Latest news with #IanDiamond
Straits Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Straits Times
Caller ID destroying our understanding of the jobs market
Getting households to pick up the phone is just one of many obstacles facing governments who have to collect data on everything. PHOTO: UNSPLASH LONDON - The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) used to knock on doors and ask people if they were employed, as a traditional way of compiling the country's labour market data. But when Covid-19 forced social distancing in 2020, door-knocking was out. At one point during the pandemic, the survey was reliant on how many phone numbers it could find for a representative sample – and also on people actually answering their mobile phones when an unknown number called. Only a quarter of Britons say they answer such calls, with most wary of scams. Fewer that half of UK households have a landline, and those numbers can be difficult to find. Response rates plunged. By 2023, the data had become so patchy the ONS was forced to suspend its unemployment reading as it desperately sought to repair a key release that helps inform government policy, influences interest rates and drives billions of dollars of investment decisions. An ensuing crisis of confidence in Britain's data ended with the resignation of national statistician Ian Diamond in May, following fierce criticism from politicians and senior central bankers. Getting households to pick up the phone is just one of many obstacles facing government agencies tasked with collecting numbers on everything from joblessness to agricultural output. Just as cellphone users swipe away unwanted callers, people screen visitors with video doorbells and an increasing number live in apartment blocks impenetrable to data collectors, compounding a collapse in survey responses. The pandemic exacerbated most of these trends. That's left statisticians from Australia to Britain and the US scrambling to update collection methods stuck in the 20th century without introducing new 21st century biases. The solution that agencies and pollsters, from the ONS to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, have zeroed in on: online surveys. These polls are less costly than telephone or face-to-face surveys, more convenient for respondents, and statistics agencies are using AI to target non-responders. Yet as agencies are finding, the big switch in economic data-collecting is throwing up new problems for the indicators global investors and policymakers rely on. 'There's no magic mode,' said Steve MacFeely, chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. 'They're well aware of the risk and are doing it because they have no other choice. It's the grim reality of official statistics today.' Barrage of spam Problems with the new wave of online surveys include fresh biases in the data, confusion over questions that a computer cannot address, gaining trust amid a barrage of spam and fraud in people's inboxes, and the fact that households may be just as likely to ignore an email with an online survey as a phone call. 'What you gain in coverage/response, you possibly lose in measurement quality or content features,' said Eric Harrison, deputy director of the European Social Survey. Problems with the UK's labour market figures serve as a cautionary tale. Early results of the UK's online questionnaire showed the new online survey was producing significantly different readings from the existing survey that relies on telephone calls and knocking on doors, people familiar with the situation said. One potential issue is that respondents aren't able to ask an interviewer to clarify a question they don't understand. The ONS is looking at an AI chatbot that could help. 'Moving the survey online has been challenging due to the survey length and complexity meaning many households didn't finish it,' an ONS spokesperson said. 'We've tested a shorter version that's giving improved and more complete responses and this new version will go live in the field next month.' Another key risk from online surveys is that it creates new unknown biases that statisticians have to counteract. In the UK, the existing labour force survey struggled to get enough young workers to answer. For an online questionnaire, it could be the opposite problem. 'If you were to do a face-to-face survey, and you were to do a telephone or an online labor force survey, you'd get different results from all three,' said Mr MacFeely from the OECD. In the US, Joanne Hsu, director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan, believes that being behind the computer screen may also skew how people respond to economic surveys. The Michigan survey's closely watched figures on economic sentiment and inflation expectations in the US fully transitioned to a web-only mode in 2024 after seven years of testing the new responses alongside its existing phone-based method. While it helped to double the survey's reach to nearly 1,500 responses, Ms Hsu noticed that respondents are more likely to give extreme answers on the web – especially for inflation expectations, which recently surged to the highest in three decades. 'People might think twice about giving any sort of extreme value to an interviewer,' she said. Former US Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner William Beach said that US data could soon be in the same state as Britain's moribund labour statistics without action to modernise its surveys. Labor force surveys 'are dying, they're decaying, they're in very serious trouble,' Mr Beach recently said on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast. 'Unless we modernize that survey, we will see a time when we will be like the British, unable to publish portions of it that just don't have sufficient sample for statistical release.' BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
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Business Standard
