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The governance of the UK’s statistics system has come under fierce scrutiny as a senior MP accused top officials of leaving the former head of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to run his organisation like “a hybrid of a Medici prince and Blofeld” without challenge.
The UK Statistics Authority governing board had shown no urgency in addressing problems with the output and internal running of the ONS that had developed over five years, said Simon Hoare, chair of Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, in its first session of an inquiry into the work of the UKSA.
Sir Ian Diamond, who stepped down as national statistician in May following mounting problems with the quality of key economic data, had “managed to pull wool over the eyes of ministers and the board”, who allowed him act “without check or balance on a boosterish desire for very expensive, cost-ineffective” data solutions, Hoare said.
He added that Diamond appeared to have run this organisation as “a sort of a hybrid of a Medici prince and Blofeld”, referring to the James Bond villain, and “that he seemed unwilling or uninterested in anything that anybody had to say”.
“I don’t think I’ve got the foggiest idea, frankly, what the board was supposed to be doing and whether it did what it was supposed to be doing,” Hoare said on Tuesday after questioning UKSA’s chair, Sir Robert Chote, and the head of the Office for Statistics Regulation, Ed Humpherson.
The Cabinet Office and UKSA have already pledged to split the role of national statistician and strengthen the ONS’s internal management, with greater priority given to its core economic statistics, following an independent review led by Sir Robert Devereux.
Devereux presented this split as a temporary measure, saying there could be a need to rethink the ONS’s governance in the longer term.
Diamond stepped down shortly after the UK Statistics Authority tasked Devereux with reviewing the agency’s leadership, culture and structure after a series of errors and delays in economic indicators, citing health issues.
Chote told the MPs he recognised it would have been “better” “to have started the turnaround earlier”. “It is, though, easier to make that judgment with hindsight than it is in the moment,” he added.
Hoare said there was a need for “basic organisational change” as a result of Diamond’s leadership, including in the relationship between the ONS and government, and “better clarity on what the board should be doing”.
Questioning the role of the UKSA in dealing with falling response rates in some of its key surveys, Hoare said the board “didn’t provide a challenge” to the ONS, adding: “It took what it was given.”
Chote replied: “We had concerns, we heard concerns, we responded to those progressively, and ended up commissioning an unusual review to look at this.”
Response rates in the labour force survey (LFS) plunged during the Covid-19 pandemic and fell further when a pandemic booster sample was removed in 2023, making key indicators, such as the unemployment rate, unreliable.
MPs on the PACAC questioned why the UKSA’s board had not known about the extent of the problems with the LFS before the response rate fell so far that the ONS had to pause its publication, asking Chote whether the board was “not proactive enough, not noticing or not informed”.
Chote said the board was not told about the crisis with the labour force survey until shortly before the data was pulled, but had since put in place processes to monitor response rates across all the ONS surveys.
Diamond told the parliamentary Treasury committee in February that a board meeting report from December 2022 “was very clear about the challenges that the labour force survey was showing” and that he had provided monthly reports on the LFS from early 2024 onwards.
The ONS has also taken steps to boost the reliability of the data, while drawing up a survey recovery plan and broader plan to strengthen economic statistical output.
Emma Rourke, interim national statistician, said: “When the report speaks to culture, for example, that isn’t going to be solved in the few months that I’m in this position.”
The issue “brings us back, I think, to who guards the guards”, said Hoare.
The FT was unable to reach Diamond for comment.
