The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has signed a deal worth £8 million to hire hundreds of temporary workers in a bid to repair what economists warn is “virtually unusable” data on employment in the UK.
The move comes amid mounting criticism of the agency’s flagship labour force survey (LFS), which policymakers at the Bank of England rely on to guide interest rate decisions.
Under the agreement finalised last month, staffing agency Randstad will recruit 148 temporary field interviewers to bolster the ONS’s permanent team of 549 people. Meanwhile, another recruitment firm, Alexander Mann Solutions, is expected to bring in around 200 more interviewers by May 2025. These new hires will carry out face-to-face visits to households, encouraging them to complete online questionnaires.
The ONS has been grappling with falling response rates in its labour force survey since the pandemic, when doorstep visits were halted. Participation has recovered from a low of 12.7 per cent in 2023 to about 20 per cent, but remains well below the 40 per cent level seen in 2019. As a result, data to capture the working arrangements of Britain’s 45 million-strong workforce is based on only 47,000 responses.
Economists have raised concerns that this data gap is hampering the Bank of England’s decision-making, particularly in the run-up to a key monetary policy meeting on 6 February. Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economist at Oxford Economics, said that “concerns about the quality of data from the UK’s labour force survey make it virtually unusable at present”.
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