05-06-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Data error may have pushed up UK inflation, rate cut bets in April: ONS
The data error means the inflation rate would have been closer to the 3.3 per cent consensus forecast and 3.4 per cent predicted by the central bank Bloomberg Britain's statistics agency said it overstated the official inflation rate due to a mistake in numbers it was given on vehicle taxes, the latest in a string of errors to plague the country's economic data. The Office for National Statistics said Thursday the headline inflation rate was 0.1 per cent higher than it should have been in April's market-rattling figures, as a result of incorrect vehicle excise duty data from the government's transport department. While the ONS will not revise its inflation estimate, it will use the correct data for May. The error may have contributed to the sharp market reaction to April's inflation data. It means that the spike in prices seen in April was less severe than first thought after inflation jumped to a 15-month high of 3.5 per cent. The bigger-than-expected pick-up in price pressures in April's initial data prompted traders to cut bets on an easing in interest rates by the Bank of England. It helped to retrench expectations of fewer reductions after the central bank's hawkish tone at the May meeting. The data error means the inflation rate would have been closer to the 3.3 per cent consensus forecast and 3.4 per cent predicted by the central bank and a plurality of economists including Bloomberg Economics. Markets were little changed following Thursday's statement, fully pricing in one more rate cut for this year. Other volatile factors are thought to have pushed up April's figure with the ONS collecting price data for air fares over Easter when demand spikes. Credibility The error is the latest to undermine the credibility of the UK's official economic statistics after a series of high-profile problems that first hit its labor market statistics before spreading to other numbers. It is the second time in recent months that its price statistics have been affected by errors with the ONS suspending its producer price figures in March. The ONS has faced mounting pressure and is awaiting the outcome of a government probe into its failings. It is also without a permanent head after National Statistician Ian Diamond resigned last month on health grounds. The latest error related to an overstatement of the number of vehicles subject to vehicle excise duty rates applicable in the first year of registration. VED is a tax applied to every vehicle using public roads in the UK, adjusted according to their environmental impact. It is expected to raise over £9 billion ($12.2 billion) in the current fiscal year, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. 'This has the effect of overstating the headline Consumer Price Inflation (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) annual rates by 0.1 percentage points for the year to April 2025 only. No other periods are affected,' the ONS said in a statement. 'We are reviewing our quality assurance processes for external data sources in light of this issue.'
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why the UK's official statistics can no longer be trusted
If there's one thing everyone – from policy makers to politicians, strategists to bankers – can agree on, it's the importance of getting access to the right data to inform decisions. You may not always agree about those decisions, of course, but at least they're made with some degree of oversight and confidence about the workings of the economy and the country. Or, at least, they were. Last month, the independent regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority publicly criticised the quality of the data the Office for National Statistics (ONS) was providing, warning it of the risks of supplying poor economic statistics to decision makers. 'It is critical that ONS takes decisive action,' the report from the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) said. This came a week after the UK Statistics Authority and Cabinet Office had jointly announced an independent review of the performance and culture of the ONS, and was the latest in a long line of crises to beset Sir Ian Diamond, Britain's most senior statistician, in his role as head of the organisation. Its flagship jobs survey data had its kitemark of quality removed, while the trans question in the most recent Census was so confusing, the official estimate of the number of people in England and Wales identifying as a different gender to the one registered for them at birth was considered inaccurate and had to be revised downwards. Andrew Bailey, governor of the bank of England, told Mansion House late last year that the ONS's Labour Force Survey was a 'substantial problem' for monetary policy. So it was no surprise when Diamond resigned earlier this month, citing 'ongoing health issues'. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that what's been going on under his watch has the potential to undermine the entire way the economy is run. 'I can't tell you how vitally important collecting the right statistics is for the economy,' says Nye Cominetti, principal economist at independent think tank the Resolution Foundation. The think tank was so concerned about the quality of the Labour Force Survey, in fact, that it published its own estimates of UK employment earlier this year. 'Employment numbers tell us about the state of the economy, so having good labour market statistics is fundamental,' says Cominetti. 