How the ONS is transforming its statistics for local areas

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The ONS produces a huge amount of high-quality data covering the economy, environment, crime and immigration. Over the last few years, we’ve also been focusing our efforts on producing much more granular estimates so we can measure how our society and economy is changing at the local level. Emma Hickman writes about how this work is progressing and what insights we’ve produced. 

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Understanding our future population: Why projections are not predictions

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There are many reasons for wanting to know the size of the future population of the UK. How many school places will we need? How many hospitals? How many people will claim a State Pension? But looking into the future is challenging. As James Robards explains, our population projections take into account current and past trends, and as those patterns change, we adjust our projections accordingly.

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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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