The Office for National Statistics’ efforts to reform and fix its Labour Force Survey “have affected wellbeing and confidence at all levels” of the department, the ONS has said.
In a letter to the Treasury Committee, national statistician Professor Sir Ian Diamond ruled out the possibility that its transition to a new Transformed LFS will happen next year, saying it is the ONS’s ambition to move over to the new system in 2026 but that it could take until 2027.
A lessons learned report attached to the letter says: “ONS teams are invested and dedicated to make the project a success. However, TLFS has been a difficult and challenging experience for many, which has affected wellbeing and confidence at all levels.”
The TLFS is a new online-first model the ONS is developing in response to a steep decline in responses to the LFS.
At its lowest point in 2023, the LFS response rate was 17.4%, which resulted in the temporary suspension of the LFS as a source of labour market data in October 2023. Before Covid, the response rate was 36% and in 1993 it was 79%. The latest figures show a small improvement, with the response rate rising to 24.6% in 2024
The letter says the sharp fall in survey response rates is a long-term trend that rapidly accelerated during and after the Covid pandemic period, and has been a significant challenge for national statistical institutes around the world.
“There are many reasons for this decline, including increased cautiousness around the sharing of personal information, declining trust in government and public institutions, a reluctance to have interviewers inside homes and increased challenges accessing secure/gated properties,” Diamond said.
Diamond also said the ONS would welcome a national conversation on making responding to the LFS compulsory.
Trials of the TLFS showed response rates as high as 40%, but Diamond said there is still work to do as “there was bias in response towards older age groups, higher levels of partial responses compared with the LFS, and quality issues with the online response to some more complex variables such as respondents’ occupation and the industry in which they work”.
Diamond also gave an update on the department's recruitment efforts to improve the LFS and other surveys. He said the ONS has increased its permanent face-to-face field interviewers from 477 in December 2023 to 544 in Nov 2024. In the same period, it has also built up an agency workforce of 130 temporary field staff tasked specifically with completing the ‘knock-to-nudge’ function of the TLFS.
In the last month, 275 face-to-face interviewers have worked on the LFS compared to 145 in October 2023. Recruitment is continuing with the aim of delivering the requirement of having 457 face-to-face interviewers by the end of March 2025.
Diamond added: “As an organisation, we fully comprehend the critical importance of high-quality labour market statistics and recognise the significant impact the response challenges are having on the reliability of data informing our key outputs.
“We are confident that by continuing to seek out internal and external challenges and expertise, progressing the improvements already made and delivering the solutions outlined above in partnership with our key stakeholders, we will be able to recover the quality issues with the LFS and continue our progress towards transition to the TLFS. Achieving a successful outcome from these programmes of work is the top priority for the ONS.”
Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Committee, said the letter “paints a daunting picture”.
“The fact that we could be waiting another two full years until we see such a crucial dataset reach the proper standard is a major blow,” she said. “These delays will make some of the most consequential decisions taken by the Treasury and Bank of England challenging at best and misinformed at worst.”