Statistically Speaking

Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a pivotal moment for the organisation. In a new episode of Statistically Speaking our host Miles Fletcher sits down with Darren to talk about what happens next.    TRANSCRIPT   MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher.   Now, if you've followed the UK news much over the past year, you'll know the ONS has been under more scrutiny than at any point in its history, questions about trust, priorities, its core economic data and whether the organisation has simply been trying to do too much at once, have all been very publicly aired.   Today's episode is about what happens next. Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a moment when some of the UK's most relied upon statistics, especially those based on the Labor Force Survey, were under real pressure. In this conversation, we'll talk about Darren's background in government, running large, complex public services and helping to craft and enact key policies. We'll explore how data has shaped his career so far, and what he found when he arrived at the ONS. We'll also dig into some of the hardest questions facing the organisation, and what absolutely has to be fixed first, what may need to stop, how user expectations are being balanced with that and how full confidence in official statistics can be restored. This isn't just an internal reset. What the ONS does and how well it does it matters to policymakers, businesses and the public alike. So join us as we talk about focus, priorities, and the road ahead.   So then Darren, to begin at the beginning, you're not an economist or statistician by profession yourself. What motivated you to take leadership of what is the central organisation in UK statistics?   DARREN TIERNEY Sure, well look as a non-statistician you can imagine I was a little bit daunted when this prospect first came along for precisely that reason.  I was kind of worried that maybe not being a statistician or an economist might be a real drawback but as I thought more about the job, and more about what was needed for the organisation at the time, and with the split of the roles, I thought actually, I can really help. But what really drew me to the role was that although I'm not a statistician, Iv'e been an avid consumer of ONS products for the 25 years that I've been a policy wonk in Whitehall. And going from a good policy professional to a great one, requires both access to good data and also a real understanding of it and knowing how to use it. And it's that background that kind of helped me and really got me into it, and so I saw it as a real opportunity to come and help an organisation that really couldn't be any more consequential for the UK.   MILES FLETCHER The Devereux review said that what was needed was someone with really serious operational experience, having run serious civil service operations, and you bring plenty of that. Could you just detail some of that? You've had a very strong rise, you know, through the ranks of the civil service. Just trace that for us, if you would.   DT Yeah. So I started life in what was the old Prescott empire of DETR, which was environment and transport in the regions as a policy wonk working on aviation. I then went and joined the Ministry of Justice, where I spent three years in the private offices of Harriet Harman, Jack Straw and Ken Clarke, and that kind of real frontline policy making, as it were, is the thing that I did a lot of in the first half of my career.   The second half of my career, which is much more relevant to the ONS, was centred around transformation and change. And again, I spent about 12 years or so in the MOJ, and my senior career there was about transforming systems and running big programs. And I went from there to international trade, just after the Referendum, where like a lot of officials at the time, I was quite keen to run to where the energy or the fire was after Brexit. But I didn't fancy working DExEU, and this new department called Trade seemed quite interesting. So I went there, and again, this was a kind of brand new department, and it grew from a few hundred people to about four and a half thousand. And so that kind of building and running the department as a strategy director for investments and exports,  I guess those two experiences in justice and trade are the two that I rely on most in this role.   MF So you spent time in the corridors of power then, the ministerial heights of the civil service, but also having to try and make the machine run efficiently as well, and to deliver public services and achieve policies in the real world. What role has data played in that? And what sort of statistics were you using? What sort of insights were you getting? Can you share some experiences of how that's shaped your career, and your understanding, particularly of the job in hand here at the ONS.   DT Sure, I guess the job where it was most relevant was when I was in justice, where I worked in civil and family policy, Legal Aid and supporting on prison reform, and particularly on youth justice reform, and maybe that's a good example to pull out. Justice is one of those areas where people have very strong views about what the right policy prescription is, but there's often quite a lack of evidence that goes behind some of these strong policy positions, if I can put it like that, and one of the things that bedevilled us was trying to turn very strong ministerial desire for action across the human justice system into something that was evidence based, and where we could point to proof that these things would work, and we did that several times in the youth justice system.   