Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK’s official statistics agency on Thursday postponed the imminent release of trade data after it identified an error dating back to 2023, in a further admission of the problems the body faces assuring the quality of its figures.
“Due to the identification of a further error in UK trade statistics, relating to international trade in services data for 2023, the Office for National Statistics has made the decision to delay the UK Trade: January 2025 release, which was scheduled for Friday March 14,” the ONS said.
It now plans to publish the corrected trade data for both goods and services in full on March 28, alongside the balance of payments and quarterly national accounts releases.
“This delay gives us more time to process and revise the estimates to account for these identified errors,” the agency added.
The delay, announced with one day’s notice, will fuel questions over the reliability of figures produced by the ONS, after long-running problems with a key survey on the state of the labour market were criticised by politicians and the Bank of England.
The collapse in response rates to the ONS labour force survey, which is not expected to be replaced until at least 2026, has left interest rate-setters without reliable employment data for almost 18 months.
It also triggered the Office for Statistics Regulation — the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority — late last year to warn that 14 sets of data could no longer be classified as “official statistics”.
Researchers have separately raised doubts over the quality of annual earnings data used to calculate the minimum wage. The ONS has taken emergency action to shore up response rates to its living costs and food survey, an important input to GDP and inflation data, even while scaling back other household surveys because of pressure on resources.
The UK is the world’s second-largest services exporter after the US, and the share of services in Britain’s total exports has risen steadily over the past decade.
In December 2024, services exports not adjusted for inflation were 50 per cent higher than in January 2019, while goods exports had yet to recover to pre-Covid levels, according to the latest ONS figures, which have yet to be corrected.
In a separate statement later on Thursday, the ONS said that “initial investigations” suggested that when the error was corrected, there would be “an upward revision of approximately 2 per cent to the level of services imports and 5 per cent to the level of services exports in 2023”.
Services imports and services exports for 2024 would be revised upwards by about 5 per cent and 6 per cent respectively, it added.
Last month the ONS identified a separate error in the data given to it by HM Revenue & Customs, the tax authority, relating to imports of goods between January 2023 and December 2024 and affecting non-EU countries. Both errors will be corrected on March 28.
Estimating goods trade flows has become more challenging for the ONS since Brexit because of changes in some data collection.
Despite the agency making adjustments to account for these changes, it has repeatedly warned that “a structural break remains” in the data for UK goods imports from and exports to the EU from January 2021.
The ONS has also made repeated big revisions to politically sensitive estimates of international migration in recent years — a sign of how difficult it has proved to move away from old-style passenger surveys to better measures of migration based on administrative data held by government.
