By David Milliken
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s statistics office said on Thursday it aimed to complete a revamp of its troubled flagship labour force data by November 2026 though the process could still take until 2027 if further problems emerge.
The Bank of England and other economists have criticised the quality of the Office for National Statistics’ data on unemployment and people in work after a sharp fall in response rates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Problems with the data make it harder for the BoE to set interest rates and for the government to design policies to boost employment.
On Monday, Britain’s statistics regulator said other countries’ statistics offices were not having the same scale of problem and told the ONS to focus its limited resources on the most important numbers. The government has also ordered an inquiry into problems at the ONS.
The current ONS labour force survey takes the average respondent 45 minutes to complete and the ONS said it had now successfully trialled a shorter 15-minute online survey.
However, this new survey is not expected to be used as the main input for headline economic data until November 2026 and could take longer.
“Transition timing will be data-led and could be in 2027 if our assessment or user needs require more data to be collected and assessed,” the ONS said.
Until then, the ONS said it would increase again the number of interviewers to boost response rates for the existing survey, which is largely conducted face-to-face in people’s homes.
Work to improve the labour force survey began in early 2022 and the ONS originally aimed to implement the new survey methods in March 2024.
The new survey aims to cover 90,000 households each quarter, up from around 63,000 achieved by the current survey in the final quarter of 2024 and a low of around 44,000 in mid 2023.
Data from the new survey is now scheduled to be published in parallel with the older survey from the first quarter of 2026.
(Reporting by David Milliken; editing by Suban Abdulla and Bernadette Baum)