Perhaps the one that I look back on most fondly in the youth estate...We were constantly telling ourselves, and indeed the world, that kids in the youth estate were getting thirty hours a week of education, and that was true in the sense that that's what we were buying. We were procuring thirty hours a week from providers, but the kids in the estate were not getting thirty hours a week and we didn't really know until we sent in a team of researchers from the MOJ analytical team to do some surveys, and then we also analysed some of the ROI coming out of that estate. And of course, what we discovered was that although we were buying thirty hours of education, it was always being disrupted by all the other services that these kids needed to access. So every dentist, every doctor, every lawyer that was coming in to interact with those kids, that was happening during what would otherwise be the school day, but we didn't really know that. And for years, we were kind of running this system and telling ourselves and indeed telling the world, that this was what was going on, but having analyzed that system and got ourselves some real data we were able to change that system so that it was education first, and all of those other ancillary services would take place outside of the school day. So sometimes it can be quite basic bits of analysis that can result in the biggest changes.   MF I guess the lesson there is, we always need to never totally trust the data we've got and find better insights and better ways of looking at things. And I guess that leads us into the challenge here at the ONS. What were your first impressions when you took the plunge in, suffice to say, quite interesting circumstances in the earlier part of 2025. What did you make of your earliest days here at the ONS and formulating what needed to be done?    DT  Your characterization of it is right. Before I even arrived, I was talking to a lot of the stakeholders, including Robert Devereux and others, and in doing that and in reading around the issues, I ended up getting quite a negative view of what was going on, perhaps understandably, because that was what was being reported. So I was expecting an organization that was perhaps much more kind of browbeaten than the one I found. And that's not to sound complacent at all, but the thing that I was surprised at when I arrived was just the desire for progress, for action, for us to kind of turn the page, and for us to get back to being a respected NSI. And that that sort of energy that I found amongst the senior team was great because I was expecting to have to do quite a lot of jigging up of the system to get us into that mode, but actually, when I arrived, people were already there. So that was my first impression. My second impression really was just the quality of the people here, the skills, the experience and the expertise here at the ONS is genuinely inspiring. And I said this to Civil Service World a few weeks ago. We abuse the phrase "world class" in Whitehall, we often claim things are world class when they're not, but we do have some genuine world class expertise in the ONS and I was genuinely inspired when getting to meet some of those people during the first few days and weeks.   MF It sounds as though people had a good idea of what needed to be done, what was coming out in the media, and of the various inquiries that took place last year, was that the general feeling was that ONS had become spread too thin, and needed to prioritize on those things that ONS is best known for. It does have a worldwide reputation for, crucially, what people most rely upon it to get it right, prioritizing those. Was that what emerged?   DT It really was. And that sense that getting back to the core business of an NSI (National Statistical Institute) was what people were people were really hungry for us to do. I think there is a danger when saying something like that, of sounding like no one valued that hugely innovative work that happened during the pandemic. And that's definitely not the case. I think

In "Crime: Numbers, Narratives and Nuance" our host Miles Fletcher speaks with Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS and John Rentoul, leading commentator on crime, policing, and the media, about the challenges in interpreting crime data.    Transcript   MILES FLETCHER  Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking – the official podcast on the UK's Office for National Statistics. The time we're returning to the scene of a major statistical topic we've touched on before but amid a new and sometimes highly polarised public debate, one we think fully bears further investigation: how best to understand and interpret the crime figures produced and published by ONS.   Helping us with our enquiries is Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS. It's his job to assemble and present the complex statistical picture of crime revealed in two very large and sometimes conflicting data sources. We also have an independent witness in the highly experiences shape of John Rentoul, Chief Political Commentator for the Independent and visiting professor at Kings College London. He'll be talking about the use and possible abuse of crime figures in the media and political debate. Are the statistics and those who produce them doing enough to enable the public to understand properly the prevalence and nature of crime in our society today?  Nick, a big question to start with, some people think crime is going down, other people insist it's going up. Who's right?     NICK STRIPE  Well, it's a question that sounds simple, doesn't it? And it's a question I get asked quite a lot. But if you think about the concept of crime, you soon realize that it covers a really huge range of actions and behaviours. If I was a chief constable trying to reduce crime in my area, I'd want to know what kinds of crimes are causing the biggest problems.  