ONS

A voice for UK businesses – a milestone for our business insights survey

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Back in March 2020, life changed very suddenly as COVID-19 struck. In the first days of lockdown the ONS set up what it thought would be a temporary rapid business survey to assess how the pandemic was impacting UK businesses. Gemma Rabaiotti explains how four years and 100 waves of responses later, the Business Impact of Coronavirus survey– now renamed the Business Insights and Conditions survey – (BICS) has cemented its place as a timely and vital voice on the challenges facing businesses today.

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Time Well Spent: How the ONS is improving the measurement of public service productivity

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The ONS is launching a new pilot ‘time-use survey’ for the public sector, which will give us much more detailed information than was previously available about how workers in the public sector spend their time, including travel, administration and delivering services directly. Ellys Monahan tells us what the survey is designed to show and why we need the information. 

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Communicating uncertainty in GDP estimates

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The UK economy has been affected by some unprecedented events in recent years, with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic followed immediately by the huge rise in energy costs due to the war in the Ukraine. For the ONS, these have increased the challenge of producing economic statistics that are both fast and accurate. Dramatic changes in the underlying data tend to bring added uncertainty to our initial estimates. As Craig McLaren explains, we are exploring ways to better portray this in our statistical outputs.   

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PODCAST: Year in Review 2023

It has been a radical and transformative 2023 for the Office for National Statistics, with work underway to future-proof its figures in a number of its outputs. National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, joins podcast host Miles Fletcher for the latest episode of Statistically Speaking, to look back over the past 12 months and discuss why change was needed. 

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Working together to improve health and social care statistics

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The COVID-19 pandemic placed health and social care statistics into the headlines, encompassing a wide range of vital topics such as mortality, vaccine uptake, mental health and other health impacts. Nearly four years on from the first news reports of the ‘coronavirus’, the interest in health data and statistics has continued to grow. Julie Stanborough explains how we are working collaboratively with other data producers to improve health and social care statistics, and how you can have your say.

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