'And it matters for policy as well: the Bank of England look very closely at this labour market data to inform their rate-setting decisions. So they've been among the most vocal complaining about the lack of good data – in fact, like us, they've constructed their own estimates based on alternative data.' So what exactly has been going on at the ONS? How did we get to the point where the chair of the cross-party Treasury select committee, Dame Meg Hillier, had to send a letter of public admonishment to Sir Ian in March, citing troubling errors and delays that will 'widen concerns about the trustworthiness and accuracy of economic statistics available to policymakers and other users'? In 2015, there were 38,741 households surveyed in one wave, but by 2023 it was down to a meagre 24,752 (although, following criticism, it went up to 31,469 households in the most recent survey). By those measures, incredibly important jobs market figures are being judged on the responses of approximately 0.03 per cent of households in this country. Cominetti says part of the problem is a huge drop in the response rate to ONS surveys. 'To be absolutely fair, declining response rates aren't unique to the ONS,' he says. 'We're seeing national surveys around the world having these issues, and it's something to do with a modern society being less interested in filling in surveys from the government. 'But could they have undertaken measures more quickly to arrest this trend, put more resources into these frontline surveys, paid respondents more and so on? That's the main question.' It's not as if the ONS weren't aware of the problems – they just didn't do much about them. They have been planning a 'transformed labour force survey' for some time now, costing millions of pounds to develop – and even that has been beset by delays and may not be fully ready until 2027. Tellingly, its own internal review of this ongoing and extended process showed it had 'a profoundly negative impact on morale and wellbeing, which corroded relationships, undermined confidence in the vision, and affected buy-in'. And there has clearly been a cultural issue inside the ONS which meant that any concerns were either swept under the carpet or ignored in favour of other priorities. Take that addition of a gender identity question in the 2021 Census. It led the ONS to produce figures in 2023 that 0.5 per cent of the adult population in England and Wales were transgender; however, they had to roll back on that figure last September, after admitting that the question was not clear to those with a lower level of English proficiency. It required a yes/no answer to: Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth? Yet several local authorities and organisations had already published dashboards, data tables or reports that mapped the trans population within their area. While the regulator couldn't find examples of this data being cited in a policy decision or resource allocation, they still criticised the ONS for their 'defensiveness' when the accuracy of the reporting was first questioned. Was this ever flagged up internally? Unsurprisingly, nobody at the ONS will speak to us on the record when we approach them, but we are pointed towards a separate OSR report on the workplace culture at the ONS – which basically says it all. 'Many staff thought there had been an erosion of quality in some areas,' it says. 'There were also calls for additional strategic focus on the quality of data inputs and to improve methodology.' Several staff also thought that while the availability of economic expertise has increased, there may have been a 'failure in some areas to increase the level of organisational curiosity, analytic oversight and challenge'. Most pressingly, some staff referred to an organisational culture that did not always promote or reward that challenge either: 'early warnings were not always appreciated or encouraged'. You can see why the regulator was concerned that the culture at the ONS left it open to accusations that it had been 'captured by interest groups' in the trans debate; even though they found no evidence of bias, the attitude of the ONS to challenge created an impression of just that to some external observers. It's not just the OSR who were concerned, the PCS (Public and Commercial Services) Union have worked with and for ONS staff for some time now. 'Our members have voiced long-standing concerns about management decisions,' says PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote, 'including around survey data, never-ending organisational change programmes, cuts to resources, uncompetitive pay, an erosion of trust, and a culture where staff feel their voices are not heard. 'ONS is full of highly qualified, passionate, hard-working staff who want to be able to constructively challenge decision makers, to be fairly paid, and have the resources they need to do their jobs. We welcomed the opportunity to engage with the Devereux Review and hope the next national statistician will bring new leadership that will work with us to address our members' concerns.' Fairly damning, then. We asked the ONS for a sit-down interview to answer some of the concerns that, well, nearly everyone has about its organisation, but a spokesperson preferred instead to send us a statement. 'We have been open about the challenges the ONS has faced in recent months and set out a renewed focus on our core economic and population statistics in our 25/26 strategic business plan,' they said. 'This work will now continue under Acting National Statistician Emma Rourke and the senior leadership team, as will our full participation in Sir Robert Devereux's review. 'We remain focused on producing the highest quality statistics for the public good and are committed to continuous improvement of our methods and approaches.' It is true that for all the outside criticism and regulatory reports highlighting concerns, there's yet to be a specific example of huge public spending wastage that can be attributed to the poor economic data supplied. The issue is more with general policy direction. 'Take the Low Pay Commission,' says the Resolution Foundation's Cominetti. 'If, from the ONS data, they think the labour market is doing really badly, then they might suggest an increase in the minimum wage to the government. 