So, is it theft, robbery, violence? Domestic abuse? sexual offenses? Maybe it's fraud. And even if you tell me it's theft, then there's still a broad spectrum. So, is that burglary from houses? Is it theft of vehicles? Is it people having things snatched off them in the street? Is there a new thing about theft from doorsteps? Each of those types of theft would have its own trends, patterns and challenges. So, what I'm really saying is that whilst I understand your desire for a single answer, the real stories are in the detail of those different crime types.     But I will come back to your question, is crime going up or down? Broadly speaking, I would say we're experiencing much less crime now than we did 20 or 30 years ago. Many crime types have been declining at a fairly steady rate since the mid 1990s and in more recent years, probably since we started to emerge from the pandemic, crime levels have broadly flattened out at that lower level.     But some types of crime are rising now, some are still falling, and some are changing in ways that reflect shifts in society, shifts in technology and shifts in policing.     MF  That's the complex and highly nuanced picture, and it's the one that is designed to best serve those who make policies around crime, those who try to contain crime, those who try to fight it?    NS  That's right, Miles. And it's a picture that we get from drawing on several different data sources. There are two main ones. One is police recorded crime, and the second one is our independent survey of crime across England and Wales. And then we can use other data sources to provide richness for certain crime types, or to triangulate what we're seeing in those main data sources. And when we pull all of that together, we try and give a rich, nuanced, accurate picture for policy and policing.     MF  That's the aim of the statistics, but when it comes to public debate and public perceptions, do we risk misleading people by not being able to come up with a single barometer of crime? You can't go on the ONS website and see whether overall offending is up or down for example, or is that a completely pointless exercise?    NS  Well as I said, different crime types will have different things acting on them at any one point in time. But what we can do, for example through the crime survey, that has measured what I'm going to call traditional types of crime experienced by us as the public. So that's things like theft, that's things like violence, that's things like criminal damage, and in the last 10 years or so, that also includes fraud. And when we look at those types of crimes, we can see that, if you want a single figure, the numbers have come down. And that's when I say that over the last 30 years, there's been a big reduction in crime. If you take violence, theft and criminal damage, about 30 years ago, four in 10 of us, about 40% of us, every year would experience one of those types of crime. Now it's one in 10 of us. So, I can give you that picture for certain types of crime, but there are different ways of measuring and different data sources are better for certain types of crime, so coming up with that overall number is actually quite difficult.     MF  John, when it comes to political and media debate around crime, there are no simple answers, and yet those are to arenas where we want simple answers.      JOHN RENTOUL  Well, I think Nick did give a fairly simple answer, which is that if you ask people an open-ended question - have you been the victim of crime over the past 12 months - then the number of people saying yes to that question has gone down very dramatically over the last 30 years. So, in that very simple sense, crime has gone down hugely over the past 30 years.    But of course, people don't feel that, because that requires comparative memory...collective memory over a long period of time, and people are worried about what they read in the papers and what they see on social media. So, people, just as they always think that Britain is becoming a more unequal society, they always think that crime is rising, and it's very difficult to contradict that with simple statistics.     MF  Isn't that because there's always  some aspect of crime, some type of crime that's always rising and it's opposition politicians, headline writers, particularly...of course you'll find lots of sophisticated, nuanced debate in the media...But those who write the headlines like to seize on the negative, don't they? Bad news sells. And you can see how people get these impressions because it's just the scary stuff they're hearing about.     JR  Well, possibly, although I think it's probably deeper than that. I think it's just human nature to feel fearful about the threats in society and the way of dealing with that psychologically is to assume that those threats are worse now than they used to be.      When you ask people has crime increased, they're not really giving you a statistical answer. They just say yes I'm afraid of various sorts of crime. And, you're quite right, the sorts of things that stick in people's minds are phone thefts and shoplifting, the sorts of things that get highlighted on social media all the time.     MF  As they used to say at the end of Crime Watch every week, these types of crimes are rare,  don't have nightmares. Yet, that's no good if you've had your phone nicked or witnessed a shoplifting incident.    JR  That's right, and what's interesting about those two is that witnessing a shoplifting incident wouldn't be recorded in the crime survey because you personally are not the victim of that crime. So that's an example of an incident that has gone up, but that wouldn't be captured in the survey statistics, although having your phone nicked is something we probably would remember.     