Blog by Jonathan Everett, Head of Policy
It’s been a busy few months on the policy front, with both challenges to navigate and opportunities to seize. In this second edition of our quarterly update, we share how the RSS is progressing on its campaign priorities — and as ever, we welcome your thoughts at policy@rss.org.uk.
Public Statistics
It has been a busy few months for the UK’s statistical system, and a major focus of our work has been on engaging with the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) and Cabinet Office. Members will be aware that it is currently a challenging time for UKSA and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – both the National Statistician and Chair of the UKSA Board have resigned, the Devereux Review into the ONS was critical of aspects of how the organisation has been run, and the senior leadership has faced difficult questions at parliamentary select committees. Our priority in this context is to champion the principle of an independent statistical system and engage with the government to promote effective governance – while ensuring that the needs of users are not forgotten.
Staff, our President, Paul Allin (our Honorary Officer for Public Statistics), and members of the Public Statistics Advisory Group have had several meetings with ONS, OSR and government officials. Our President and CEO were interviewed as part of the Devereux Review into the Office for National Statistics, and we have engaged with the Cabinet Office around the future of the National Statistician role. Paul has also blogged in response to the Devereux Review and on the future of the ONS and, with the ONS and Office for Statistical Regulation, we have devised a series of roundtables to explore the issues and potential solutions, the first of which will be on survey methodology on 23 July.
The other big ONS-related news was its decision to recommend that a census take place in 2031. In our engagement on the census, we had identified five areas that we wanted to see progress on before moving to an admin-only census. Given the challenge in addressing these points, we were pleased with the decision and view it as a win for user engagement.
We’ve also been engaging with the Government Statistical Service to produce a report outlining the future skills needs for the profession, and it was great to hear more about the start of the project in the roundtable report summary last month.
Away from the statistical system, we have responded to a government consultation on disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting, setting out some key statistical questions about the process. Ensuring that this reporting is implemented effectively will be an important focus over the next few months.
We were also excited to announce the launch of a new project funded by JRF Insight Infrastructure, looking to identify and fill gaps in data about poverty, with another roundtable upcoming on that.
Public Understanding
We have been working with our Education Policy Advisory Group to develop plans for our public understanding work and have identified two strands where that group is going to focus its attention: first, how statistics is taught at school-level and, second, public understanding of AI. The importance of these two topics also came through from the horizon scanning process that we ran in June. Many thanks to all members who fed into that – a write-up from the event and next steps will be published soon.
We are already engaging with the Royal Society on these issues – supporting their Mathematical Futures work and engaging with them to feed into the Francis Review of the curriculum to set out what we would like to see on data education. Our Vice President for Education and Statistical Literacy set out some of our thinking in a blog for the OCR, and we announced our William Guy Lectures for 2025/26, which will be on the theme of AI.
The Climate Change Task Force has published two further statistical explainers. The first is on climate change attribution of extreme events and trends. It looks at how we can determine the extent to which human activities and natural factors contribute to weather events and climate trends. The second focuses on how local warming is related to global warming. It explores how warming differs in different locations across the globe; which locations warm more or less than the global average; and how pattern scaling can be used to project future temperature increases for specific locations.
Finally, we’ve been continuing engagement with parts of the legal system to improve the understanding and use of statistics. Our CEO published a blog with the Bar Council on this – and we should have a more substantial update on this in the next blog.
AI
As well as looking at AI in the context of public understanding, we are also planning to support effective regulation of new AI tools through targeting regulators. To start this process we responded to the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) consultation on its live testing environment. We will be reaching out to the FCA and other regulators to reinforce our input and offer support. Working with the Data Science and AI Section, we have also surveyed members who are working in AI to understand their priorities, which will inform our work over the next quarter.
Finally, it is perhaps worth highlighting the relaunch of Real World Data Science – which has launched a new call for submissions. The editorial board is looking for articles on how AI might be applied in public policy (as well as other areas).