'Last year, of course, we had this big confluence of the minimum wage going up and a big increase in employer National Insurance contributions – both of which raised costs for employers hiring low earners. 'I can't speak for the government; maybe they would have wanted to pursue those policies regardless. But personally speaking, I think a clearer picture of the labour market from the ONS might have suggested that one or both of those policies should have been moderated. Or that maybe they should have looked elsewhere for its tax increases.' Does that mean the ONS' methods and approaches can even be trusted? If the Resolution Foundation and Bank of England are now producing their own figures anyway, what does that actually say about the future viability of the ONS? 'No, I do think it should be the ONS's role to do this,' says Cominetti. 'Nobody actually wants to be spending time arguing about statistics; we want to be talking about the right policy and what government should do with an accepted version of the facts. 'I'm now on a steering group which is overseeing some of the measures the ONS are putting in place to improve the Labour Force Survey, so they are now being collaborative and fairly open. They're aware of the issues.' Sir Ian Diamond's successor just needs to confront them head on, it seems. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
21-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Why the UK's official statistics can no longer be trusted
If there's one thing everyone – from policy makers to politicians, strategists to bankers – can agree on, it's the importance of getting access to the right data to inform their decisions. You may not always agree about those decisions, of course, but at least they're made with some degree of oversight and confidence about the workings of the economy and the country. Or, at least, they were. Last month, the independent regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority (OSR) publicly criticised the declining data quality the Office for National Statistics was providing, warning them of the risks of supplying poor economic statistics to decision makers. 'It is critical that ONS takes decisive action,' the OSR report said. This came a week after the UK Statistics Authority and Cabinet Office had jointly announced an independent review of the performance and culture of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and was the latest in a long line of crises to beset Sir Ian Diamond, Britain's most senior statistician, in his role as head of the organisation. Its flagship jobs survey data had its kitemark of quality removed, while the trans question in the most recent Census was so confusing, the official estimate published had to be dropped. Andrew Bailey, governor of the bank of England, told Mansion House late last year that the ONS' Labour Force Survey was a 'substantial problem' for monetary policy. So it was no surprise when Diamond resigned earlier this month, citing 'ongoing health issues'. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that what's been going on under his watch has the potential to undermine the entire way the economy is run. 'I can't tell you how vitally important collecting the right statistics is for the economy,' says Nye Cominetti, principal economist at independent think tank the Resolution Foundation. In fact, the think tank were so concerned about the quality of the Labour Force Survey they've published their own estimates of UK employment in recent weeks. 'Employment numbers tell us about the state of the economy, so having good labour market statistics is fundamental,' he says. 'And it matters for policy as well: the Bank of England look very closely at this labour market data to inform their rate-setting decisions. So they've been among the most vocal complaining about the lack of good data – in fact, like us, they've constructed their own estimates based on alternative data.' So what exactly has been going on at the ONS? How did we get to the point where the chair of the cross-party Treasury select committee, Dame Meg Hillier, had to send a letter of public admonishment to Sir Ian in March, citing troubling errors and delays that will 'widen concerns about the trustworthiness and accuracy of economic statistics available to policymakers and other users'? Some of the issues within the ONS are, admittedly, more prosaic than others. Much of the concern about the Labour Force Survey results comes from the huge drop in response rates to the surveys used to generate the data in the first place. Ten years ago, it was 48.5 per cent – now, on average, it's more like 25 per cent. And until this last quarter, the amount of people surveyed had been declining rapidly too; in 2015, there were 38,741 households surveyed in one wave, but by 2023 it was down to a meagre 24,752, recovering after the various concerns and reports to 31,469 households in the most recent survey. By those measures, incredibly important jobs market figures are being judged on the responses of approximately 0.03 per cent of households in this country. It's a minuscule amount, which is one of the reasons Resolution Foundation have been using available HMRC tax data instead. 'To be absolutely fair to the ONS,' says Cominetti, 'declining response rates aren't unique to the ONS. We're seeing national surveys around the world having these issues, and it's something to do with a modern society being less interested in filling in surveys from the government. 