MF  And how responsible would you say our political leaders have been over the years? How responsible perhaps are they being now in the way that they present crime statistics?     JR  Well, it's very difficult, isn't it, because it's always partisan between government and opposition because ministers are always saying that crime has gone down, just as they're saying more nurses and doctors are employed in the NHS and all that. It's one of those statistics that well, certainly for the past 30 years, has been true, but opposition politicians have to try to argue the opposite, and they point to the sorts of crimes that have gone up, such as shoplifting and phone theft. So, it is a constant battle between what sounds to the public like just rival political claims, and the public will just discount more or less what any politician says and just choose to believe what they want to believe.     MF  Like many big statistical topics, once again, people can argue diametrically opposing things and both be right in a sense...    JR  Yes, exactly    MF   ...and have some statistical basis for saying it. So it's the job of this podcast to help people untangle those sorts of complexities and decide for themselves.     Let's embark on a little journey then around how the crime statistics, these are the ONS crime statistics for England and Wales, how they are put together, how best to interpret them. And nobody better to guide us through that than yourself Nick, as joint head of crime. Starting at the beginning, because this would have been the original source for crime statistics going back a very long time indeed, and that is police recorded crime. And that sort of conjures up an image of The Bill, doesn't it, or Dixon of Dock Green for older listeners of a desk sergeant sitting there and dutifully recording offenses. Is that what it's like?     NS  I'm pretty old myself Miles, but that's stretching it...    MF  [Laughter] Yes. Very elderly...    NS  But yes, police recorded crime is one of the two main sources for crime statistics, and we report what we find in that data every single quarter. It's why John c

With migration continuing to make headlines in the media, we unpack what actually defines a "migrant", and how the UK's largest producer of official statistics goes about counting them.  We also shed light on the misuse of migration figures.    Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Hello and a very warm welcome to a new series of Statistically Speaking - the official podcast of the UK Office for National Statistics. This is where we hear from the people producing the nation's most important numbers, about how they do it and what the statistics are saying.   Now it's hard to think of one statistic that could be said to have been more influential these past few years than net international migration. Suffice to say it's the one ONS statistic that probably draws more media attention than any other.  But to fully understand the migration figures, and the swirling debate around them, we'd say it pays to know a little about how they are put together. And the first thing you need to know about that is what, or who, is a migrant in the first place. As usual, to unpack and explain the migration statistics we have the top experts from the ONS and beyond. Mary Gregory is director of population statistics here at the ONS. Madeleine Sumption is director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, and new chair of the National Statistician's Advisory Panel on Migration. And to help us understand how the numbers are used and abused in public debate, we're also delighted to welcome Hannah Smith, senior political journalist at fact checking charity Full Fact. Welcome to you all.   Madeleine, to start with you if I may, with that fundamental question, quite simply, what is a migrant?   MADELEINE SUMPTION  Well, there are actually lots of different definitions of a migrant and we use different definitions at different points in time. The standard definition of migration that we use in this country is long term migration, so people moving for at least 12 months, and so the Office for National Statistics figures on immigration, emigration and net migration are all using that definition. And people in that data, they're migrants regardless of whether they are British or not British. So you could have a British person who's gone to live overseas for a few years and coming back they would be counted, in theory, at least in the data, as a migrant. There are other definitions though that are very useful for policy. So sometimes people talk about migrants, meaning people who don't have British citizenship, and the value of that is that these are people who are subject to immigration control, effectively that the Home Office is regulating their status. But it's also sometimes quite useful not to look at whether someone's a citizen now, because of course people can change their citizenship, and many migrants to the UK do become British citizens. So it can be useful to look at whether someone has migrated in the past. The standard definition for that is whether someone is born abroad. But now we've got all these exciting new data sets from administrative data, and so there's a new definition that's creeping in and being used a lot, which is someone who was a non-citizen at the time they registered for their National Insurance Number, regardless of whether they've subsequently become a British citizen. So it's a bit confusing sometimes for the external user, because for various reasons, we have to have all of these different definitions. You just have to know which one you're looking at at any point in time.    