By Paul Allin, Honorary Officer for Public Statistics
Last week was a significant one for the UK’s statistical system: it saw the release of the Devereux Review into the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as well as the UK Statistics Authority’s (UKSA) and Cabinet Office’s response and the ONS’s plans for improving its economic statistics, plus an ONS commentary.
There are three aspects of the review – and the response – where the RSS has a particular interest: the recovery plan for economic statistics, how the ONS involves users in its decision making and the future of the national statistician role and governance of the organisation.
Recovery plan for economic statistics
The RSS welcomes the level of accountability in the recovery plan – with the ONS setting a clear timeline for improvements. This is the first time that we have seen this level of commitment by the ONS to holding itself accountable for a detailed plan and is a crucial step towards restoring users’ confidence that ONS can deliver.
More broadly, we believe that this level of transparency should be the norm for development plans for all parts of the ONS portfolio, and for official statistics elsewhere in government. This would create a much better platform for wider user engagement, which would in turn improve the value and quality of the resulting outputs as well as building trust.
User engagement
The RSS continues to campaign for a greater emphasis on public statistics within the statistical system. We have been calling for a more transparent user and producer partnership, a more strategic approach to maximising the value of available data and improved governance. A key part of our campaign has been to urge the ONS – and the wider statistical system – to be ambitious in its user engagement strategy. This means involving users in prioritisation and providing a counterweight to the (understandable) tendency to prioritise government users.
Our long-standing views on user engagement sit in a wider range of cultural issues identified in the Devereux Review. All these are of concern to the RSS, not least so that we can recognise the position of our members who are working in ONS and in the Government Statistical Service (GSS) as a whole.
The RSS supports the focus on getting key economic and population statistics right – it benefits nobody if there is a lack of confidence in these measures. But it is also important that a national statistical system retains sight of its responsibility for providing a wider range of statistics meeting the needs of a wide range of users.
As one example, while having an accurate measure of GDP is clearly crucial, there are many organisations and researchers with an interest in wider measures of societal progress and environmental impact. Once the issues with GDP measurement are addressed, we will want to see these user needs properly considered.
The way to build quality and trust is to be open about issues at an early stage and to engage with a broad coalition of users about the best solutions. The Devereux Review is critical of the ONS’s Integrated Data Service (IDS) – both in terms of pursuing a “high-handed” approach to data collection and in low take-up among government analysts (outside the ONS). Our view is that a greater cultural emphasis on user engagement could have identified issues at an earlier stage and either mitigated them, or provided a motivation to invest in other areas.
The need for confidence also needs to be addressed – confidence in escalating concerns when those engaged in official statistics are in effect asked to deliver quality outputs with insufficient resources, skills and infrastructure.
Governance and the national statistician role
In the short term, we believe it makes sense to separate the role of national statistician as suggested by the Devereux Review. This would allow the ONS to recruit an experienced leader with a remit to tackle structural challenges in this data-driven organisation. The review suggests that the national statistician will act in a role analogous to the chief medical officer. Our view is that this should involve championing public statistics from across the GSS and beyond, and overseeing the statistical integrity of ONS's outputs.
Beyond that, both Devereux and the UKSA’s response suggest that the legislation governing the UK’s statistical system will need to be revisited. Devereux suggests this in the context of changing the national statistician role – potentially so they serve as chair of UKSA – and UKSA suggest changing it to ensure “a more appropriate model of governance for the ONS”.
The future of the national statistician role clearly needs careful consideration – as set out by Denise Lievesley in her review of UKSA. It is possible that – with structural organisational challenges addressed and senior statisticians provided leadership opportunities – the national statistician role could remain broadly similar in the medium-term. From the RSS’s perspective, we have long argued that it is important to give statisticians wider leadership opportunities – both in the context of talent development and in spreading statistical thinking across government. This type of succession planning seems to make good sense.
It is not currently clear to us, however, that legislative change is the answer, although we stand ready to explore this with others. The 2007 Act has a clear purpose – to make statistics more independent of government and politics. We would strongly oppose any changes to legislation that might weaken this.
It is particularly important that the senior leadership of the ONS continues to report to Parliament through their advice to the UKSA Board. This is vital for the independence of the system, and it would be concerning if, for example, lines of reporting are changed so that the new CEO just reports directly to the Cabinet Office, without accountability to the UKSA Board and Parliament as well.
Building the conversation
We were pleased to be asked to contribute to the Devereux Review, and are delighted that UKSA and Cabinet Office have committed to engaging in discussion about the legislation and future of the national statistician role – this will be a focus of our engagement with them. We encourage the conversation to also be wider and more inclusive.
The Devereux Review identifies shortcomings at the ONS, which the ONS have acknowledged. We welcome the plans to address these and look forward to constructively engaging with ONS to support them in successfully implementing their recovery plans.
We are planning a series of joint roundtables with the ONS and OSR, with the aim of discussing statistical state-of-the-art and how this can help the ONS tackle methodological challenges. In doing so, the RSS will actively seek to provide a forum for ONS statisticians to engage with their peers working in research and industry – to seek to constructively input around product and service range as well as methodology.
The conversation about ONS and public statistics more widely will continue, including in light of the Parliamentary (PACAC) inquiry into the work of UKSA now getting under way. Do get in touch on any of this by emailing the RSS policy team.