The UKs beleaguered stats agency has come under yet another attack from the Bank of England, as it was revealed ministers grappling with the UKs productivity crisis may not have accurate figures about the countrys workforce for another three years.
Dr Swati Dhingra, who sits on the banks rate-setting monetary policy committee (MPC) hit out at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) over inaccuracies in its labour force survey.
At a conference in London she accused the ONS of losing the will to do it as carefully as it used to be done. The LFS was suspended in October 2023 over concerns about the accuracy of its data.
The Indian-born economist contrasted the situation with that of her huge native country, saying: There are a billion people there. We managed to get the labor force survey answered. I dont find it particularly plausible that thats hard to do.
It came as ministers launched a major new drive to try to get people back into work - but means they may not accurately know how many there are in the first place.
The ONS has faced criticism over the LFS. Last week the Resolution Foundation think tank said almost one million workers in Britains jobs market have been lost because of poor data.
And at a meeting in July first reported by Bloomberg, the UK Statistics Authority, which oversees the ONS, admitted that a reliable transformed survey may not be available until mid-2027.
It comes as the ONS faces strike action from staff over plans to make them work in the office two days per week. Staff have been continuing to work from home after refusing to spend at least 40 per cent of their time in the office.
Dr Swati Dhingra, who sits on the banks rate-setting monetary policy committee (MPC) hit out at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) over inaccuracies in its labour force survey.
The ONS has faced criticism over the LFS. Last week the Resolution Foundation think tank said almost one million workers in Britains jobs market have been lost because of poor data .
The ONS has been warning over the accuracy of its main LFS data for some time, because of poor response rates to the survey since the start of the pandemic, with economists increasingly becoming reluctant to place any weight on the statistics.
Last week the Resolution Foundation suggested it had been misrepresenting trends in the jobs sector through inaccurate figures, which it said underestimated growth in employment by 930,000 workers since 2019.
It claims that the response rate to the ONS’s jobs survey has slumped to just 13 per cent from 39 per cent between 2019 and 2023, which has seen workers less disproportionately likely to respond, while it has also struggled to reflect the growing importance of workers from outside the European Union.
The ONS said it was aware of issues with the LFS data and has been placing more weight on other statistics, such as the more timely payroll data from HMRC.
It also stressed that recent improvements to increase response rates have seen the number of interviews carried out rise from 44,238 to 59,139.
The Resolution Foundation think tank said the Office for National Statistics ( ONS ) had underestimated growth in employment since 2019 by 930,000 workers
In a new report, they accused the ONS of misrepresenting trends in the jobs sector through inaccurate figures from its Labour Force Survey (LFS)
They created their own alternative estimate of employment across the UK, which suggested the employment rate could be around 76% - higher than the official rate of about 75%
Dr Dhingra in not the first BoE figure to complain about the statistics. Governor Andrew Bailey, in his annual report at the start of November, said it was currently difficult to gauge the underlying state of labour market activity.
In light of this, the MPC has needed to rely more heavily than usual on alternative sources of information to inform its judgements on the labour market, including business surveys and intelligence from the Bank’s Agents around the country, he added.
In a recent ballot, ONS staff backed taking strike action if bosses dont back down on forcing them to return to their workplaces.
An ONS spokesman said: We have been clear for some time that we believe the trends in employees produced from the HMRC tax information and our own separate survey of employers are likely to be painting a more accurate picture than that currently presented by the LFS.
Our ongoing work to improve the LFS estimates by increasing the sample, reintroducing face-to-face interviews, increasing incentives for those taking part and reweighting the data using the latest population information will all help to improve the quality of the survey.
The ONS added it was working with outside experts to assess if any further action may need to be taken.