MILES FLETCHER  But the basic headline definition, as far as the ONS is concerned -and I guess internationally too because it's important that these figures are comparable- is that it is a person traveling from one country to another for a period of 12 months.   MADELEINE SUMPTION  That's right  MILES FLETCHER  And I guess that is something that is perhaps not widely understood. People understand that migration has a degree of permanence, so they move from one country to another, and yet you can be a migrant in quite a sort of transient way.   MADELEINE SUMPTION  That's right, we have short term migrants as well. So we have a lot of people who come to this country to do seasonal work. For example, they spend up to six months in the country. Then you have people who are long term migrants by the ONS definition and they may spend two to three years here, for example, if they're a worker or an international student. So you're right. I think in people's minds, often when they think about who is a migrant and who comes to mind, they will typically think of someone who is moving permanently. But actually a lot of migrants to the UK only stay for a couple of years.   MILES FLETCHER And none of these people, when it comes to measuring them, none of these people arrive Paddington Bear style with labels around their necks saying "I am a migrant". The ONS in measuring migration has to classify whether these people qualify or not.   MADELEINE SUMPTION  That's true, and that is very tricky. And it's something I think the non-technical user of the statistics finds it difficult to appreciate quite how hard it is for ONS to work out who is a migrant or not. Because we have millions of people crossing our borders every year, most of them not migrants. We have tourists or people who come in to visit family members. There are all sorts of people and reasons why those people come and go, so ONS is really looking for the needle in the haystack, and a relatively small share of people who are crossing the borders are actually migrating.   MILES FLETCHER  Well, that seems a good moment to bring in the person who is in charge of finding that needle in the haystack statistically. Mary, tell us how we approach this task. Perhaps start off by explaining how we used to do it. MARY GREGORY  Previously we used a survey called the International Passenger Survey, and there we would ask a sample of people as they came into the country, or as they left the country, what their intentions were, and we'd be able to provide very early estimates based on people's intentions to stay or to leave.   MILES FLETCHER  This is people at airports and other ports of entry, ferry ports, for example, simply approaching people as they wander along the corridors, almost in a random sort of way.   MARY GREGORY  Exactly that, you might have seen them. If you have travelled through an airport you may have seen a desk that sometimes says Office for National Statistics. And there would sometimes be people there with very carefully scheduled timetables to make sure that we collect a good cross section of people.   MILES FLETCHER  So the International Passenger Survey is essentially a big sample survey. Nothing wrong with that, and yet, the number of people being stopped at airports who did actually identify themselves as being migrants was quite small, and that made for some very broad-brush estimates didn't it?   MARY GREGORY  Yes, as you can imagine, people travel through airports or ports for many different reasons, and a lot of those people traveling will be traveling for a holiday or business or to visit family. And so the proportion of those people who are actually going to become residents or leaving for more than 12 months is very small, which makes it really difficult to pick up a good sample of those people.   MILES FLETCHER  And because it's fair to say the International Passenger Survey was never set up to measure migration in the first place, and that was something ONS found itself pointing out for a long, long time before things actually changed. MARY GREGORY  For a number of years we made clear that it was being stretched beyond its original purpose, and that it was the best measure we had at the time but now we think we can do better. And I think one other really important aspect of that is understanding that the survey was asking about people's intentions, and intentions don't always match reality of what we then see.   MILES FLETCHER  Because you might arrive as a student, end up working, settling, starting a family...   MARY GREGORY  Yes. Or you might find that you've arrived planning to stay for a year and then change your mind and you've left again. So it could go in either direction.   MILES FLETCHER  So the case for change was strong. What has changed? How is migration measured now?   MARY GREGORY  So now we have a variety of different ways to measure depending on the nationality of the people arriving. So for anybody from outside the EU, we have good data around visas from the Home Office, so we can use that to understand who is coming and what their reasons for travel are, and we can come on to that a little bit later. For people within the EU, that was a bit more difficult because prior to exiting the EU nobody needed a visa. And so at the moment, we use administrative data, so that's data collected for other purposes, and we use data from DWP, so the Department for Work and Pensions, to understand who has come into the country and who is staying in the country for more than 12 months. And for British nationals, we still, at the moment, use the International Passenger Survey, but we hope to change that very soon.   MILES FLETCHER  And essentially, the last use of the IPS, as far as migration is concerned, is to capture British passport holders leaving the country because nobody else is counting them out.   MARY GREGORY  That's right, and it's actually just stopped collecting that data. So we will move to the new methods very soon.   MILES FLETCHER  Okay, so how successful would you say this shift has been?   MARY GREGORY  I think we've definitely improved the data we can provide. It's a better reflection of people's behaviours. We know that because we've compared the different methods and looked against the census and how the population has changed there. But there are also other advantages as well. So we can now loo

