The credibility of UK economic data has been thrown into doubt after senior officials at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Bank of England raised serious concerns about the reliability of statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Speaking to MPs on the Treasury select committee, Richard Hughes, chairman of the OBR, warned that “trying to get a clear read” on the UK economy from current ONS data is “very difficult”. His comments follow a sharp decline in response rates to the ONS’s labour force survey, which has compromised the quality of data on employment and wage trends.
The situation has now triggered a formal government investigation into the “performance and culture” of the ONS. The review, commissioned by the Cabinet Office and the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), will be led by Sir Robert Devereux, a former top civil servant, and is expected to conclude this summer.
The ONS’s labour force survey — a key tool used by the Bank of England and the OBR to inform monetary and fiscal policy — has seen its response rate fall from around 50 per cent a decade ago to just 12.7 per cent in 2023. Although it has since improved marginally, the data remains under significant scrutiny. The ONS has delayed the rollout of a new “transformed labour force survey” until 2027, despite spending £40 million on its development.
Professor David Miles, a fellow OBR committee member, compared the current approach to “trying to generate economic data with a tool which isn’t working as well as it did in the past”.
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