The ONS’s new Director-General for Surveys and Economic and Social Statistics, James Benford, talks through work going on behind the scenes to improve our statistics after a week with several major releases on the UK economy.
It was a packed week last week at the ONS for our economic statistics outputs. Looking back on it, I wanted to share a bit more on what has been going on behind the scenes.
First off, a bit of a recap:
- Tuesday saw our latest labour market outlook which continued to point to a loosening, with vacancies, payrolled employees and private sector pay growth falling slightly, though with some signs the falls in employment were flattening off;
- On Wednesday, the latest figures showed consumer price inflation holding at 3.8% in the 12 months to August, as falls in volatile air fare inflation were offset by higher contributions from restaurants and hotels and motor fuels;
- On Thursday, our annual article on housing affordability showed improvements in affordability across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland during the financial year ending 2024;
- Friday’s Public Sector Finance release saw borrowing in the five months to August rising to £83.8bn, the highest year-to-date figure since the first year of the pandemic, driven by increased central and local government spending and weak VAT receipts;
- And Friday’s retail sales release showed volumes broadly flat in the three months to August when compared with the previous three, as strength in spending online and on clothing and footwear was offset by lower spending in other non-food stores and on automotive fuel.
We did not make significant methodological or presentational changes to releases last week, though behind the scenes the teams are working hard to deliver future improvements.
Work in Progress
Our Economic Statistics Plan, focuses on six themes: Labour Market, Prices, Public Sector Finances, National Accounts and Gross Domestic Product, Trade and Balance of Payments and Trade and International Macroeconomic Statistical Standards.
I will focus this blog on what we are doing to improve labour market statistics where, in common with other countries where the household surveys are voluntary, we have seen large changes in people’s willingness to respond to surveys since the pandemic. We are pursuing a four-pronged strategy to improve the quality of labour market statistics:
- Bolstering the Labour Force Survey: A combination of an expanded interviewer force, a boosted sample and increased incentives, brought the sample size for the first wave of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) from 7,389 household interviews in the second quarter of 2023 to 8,555 household interviews in the second quarter of this year, broadly in line with the pre-pandemic position. Easter and May bank holidays meant it was harder to reach households, causing a slight dip across all waves at the start of the second quarter, but response improved towards the end of the quarter. The increases in the wave one sample are following through to waves two to five of the survey, which have also been increasing and are likely to reach the pre-pandemic position in the data for Q3.
- Investing in a Transformed Labour Force Survey: In parallel to improving the Labour Force Survey, we have a programme of work to develop an online-first Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS), that is designed to reduce respondent burden, have broader reach across households and therefore enhance the overall data quality of the headline labour market indicators. We launched a streamlined, longitudinal labour market-focused Core survey in early July with a Wave 1 sample size of 90,000 households per quarter across Great Britain, complemented by a separate, cross-sectional survey to meet the need for additional labour market, and wider household, socioeconomic and local data. On the timeline, we will take stock in July 2026 in collaboration with our key users on whether we are ready to transition from the LFS to the TLFS in November 2026, noting that we’ve always highlighted decisions will be data-led with a transition in 2027 possible if further data or development is required. We will publish a full update on the TLFS in early November.
- Launching a new project to integrate and link labour market data: This month we launched a new project that will seek to integrate and link data across our labour force and employer surveys with administrative payroll data. This recognises that it will be some time until we have a run of data from the TLFS and, in the interim, the change in how people are responding to the LFS is making it hard to interpret movements in statistics derived from it. During the period where we have bolstered the sample size of the LFS it has moved to be more in line with other labour market indicators; but it is hard to disentangle how much of the increased employment rate is down to a changed sample and how much reflects developments in the economy. While the LFS employment rate has been rising, administrative data has shown a fall in the number of people on payrolls. By bringing together different labour market datasets, we hope to learn more about the characteristics of people who do not respond to the LFS and develop improved insights on labour market dynamics. We will provide an update of progress standing up this new project with the TLFS update in early November.
- Modernising production of earnings data: Production of statistics from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is complicated by the legacy systems and methods involved. We are working to move data collection online, to review and improve methods and to remove dependencies on legacy software. We have already expanded the use of electronic collection for the 2025 survey to businesses with five or more responses, with an aim for the full 2026 survey to be conducted fully electronically. We have redeveloped the table production system for this year’s publication and we aim to have redeveloped the result production system for the 2026 release.
We will update on progress in other themes in future blogs.
Refocusing Resources, Connecting with Users
As well pushing ahead with our improvement plans, we are freeing up capacity to work on them through an ongoing prioritisation exercise to tighten the scope of our statistical outputs. This reflects feedback both externally and internally that the ONS has been trying to do too much. Internal discussions have identified a number of areas that we will focus on and we will begin engagement with the relevant stakeholders in the coming weeks with a view to publishing an update on how we are prioritising outputs in October.
Later in the autumn we will also engage our stakeholders on priorities for improving statistics. It will not be possible to improve all outputs at the same time. These engagements will inform our first full update on our Statistics and Survey improvement plans, due for publication in December.
I hope you have found it useful to read a little more about what is going on behind the scenes at the ONS. As always, we would welcome any feedback. Should you have any please email econstatsplan@ons.gov.uk.
James Benford is Director-General for Surveys and Economic and Social Statistics at the Office for National Statistics.