In this episode we explore how the ONS measures our natural environment and the green economy.        Relevant datasets: ONS Environmental Accounts    Transcript     MILES FLETCHER   Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and this time we're getting back to nature as we explore the work of the ONS in measuring the economic and social value of the natural environment.   Is classical economic growth - as measured by gross domestic product or GDP - always achieved at the expense of the environment? What price can we put on the amenities our environment provides? What is the green economy and what are green jobs? And what are the key data to watch as policymakers strive for net zero carbon emissions, while also seeking to improve national prosperity?   Our guides through the rich and perhaps under explored landscape of environmental data are ONS's Deputy Director for Environmental Statistics Analysis, Ian Townsend; Head of Natural Capital Accounts, Gemma Thomas; and Sophie Barrand, Monetary Accounts lead in the Environmental Accounts team.   Welcome to you all.  Ian to come to you first. The ONS is mainly known for measuring the economy and the population of the UK. So, what exactly is its role when it comes to the environment? What are we seeking to achieve?  What do we do? What do we publish?   IAN TOWNSEND So the environment is quite a broad topic that links with a lot of other issues and a lot of different national and devolved government departments and other related bodies producing statistics on the environment. And with all that range of statistics, we tend to focus at the ONS on the intersections between our environment and both the economy and society. This includes measuring what we call the Low Carbon and renewable energy economy, how many green jobs there are, the greenhouse gas emissions produced by different economic sectors, and valuing the services that nature provides to us, as well as providing rapid insights into what people and business think about climate change in the environment and their actions or indeed otherwise.    MF And what are the major publications that come out of the ONS that people ought to be looking at to get a sense of what we're saying about the environment and its value?   IT So I mentioned a couple in the introduction there - things like low carbon and renewable energy economy, green jobs, etc... and our emissions figures. But perhaps one that is quite worth bringing to the fore is our natural capital accounts. So, it's something we've done for several years, which basically looks at the value that ecosystems provide to nature and ecosystems provide to us, and the services that provides. So, we bring this out as a report every year - have done so for several years - and that looks beyond the economy, beyond gross domestic product, to look at all those natural resources and we found that in 2021, the total value of all those natural assets was around one and a half trillion pounds. It's such a big figure, I think it can be quite hard for people to grasp. But a useful comparison might be that it's not that far off the 1.7 trillion pounds that homes in the UK were valued at in 2021 as well.   MF It's very difficult to arrive at a financial figure or value like that. Can you just give us a brief explanation of how it's calculated?    IT Sure. So, there are internationally agreed guidelines that we follow around how to measure or indeed account for the current value of what natural capital could provide for us and our current and future generations. And all that process, all those guidelines are aligned with how we measure the GDP in the economy. It's really quite a complex exercise and includes things like the value of trees, rivers, peatlands, and many other habitats and natural resources in them. We've been developing and improving these approaches for probably at least 10 years, and probably have some of the most developed accounts in this form globally. Our estimates have improved over the years. But there are some things that we don't cover. So, in a way, this is probably best seen as a kind of partial and minimum value, even though it's already very large. And it's also part of a wider mission that the ONS has to capture the value of what's called missing capital, things that we don't currently measure so well in gross domestic product. So that's including social capital as well as natural capital. So that's called 'inclusive wealth' and that's another publication the ONS produces that people might be interested to have a look at.   MF And it's important, I guess, to have this economic value of the environment so that can be compared against the traditional measure of economic progress and prosperity, which of course is GDP. And it's sometimes – and we've heard this in other podcasts - because GDP is like the big beast of the economic statistical world. It's very important, it's very influential, but of course it does have significant weaknesses and omissions, and notably its lack of account for environmental factors being notoriously one of those.   