National Statistical

The pandemic has affected many of the figures that the ONS publishes – both in terms of ‘real world’ changes…

As we have discussed before, the pandemic affected how we collected our surveys, and in some cases created bias in…

The impact of the pandemic on the number of people living and working in the United Kingdom is an important question. Measuring the population has been particularly challenging in the last year with the ONS’s International Passenger Service suspended last year and interviews for the Labour Force Survey no longer taking place face-to-face. Here Jonathan Athow looks at the work that is taking place to identify new data that tell us more about the labour market and give us new insights on the UK population.    

Measuring the work of public services has probably never been as challenging as in recent months, with many services being reduced due to the pandemic while new services, such as track and trace, have been brought on stream to combat it. Here Jonathan Athow writes about how we have adjusted our previous estimates and how we expanding our statistics to include these new types of services. 

A challenge faced by ONS during the pandemic is the inability to conduct face-to-face household interviews, having to rely on telephone surveys instead. So we’ve been exploring how this might have affected responses to our Labour Force Survey on which the key UK employment data are based.  Jonathan Athow explains what we have found and how we plan to tackle it.