'But could they have undertaken measures more quickly to arrest this trend, put more resources into these frontline surveys, pay respondents more and so on? That's the main question.' It's not as if the ONS weren't aware of the problems – they just didn't do much about them. They have been planning a 'transformed labour force survey' for some time now, costing millions of pounds to develop – and even that has been beset by delays and may not be fully ready until 2027. Tellingly, its own internal review of this ongoing and extended process showed it had 'a profoundly negative impact on morale and wellbeing, which corroded relationships, undermined confidence in the vision, and affected buy-in'. And there has clearly been a cultural issue inside the ONS which meant that any concerns were either swept under the carpet or ignored in favour of other priorities. Take that addition of a gender identity question in the 2021 Census. It led the ONS to produce figures in 2023 that 0.5 per cent of the adult population in England and Wales were transgender; however, they had to roll back on that figure last September, after admitting that the question was not clear to those with a lower level of English proficiency. It required a yes/no answer to: Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth? Yet several local authorities and organisations had already published dashboards, data tables or reports that mapped the trans population within their area. While the regulator couldn't find examples of this data being cited in a policy decision or resource allocation, they still criticised the ONS for their 'defensiveness' when the accuracy of the reporting was first questioned. Was this ever flagged up internally? Unsurprisingly, nobody at the ONS will speak to us on the record when we approach them, but we are pointed towards a separate OSR report on the workplace culture at the ONS – which basically says it all. 'Many staff thought there had been an erosion of quality in some areas,' it says. 'There were also calls for additional strategic focus on the quality of data inputs and to improve methodology.' Several staff also thought that while the availability of economic expertise has increased, there may have been a 'failure in some areas to increase the level of organisational curiosity, analytic oversight and challenge'. Most pressingly, some staff referred to an organisational culture that did not always promote or reward that challenge either: 'early warnings were not always appreciated or encouraged'. You can see why the regulator was concerned that the culture at the ONS left it open to accusations that it had been 'captured by interest groups' in the trans debate; even though they found no evidence of bias, the attitude of the ONS to challenge created an impression of just that to some external observers. It's not just the OSR who were concerned, the PCS (Public and Commercial Services) Union have worked with and for ONS staff for some time now. 'Our members have voiced long-standing concerns about management decisions,' says PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote, 'including around survey data, never-ending organisational change programmes, cuts to resources, uncompetitive pay, an erosion of trust, and a culture where staff feel their voices are not heard. 'ONS is full of highly qualified, passionate, hard-working staff who want to be able to constructively challenge decision makers, to be fairly paid, and have the resources they need to do their jobs. We welcomed the opportunity to engage with the Devereux Review and hope the next national statistician will bring new leadership that will work with us to address our members' concerns.' Fairly damning, then. We asked the ONS for a sit-down interview to answer some of the concerns that, well, nearly everyone has about its organisation, but a spokesperson preferred instead to send us a statement. 'We have been open about the challenges the ONS has faced in recent months and set out a renewed focus on our core economic and population statistics in our 25/26 strategic business plan,' they said. 'This work will now continue under Acting National Statistician Emma Rourke and the senior leadership team, as will our full participation in Sir Robert Devereux's review. 'We remain focused on producing the highest quality statistics for the public good and are committed to continuous improvement of our methods and approaches.' It is true that for all the outside criticism and regulatory reports highlighting concerns, there's yet to be a specific example of huge public spending wastage that can be attributed to the poor economic data supplied. The issue is more with general policy direction. 'Take the Low Pay Commission,' says the Resolution Foundation's Cominetti. 'If, from the ONS data, they think the labour market is doing really badly, then they might suggest an increase in the minimum wage to the government. 'Last year, of course, we had this big confluence of the minimum wage going up and a big increase in employer National Insurance contributions – both of which raised costs for employers hiring low earners. 'I can't speak for the government; maybe they would have wanted to pursue those policies regardless. But personally speaking, I think a clearer picture of the labour market from the ONS might have suggested that one or both of those policies should have been moderated. Or that maybe they should have looked elsewhere for its tax increases.' Does that mean the ONS' methods and approaches can even be trusted? If the Resolution Foundation and Bank of England are now producing their own figures anyway, what does that actually say about the future viability of the ONS? 'No, I do think it should be the ONS's role to do this,' says Cominetti. 'Nobody actually wants to be spending time arguing about statistics; we want to be talking about the right policy and what government should do with an accepted version of the facts. 'I'm now on a steering group which is overseeing some of the measures the ONS are putting in place to improve the Labour Force Survey, so they are now being collaborative and fairly open. They're aware of the issues.' Sir Ian Diamond's successor just needs to confront them head on, it seems.
RTÉ News
16-05-2025
- RTÉ News
International Blue Flag and Green Coast Award recipients for 2025 announced
Ian Diamond, Coastal Awards Manager with An Taisce discusses the 89 beaches and ten marinas that have been awarded a Blue Flag.
