘criminal prevention’ activity category, with a view to future development. 
• Recommendation 72: The ONS should continue to explore the feasibility of introducing a combined Police crime and Police public safety and welfare output measure by critically assessing alternative activity and weighting sources. 
• Recommendation 73: The ONS should continue to collaborate with policing partners to develop appropriate quality adjustments for Policing services. 

Immigration & Citizenship services 

• Recommendation 74: The ONS should seek to convince the United Nations Review of the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) to separate Immigration & Citizenship activities from COFOG 3.1 Police services. 
• Recommendation 75: The Review recommends commencing the split of Policing from Immigration & Citizenship services from 2004, and retaining the combined series for earlier years.
• Recommendation 76: The ONS should review the composition of the Immigration component of the combined Police & Immigration intermediate consumption deflator annually to ensure accurate representation. 
• Recommendation 77: The ONS should review whether full cost recovery fees, for example for passports, should be treated as market-equivalent prices, which do not require quality adjustment, as prices should internalise quality change. 
• Recommendation 78: The ONS should continue discussions with the Home Office to identify the most appropriate service activities and suitable weights for these to construct a direct volume output measure for Immigration & Citizenship services. 

Public Order and Safety 

• Recommendation 81: The ONS should explore possible new prison data sources for Scotland to allow for differential cost weights for different categories of prison, and data for Northern Ireland in the ambition of creating a UK-wide output measure.
• Recommendation 82: The ONS should continue to work with the Ministry of Justice to obtain expenditure data that enable the relative weights of different groups of probationers to vary with time in future years. 
• Recommendation 83: The ONS should explore the data available on probation services for Scotland and Northern Ireland with a view to creating a complete UK measure for probation output. 
• Recommendation 84: The ONS should continue to work with the Ministry of Justice to obtain expenditure data to derive improved weights for individual law courts service areas. 
• Recommendation 85: The ONS should explore the data available for Scotland and Northern Ireland with a view to creating a complete UK measure for criminal court output. 
• Recommendation 86: The ONS should explore the data available for the Scotland and Northern Ireland with a view to creating a complete UK measure for legal aid output. 
• Recommendation 87: The ONS should undertake further research into whether legal aid should be considered an intermediate stage in the provision of justice as opposed to an output in itself. 
• Recommendation 91: Work should continue on identifying appropriate data to develop a direct measure of labour input for the prison service component of Public Order and Safety. 
• Recommendation 92: Work should continue on developing a direct measure of labour input for the courts service component of Public Order and Safety, ensuring no double-counting with intermediate consumption input in this area.

Taxation

• Recommendation 95: The ONS should work with HM Revenue and Customs to continue to ensure data on different taxes is utilised in as granular a fashion as benefits productivity estimates.
• Recommendation 96: The ONS should explore how to complement existing HM Revenue and Customs data to complete coverage of Tax Administration activities. 
• Recommendation 97: The ONS should investigate further developments that could be made to account for changes in quality such as fraud and error, customer satisfaction and waiting times, but recommends that treatment of the ‘tax gap’ should be the priority area for focus. 
• Recommendation 98: The ONS should review data on taxes administered locally and in devolved governments in relation to inputs and outputs, to explore the feasibility of further improving coverage of Taxation Administration. 
• Recommendation 99: The ONS should investigate the feasibility of extending the time period for Tax Administration productivity measure to pre-2018. 

Social Security Administration 

• Recommendation 100: The ONS should undertake further work to identify the best treatment of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. 
• Recommendation 101: The ONS should review whether data exists to better understand, for Social Security Administration, whether non-administrative costs for concessionary fares and Housing Benefit are correctly recorded, and whether they are sufficiently impactful to merit further work.
• Recommendation 103: The ONS should seek to acquire data to incorporate Tax Credits, Housing Benefit and Child Benefit in both output and inputs measures of Social Security Administration, while making appropriate adjustments to the “Other” grouping of inputs.  
• Recommendation 106: The ONS should work with the Department of Work and Pensions to replace stock measures of fraud and error with more appropriate flow measures to better reflect in-period performance, in Social Security Administration quality adjustment. 
• Recommendation 107: The ONS should investigate data availability accounting for benefit administration in Northern Ireland, as the current measure does not include that activity. 
• Recommendation 108: The ONS should further investigate whether administrative costs associated with benefits delivery are being captured in Social Security Administration. 
• Recommendation 109: The ONS should continue to work to identify the most appropriate route to capture user satisfaction in Social Security Administration across the UK.  
• Recommendation 110: The ONS should continue to collaborate with the Department of Work and Pensions to develop data on timeliness for Social Security Administration.
• Recommendation 111: Weighting mechanisms for baskets of quality adjustment factors, such as in Social Security Administration, should be considered and if necessary, data collected to ensure quality adjustment estimates reflect societal preferences and that these are aligned with how other relevant areas are treated, such as health waiting lists.

Local Government, including Adult and Children’s Social Care 

• Recommendation 112: The ONS should continue to work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to determine a strategy to capture the remaining local services, with a particular focus on ensuring alignment of treatment with Environmental Services, noting the potential impact of the United Nations Classification of the Functions of Government Review. 
• Recommendation 113: Local government data across the devolved governments should be sought to enable UK-wide local government estimates to be prepared. 
• Recommendation 114: The ONS should seek to separate elements of Children’s Social Care where output measures cannot be identified, with particular reference to Early Years Childcare, and in the absence of direct output measures estimate output in this area through the ‘inputs = outputs’ methodology until further measures can be developed. 
• Recommendation 115: The ONS should periodically investigate the methodology into Children Social Care in relation to non-government sectors in order to make further improvements to the measure. 
• Recommendation 116: The ONS should continue to keep the Adult Social Care system under review with the aim, utilising ongoing data developments, to address areas of this service which continue to use the ‘inputs = outputs’ methodology. 
• Recommendation 117: The ONS should consider the user need for a separate Adult Social Care, England publication in the suite of public service productivity publications. 

Environment 

• Recommendation 118: The ONS should work with relevant departments to recommend a definition of ‘Environmental Services’ to the upcoming consultation on the international Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) definitions to encourage the creation of a wider COFOG sector covering ‘Environmental Services’, for use in developing measures, using the work of this Review to inform developments in this space. 
• Recommendation 119: An improved Classification of the Functions of Government structure for ‘Environmental Services’ should differentiate between ‘Environmental Protection’, ‘Natural Resource Management’ and ‘Climate Change and Net Zero’, with further detail embedded below this structure. 
• Recommendation 120: The ONS should undertake research to identify appropriate deflators for inputs into, and outputs from, Environmental services.