The RSS wrote to key new ministers in August to welcome them to their roles and set out our key asks of them: the highest priority of these is to urgently address the need to appoint a new national statistician.
National Statistician
We wrote to Lousie Haigh as the minister responsible for the UK Statistics Authority. We called on the Government to make swift progress on appointing a National Statistician and a permanent Chair of the UK Statistics Authority. We stressed that the prolonged absence of system-wide leadership cannot continue. Our letter also called for stronger data sharing across government departments to improve public services and decision making, and reiterated our longstanding campaign to end the practice of pre-release access to official statistics. We had been told that there was an internal review of this practice so we also asked for an update on its outcome.
AI Regulation
Separately, we wrote to Kanishka Narayan as the Minister for AI. We highlighted our recent work on AI, emphasising the statistical nature of AI and the importance of this for the questions of reliability, uncertainty, bias and performance that are at the heart of effective AI governance. We repeated our calls from AI Regulation Needs Statistics for stronger statistical capability across regulators, powers for regulators to require evidence from high-risk AI systems, and clear responsibility for identifying gaps in AI regulation.
Read our letter to Lousie Haigh here and our letter to Kanishka Narayan here.