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The Office for National Statistics is scaling back its work in key areas of public policy in order to focus resources on core UK economic statistics, according to plans published on Thursday.
The agency said the cutbacks were a response to real-term budget cuts imposed by the Treasury for the 2025-26 fiscal year and would provide room to focus on its most critical statistics and spend more on surveys that have suffered from sharp falls in response rates.
Sir Ian Diamond, the UK national statistician, said the budget constraints would mean “prioritising our efforts in areas that have the greatest impact such as gross domestic product, prices, labour market and population changes”.
The ONS has now paused some work to measure crime against children; curtailed a review of how it measures public services productivity; and downscaled the statistics it produces on wellbeing “to an absolute minimum” — reversing a previous push to go “beyond GDP” in measuring how well society is doing.
There will be an “extended pause” to the Survey on Living Conditions, a household survey used to help measure living standards.
The change of focus set out in the ONS’s business plan comes in response to growing scrutiny of the agency’s performance, following a series of errors, revisions and delays to key economic indicators.
The ONS is also still struggling to repair and replace its labour force survey, the collapse of which in 2023 has left big gaps in policymakers’ understanding of trends in the jobs market. The survey is the only official source of data on unemployment, economic inactivity and self-employment.
The Cabinet Office launched an independent review of the agency’s leadership and structure this week, reflecting widespread concern that the data gaps are hindering policy decisions.
However, many officials acknowledge that the ONS has run into difficulties partly because its resources have been spread too thinly across an expanding array of activities.
The changes outlined in the business plan include removing data science support to the rest of government. The ONS said its ability to inform ministers’ “mission-based” policy development was “likely to be conditional on additional funding”.
Diamond said the top priority would be to boost the ONS’s reputation for “trusted, relevant, independent statistics” in core areas, while supporting the government’s missions “where we are uniquely positioned to do so”.
