Refocusing the ONS on its core statistics
Permanent Secretary Darren Tierney sets out the next steps the Office for National Statistics is taking to prioritise quality and strengthen core statistical outputs.
November last year saw a turning point for the ONS, as we announced our plans to reprioritise urgently and focus our resources on improving the quality of our essential statistics as part of a wider strategic recovery plan.
This, of course, stems from the findings from Sir Robert Devereux’s review into the ONS that the organisation had stretched itself too thinly and needed to get back to its core purpose: delivering trustworthy, independent, high-quality statistics that underpin the UK’s most critical economic and societal decisions and inform the public.
Our plans also respond to the Office for Statistics Regulation’s Systemic Review of ONS’s Economic Statistics in November 2025, which recommended that the ONS take urgent action to improve and rebuild trust in our core economic statistics.
Following engagement with users on our breadth of statistical outputs, we are now ready to take the next steps. The decisions we’ve made are designed to put quality over quantity, narrow the focus of our portfolio and concentrate resources on improvement work to restore confidence in our core statistics. They also represent progress towards our commitment to reduce our statistical outputs by 10 per cent in 2026, alongside launching a new ONS website to bring clearer, streamlined information, focusing on what audiences need most.
These decisions build on progress already made to generate capacity for our improvement activity, such as re-purposing resources from the closure of the Integrated Data Service Programme and redirecting 150 skilled roles in support of our economic statistics and survey improvement and enhancement plans.
Working with users as we prioritise quality
Today’s announcement follows close engagement with users on our portfolio of publications, particularly across health, sub-national and areas of economic statistics relevant to government departments. It is all part of considering user needs given available resources and focusing ONS statistics where they add most value, and where we are uniquely placed to deliver them.
The changes will mean a reduction in our statistical outputs over the immediate period while we progress the ONS’s recovery, with our priority focus on our critical national statistics, including GDP, prices, labour market and population statistics.
The details are set out in my letter to Penny Young, interim chair of the UK Statistics Authority, including the publications we will be stopping, pausing or scaling back plus some other changes. These include no longer leading on health surveys that other organisations can offer, pausing our greenhouse gas emissions statistics while continuing our annual outputs, and rethinking our approach to externally-funded work. They also include continuing to run the Annual Population Survey following feedback from users – but with a lower level of resourcing to enable us to bolster the Living Costs and Food Survey as a key contributor to some of our economic statistics.
What’s next?
Looking further ahead, we will publish our 2026/27 Strategic Business Plan in the spring, setting out key activities. This will include preparing for transition to the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) and laying the groundwork for the delivery of Census 2031.
We continue to build our approach of working in the open, providing regular updates on the delivery of our improvements so that we can be held accountable and receive feedback to help us focus on what matters most for users.
That work towards greater accountability and openness extends to the conversations we have had with organisations across the statistical system over the past few months, setting out the rationale for our decision-making and making choices based on the feedback we have received. November’s turning point is now turning to action and will refocus the ONS where it needs to be – putting quality before quantity, and delivering the vital economic and social statistics that decision-makers and the wider public need to see.
Darren Tierney is Permanent Secretary at the Office for National Statistics