Dear Baroness Taylor,
House of Lords Committee on Industry and Regulators – inquiry into regulators and growth
I welcome the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Committee on Industry and Regulators’ inquiry into regulators and growth. While we do not have a role in making regulatory decisions directly related directly to growth, we believe that high quality statistics create the conditions for better decisions and more durable economic growth.
The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) provides independent regulation of all official statistics produced in the UK and aims to enhance public confidence in the core information which informs both policy and everyday decision-making. We do this by ensuring that official statistics meet the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics (Code).
The core principle of both our regulatory approach and the Code is that statistics should serve the public good. This means they should exist as public assets that provide insight that allows them to be used widely for informing understanding and shaping action. They should benefit society as a whole by addressing the issues which matter most in people’s lives and evolve as society and the economy change.
Our regulatory work safeguards trust in key economic statistics – such as GDP, productivity, labour market and inflation data – and ensures that decisions by government are based on credible and transparent evidence. Our recently published Systemic Review of the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS) Economic Statistics placed requirements on the ONS intended to strengthen confidence in some of its key outputs following well-publicised problems with quality. As well as safeguarding key economic indicators, we also regulate statistics that help business understand their local market conditions and inform their decision making on where to locate and provide new services – for example, our work on population estimates and sub-national economic statistics.
We are also reinforcing our regulatory influence on critical transformation projects such as the redevelopment of the Consumer Prices Index and the Labour Force Survey. These are pivotal to modernising the UK’s statistical system and ensuring its continued relevance, robustness and public trust. Confidence in statistics reduces uncertainty and helps to set the conditions for long-term investment, which is fundamental to sustainable growth.
Our Strategy for 2026-2029 emphasises ensuring statistics meet society’s evolving needs. In the context of growth, this includes our routine regulatory activity highlighting gaps and good practice in data on productivity, regional and sectoral performance, innovation, skills and the green economy. By encouraging statistics that better reflect user needs and value to the modern economy, OSR supports more effective targeting and evaluation of growth policies.
OSR promotes high standards in how statistics are used in public debate and policymaking. Challenging misuse of economic data, encouraging clarity about uncertainty, and supporting good analytical practice all help ensure that growth policies are grounded in evidence rather than misleading presentations of statistics. We also seek to ensure that statistics serve the public good by enabling Parliament, the media and public to scrutinise policy.
In summary, consistent with our new strategy, OSR helps to support understanding of the Government’s growth agenda not by advocating specific policies, but by strengthening the quality, relevance and use of key official statistics, especially relating to the economy. This independent role creates the conditions for better decisions and more durable economic growth.
Yours sincerely
Ed Humpherson
Director General for OSR