National Statistical

Today marks the publication of The Official History of Britain: our story in numbers as told by the Office for National Statistics. Described by the Sunday Times as an “early stocking-filler” and “future quizzers’ manual”, the book celebrates the richness and detail of ONS and Census statistics down the years. In this post ONS co-author David Bradbury tells readers what to expect.   

One of the less discussed economic issues in the pandemic has been the big fall in business investment, which contributes to GDP and is also a driver of future productivity growth. Here David Roberts looks at recent trends and what they tell us about the economy.

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.

One of the challenges of measuring the economy through the pandemic has been estimating the contribution of the public sector, when the relationship between public spending and outputs – for example classes taught or operations conducted – is very different from pre-COVID-19 times. Katherine Mills talks about how we’ve approached the issue.  

This week marks 6 months since the beginning of lockdown. It, therefore, feels appropriate to reflect on our response to the pandemic so far and provide an update on our plans for future analysis.  Liz McKeown and Darren Morgan, who are leading the analytical response, reflect on how we’ve responded to the coronavirus pandemic to date and look ahead at our future plans.