In this episode Miles is joined by the National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, to reflect on what has been a busy and transformative year at the Office for National Statistics.

Transcript

MILES FLETCHER
This is “Statistically Speaking”, the official podcast of the UK Office for National Statistics, I’m Miles Fletcher. This is our 20th episode, in fact, a milestone of sorts, though not a statistically significant one. What is significant is that we're joined, once again, to look back at the highlights from another 12 months here at the ONS by none other than the National Statistician himself, Professor Sir Ian Diamond. Ian, thanks for joining us again. The year started for you with being reappointed as the national statistician. As 2023 developed, how glad did you feel to be back?

SIR IAN DIAMOND

Of course, you know, I was hugely privileged to be invited to continue. It's one of the most exciting things you could ever do and I will continue to do everything in my power to bring great statistics to the service of our nation.

MF
To business then, and this time last year, we sat in this very room talking about the results of Census 2021, which were coming in quite fresh then. And we've seen the fastest growth of the population, you told us, since the baby boom of the early 1960s. Over the course of the year much more data has become available from that census and this time, we've been able to make it available for people in much richer ways, including interactive maps, create your own data set tools. What does that say about the population data generally and the way that people can access and use it now? How significant is that there's that sort of development?

SID
Well I think we need to recognise that the sorts of things that we can do now, with the use of brilliant technology, brilliant data science and brilliant computing is enabling us to understand our population more, to be able to make our data more accessible. 50, 60, 70 years ago, 150 years ago, we would have just produced in about six or seven years after the census, a report with many, many tables and people would have just been able to look at those tables. Now, we're able to produce data which enables people to build their own tables, to ask questions of data. It’s too easy to say, tell me something interesting, you know, the population of Dorset is this. Okay, that's fine, but actually he wants to know much more about whether that's high or low. You want to know much more about the structure of the population, what its needs for services are, I could go on and on. And each individual will have different questions to ask of the data, and enabling each individual to ask those questions which are important to them, and therefore for the census to be more used, is I think, an incredibly beautiful thing.

MF
And you can go onto the website there and create a picture...

SID
Anyone can go onto the website, anyone can start to ask whatever questions they want of the data. And to get very clearly, properly statistically disclosed answers which enable them to use those data in whatever way they wish to.

MF
And it's a demonstration of obviously the richness of data that's available now from all kinds of sources, and behind that has been a discussion of, that's gone on here in the ONS and beyond this year, about what the future holds for population statistics and how we can develop those and bring those on. There's been a big consultation going on at the moment. What's the engagement with that consultation been like?

SID

Well the engagement's been great, we’ve had around 700 responses, and it addresses some fundamental questions. So the census is a really beautiful thing. But at the same time, the census, the last one done the 21st of March 2021, was out of date by the 22nd of March 2021, and more and more out of date as you go on and many of our users say to us, that they want more timely data. Also by its very nature a census is a pretty constrained data set. We in our country have never been prepared to ask for example, income on the census yet this is one of the most demanded questions. We don't ask it because it is believed that it is too sensitive. And so there are many, many, many questions that we simply can't ask because of space. There are many more questions that we simply cannot ask in the granularity that we want to. We've been doing some work recently to reconcile the differences between estimates in the number of Welsh speakers from surveys with estimates on the number of people in the census who report they speak Welsh. Frankly, it would be better if we were able to ask them to get information in a more granular way. And so while the census is an incredibly beautiful thing, we also need to recognise that as time goes on, the technology and the availability of data allowing us to link data becomes much more of a great opportunity that we have been undertaking a lot of research, a lot of research which was asked for by the government in 2013, following the report by Chris Skinner, the late Chris Skinner, Joe Hollis, and Mike Murphy, which is a brilliant report. We said at the moment we need to do another census in 2021. That's what we have done and I believe it to be one of the best coverages there has ever been. And yet we need to assess whether administrative data could be used in future to provide more timely, more flexible and more accessible data and that's what the consultation is about. I will be making a recommendation to the UKSA (UK Statistics Authority) board in the future. In the near future we have to say, and I think it is worth saying that what the consultation says to us is that people are very, very, very much in favour of the direction of travel but at the same time as yet accepting our prototype, unconvinced about the data flows and the sustainability of those data flows to enable us to do it and so, we are looking at how to respond to other very important analyses and we will do so in the near future.

MF
When can the people who contributed to that consultation, roughly when should they expect to hear from us?

SID
I think the expectation is we'll publish something by the end of quarter one in 2024.

MF
Surveys have continued to be a very important part of what the ONS does, these very large national surveys, and yet one of the biggest challenges of the has been maintaining coverage and particularly response rates and obviously, particularly with the Labour Force Survey recently that has been a particular issue for the ONS hasn’t it. Where do things stand now as we move into modernising the traditional Labour Force Survey and moving to a new model because it's an issue statistics bodies around the world have been dealing with, it's harder to get people to complete surveys like they used to.

SID
I think it's a fair point that response rates globally are a challenge and response rates globally, not only in national statistics issues, but in the private sector organisations that also collect data, are a challenge. So we need to recognise that. A part of that is that historically, one could find people at home, knock on doors, have that conversation with people, and perhaps post pandemic people are less willing to have a conversation at the house. Also, people are very busy. They work in multiple occupations. They are not always in, they live in housing accommodation which is more and more difficult to access. This there is no kind of single magic bullet here that we could press all we would have. The first thing to say Miles is that we recognise that and that's why we worked with our colleagues at His Majesty's Treasury to provide a project to go to what we call a transformed Labour Force Survey. And I think that that's a hugely exciting project for a number of reasons. One, the labour force survey which has been around for a long time, the questionnaire had become a little bit unwieldy. And also we wanted to enable people to have much more flexibility at the time of which they answered the question. We are in the field with the pilots for that service. We've been pretty good. There are good response rates. There are also some challenges around getting the questions right. These aren’t challenges that stress me, that's why you do a pilot, but at the end of the day we're hoping to be able to transform into that new Labour Force Survey early in 2024, in the first half of 2024. We're working very closely in doing that with our major stakeholders and the Bank of England, His Majesty's Treasury and the Office for Budgetry Responsibility (OBR), is you take a joint decision on when people feel comfortable that we have had enough dual running to enable us to move forward. The other question that I'd have to raise around surveys more generally, is on inflation, which we have all been subjected to in many, many areas in the last couple of years, inflation in survey collection has increased massively and so in the last year we've