If John Healey wants to succeed as Chancellor, he needs to get a grip on the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
I’ve written about the troubles and tribulations of our hapless Newport-based statistics office many times now, both in this newsletter and the magazine, and the problems keep coming. Its most high-profile failure of recent years has been the delivery of the Labour Force Survey (LFS). That’s the main source of our knowledge about Britain’s jobs market: unemployment, inactivity, redundancies etc etc.
During the pandemic, response rates to the survey collapsed and the integrity of the data it produced was diminished. That set off a chain of errors. As I’ve noted before, a decade ago, more than half of households approached took part; during lockdown that fell to 27 per cent and it has crept back to only around a third since. The sample has shrunk so badly that figures for one entire industry had to be suppressed after the number of respondents fell to just five people.
Since then, the ONS has done lots of work to improve the survey. But, yet again, this week’s job market figures have been hit by errors. In a quality update released with Tuesday’s labour market data, the ONS admitted an ‘operational error’ that ‘should have been detected earlier’ led to its telephone interviewing operation being understaffed for six weeks. That meant contact rates dropped and the missing data had to be filled in with guesswork. The impact, the ONS insists, is ‘minimal’ – mainly affecting the data on hours worked, which drive productivity figures.
