The head of the Office for National Statistics has been summoned for a grilling by MPs next week amid concerns the UK’s faulty economic data has become “virtually unusable”.
The cross-party Treasury select committee has asked Prof Sir Ian Diamond to appear before it, after the ONS conceded in December that it might not be able to launch a new series to replace the problematic labour force survey (LFS) until 2027.
Diamond will appear on Tuesday, days after it emerged the Office for Statistics Regulation – the watchdog that monitors the ONS – has widened a review of economic data to cover other series aside from the LFS.
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These include the living costs and food survey, and the wealth and assets survey, which ask consumers about their financial status and their spending habits.
A spokesperson for the OSR said: “Response to surveys remains a key challenge for the UK statistical system. We have conducted a range of regulatory work to set out our expectations of ONS for its work on the labour force survey. We are now turning our attention to a broader range of household surveys.”
In a letter to the ONS, the regulator said it would look at “the extent to which these statistics meet user need”.
The accuracy of the LFS has been widely questioned after response rates collapsed in recent years – with the pace of decline accelerating during and after the Covid pandemic.
One analysis by the thinktank the Resolution Foundation found that the LFS may have “lost” up to 930,000 workers.
Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the government’s statistics agency was spending £8m to hire an army of low-paid temporary workers amid a push to fix its LFS, which has been labelled “virtually unusable”.
The ONS is developing a replacement survey but Diamond has admitted it will not be launched until next year at the earliest. The chair of the select committee, Meg Hillier, called that a “major blow”.
Economic policymakers have repeatedly raised concerns about quality issues with ONS data, in particular the LFS – with the ,Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, calling it a “substantial problem”.
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“I do struggle to explain when my fellow governors ask me why the British are particularly bad at this,” he said in his Mansion House speech last year.
A spokesperson for the ONS said: “We have been addressing the challenge of falling survey response rates in a number of ways, including increasing sample sizes and reintroducing face-to-face interviews.”
Speaking specifically about the iving Cost and Food (LCF) survey, the spokesperson added: “While the LCF feeds into headline household expenditure estimates, its findings are triangulated with other sources, such as business surveys and trade data, to create a robust picture of household spending patterns.
“From this quarter we are also using card spending data as an additional stage of validation of LCF responses.”
