The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is under fire after internal emails exposed a sample size of employment data “collapsed to only five individuals”.
According to correspondence obtained by the Financial Times, deputy chief economist Richard Heys cautioned in October 2023 that maintaining the statistics agency’s labour force survey (LFS) had “little and falling merit.”
Heys highlighted that the reduction in sample size had caused the data point for one industry to move by 30 per cent.
The emails, revealed by the FT’s Freedom of Information request, took place ahead of a briefing to ONS boss Sir Ian Diamond in October 2023, just before the agency withdrew publication of key labour market statistics on a day’s notice.
Diamond told the Treasury Select Committee last month that the briefing in October 2023 was the first time he was made aware of the issues related to the survey’s strength.
Calls for a ‘transformed’ labour force survey
Heys mentioned the development of a new survey in in the emails, dubbed the “transformed” labour force survey (TLFS), which was “presenting some challenging data” but still called for the existing LFS to be chopped.
He said: “There is little and falling merit in retaining the LFS and the key point isn’t when the TLFS is perfect, it is when it is clearly superior to LFS.”
It is unknown which specific industry data was affected, but the emails suggested Heys was discussing one of the detailed industry releases published alongside headline unemployment numbers.
Following raising the issues via email, Heys described how ONS officials should present the issues to Diamond.
“We need to be careful to sound positive but not Panglossian.
“Data quality and stakeholder feedback are non-trivial issues to hit SID [Sir Ian Diamond] with and it’s important we don’t sound like we [are] underplaying these.”
Responses to ONS’ LFS took a tumble during the COVID-19 pandemic, when officials were forced to switch interviews from in person to telephone.
By 2023, the survey’s response rate had sunk to below 15 per cent.
The ONS is yet to issue a response.