IT Sure. And actually, there's a process going on right now internationally that would bring some of that into the way that we measure some of the key economic indicators. But I think one of the key things you say is putting out there is a measure of how our natural capital assets are doing. But I think the other real benefit of these statistics, and particularly the natural capital accounts, is that it helps literally to account for nature to give an estimate of some of the benefits that the environment does provide. So, when people make decisions, they can take that into account. We're not exactly saying that nature has this given value. It's more that that's the value that we've estimated so far that provides those. It helps people to make sure that when they're taking their decisions, they take into account what would happen if we reduced or depleted that natural capital, and indeed, the benefits we might get in the future if we were to increase that natural capital as well.   MF Because – and this is the other side of the question – high per capita GDP often goes with high carbon emissions in an economy, doesn't it? This way, we can look at the other side of the balance sheet and say, well, yes, you might be achieving this high economic performance in traditional terms, but look at the cost on the other side and, as you say, this is part of a big international movement to recognize that called 'beyond GDP', which is a topic we've covered in previous podcasts already.     IT Sure.  I think, just getting back to your point around GDP and emissions one of the things that we produce in the ONS is a piece around a different emissions measurements there are, and actually if you look at those, you'll see that over time, all those measures have been reducing. So there is an element to which whilst the economy is expanding, we are actually reducing emissions on all three different measures that are available.    MF And we say the environment is - we're putting it at 1.5 trillion pounds – that's the capital value of the natural environment, broadly equivalent to the value of all the houses in the UK. Some people might say that's a low figure perhaps you can think we measure human capital being much, much greater than that but that's a debate for another time. But explain for us who is using this number, how does it inform decision making at the moment at national and local level? How might it influence policymakers in future do you think?    IT Sure, I think it's not necessarily about the big number at the top although that is one that will get a lot of interest from people and as you say, it might be an underestimate. I mentioned that there are some aspects of nature that we don't currently measure. But in terms of how it's used lots and lots of detail that's available underneath that key figure in the natural capital accounts we publish every year, at kind of macro level. The figures we use are important considerations for decision making by UK and devolved governments. So Defra published a policy paper, for example, on the accounts, I think, a couple of years back, which looked at what the key takeaways for policy there were from there, and we think that some of the figures were used in some of the bids that departments put in for the 2021 Spending Review. I think at the micro level figures are definitely used in the analysis of costs and benefits that are used for judging different government projects. It's part of what Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs call enabling a natural capital approach - it is in that guidance, and that has a lot of impact at kind of micro level. We're also publishing more and more data from the natural capital accounts at a local level. And making that available means that councils and others can use that in their decision making as well. And we're also building our connections and encouraging use where we can and it's also something that's being worked on internationally as well, which we're part of working with other national statistics offices and the UN.   MF Turning to Gemma then, you're the head of natural capital accounts at the ONS. Let's get into the nuts and bolts then of what contributes to this valuation, this figure, because by understanding that we can better understand what it contributes to the economy and what it contributes to our wellbeing. Talk us through those elements if you would.   GEMMA THOMAS Yeah, of course. So as Ian mentioned, there's some international standards that we abide by, but essentially what we do is we say, okay, what services does nature provide to us? And we identify those services, and then we attempt to put a value on them. Now those services can fall into three broad categories. The first would be provisioning services, whic

  With the public release of large language models like Chat GPT putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) firmly on our radar, this episode explores what benefits this technology might hold for statistics and analysis, as well as policymaking and public services.  Joining host, Miles Fletcher, to discuss the groundbreaking work being done in this area by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and across the wider UK Government scene are: Osama Rahman, Director of the ONS Data Science Campus; Richard Campbell, Head of Reproducible Data Science and Analysis; and Sam Rose, Deputy Director of Advanced Analytics and Head of Data Science and AI at the Department for Transport.  Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and, if you've been a regular listener to these podcasts, you'll have heard plenty of the natural intelligence displayed by my ONS colleagues. This time though, we're looking into the artificial stuff. We'll discuss the work being done by the ONS to take advantage of this great technological leap forward; what's going on with AI across the wider UK Government scene; and also talk about the importance of making sure every use of AI is carried out safely and responsibly. Guiding us through that are my ONS colleagues - with some of the most impressive job titles we've had to date - Osama Rahman is Director of the Data Science Campus. Richard Campbell is Head of Reproducible Data Science and Analysis. And completing our lineup, Sam Rose, Deputy Director of Advanced Analytics and head of data science and AI at the Department for Transport. Welcome to you all. Osama let's kick off then with some clarity on this AI thing. It's become the big phrase of our time now of course but when it comes to artificial intelligence and public data, what precisely are we talking about? OSAMA RAHMANSo artificial intelligence quite simply is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computing systems, and the simulation is the important bit, I think. Actually, people talk about data science, and they talk about machine learning - there's no clear-cut boundaries between these things, and there's a lot of overlap. So, you think about data science. It's the study of data to extract meaningful insights. It's multidisciplinary – maths, stats, computer programming, domain expertise, and you analyse large amounts of data to ask and answer questions. And then you think about machine learning. So that focuses on the development of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience and by the use of data. So, in other words, machine learning enables computers to learn from data and make decisions or predictions without explicitly being programmed to do so. So, if you think about some of the stuff we do at the ONS, it's very important to be able to take a job and match it to an industrial classification - so that was a manually intensive process and now we use a lot of machine learning to guide that. So, machine learning is essentially a form of AI. MILES FLETCHERSo is it fair to say then that the reason, or one of the main reasons, people are talking so much about AI now is because of the public release of these large language models? The chat bots if you like, to simpletons like me, the ChatGPT's and so forth. You know, they seem like glorified search engines or Oracles - you ask them a question and they tell you everything you need to know.  OSAMA RAHMANSo that's a form of AI and the one everyone's interested in. But it's not the only form – like I said machine learning, some other applications in data science, where we try in government, you know, in trying to detect fraud and error. So, it's all interlinked.   MILES FLETCHERWhen the ONS asked people recently for one of its own surveys, about how aware the public are about artificial intelligence, 42% of people said they used it in their home recently. What sort of things would people be using it for in the home? What are these everyday applications of AI and I mean, is this artificial intelligence strictly speaking?  OSAMA RAHMANIf you use Spotify, or Amazon music or YouTube music, they get data on what music you listen to, and they match that with people who've been listening to similar music, and they make recommendations for you. And that's one of the ways people find out about new music or new movies if you use Netflix, so that's one pretty basic application, that I think a lot of people are using in the home.  MILES FLETCHERAnd when asked about what areas of AI they'd like to know more about, more than four in 10 adults reported that they'd like to know better how to judge the accuracy of information. I guess this is where the ONS might come in. Rich then, if I could just ask you to explain what we've been up to, what the Data Science Campus has been up to, to actually bring the power of artificial intelligence to our statistics. RICHARD CAMPBELLThanks Miles. Yeah, a few things that ONS has been doing in this very broad sphere of artificial intelligence, and it's really in that overlap area that Osama mentioned with data science, so I'd pick out a few sorts of general areas there. So, one is automation. You know, we're always keen to look at how we can automate processes and make them more efficient. It frees up the time of our analysts to conduct more work. It means that we are more cost effective. It means that our statistics have better quality. It's something we've done for years but AI offers some new opportunities do that. The other area which Osama touched on is the use of large language models, you know, we can get into the complexities of data. We can get much more out of data; we can complete tasks that would have been too complex or too time consuming for real data scientists. And this is good news, actually, because it frees up the data scientists to add real valuable human insights. Some of the places we've been using this. So, my team for example, which is called reproducible data science and analysis, and we use data science and engineering skills to develop computer systems to produce statistics where the data is a bit big, or what I tend to call a bit messy or a bit complex for our traditional computer systems. We use AI here through automation, as I mentioned, you know, really making sure that we're making systems as efficient and high quality as possible. Another thing we're interested in doing here is quite often we're doing something called re-platforming systems. So, this is where we take a system that's been used to produce our statistics for years and years and look to move it on to new technology. Now we're exploring with Osama's team the potential for AI to do a lot of the grunt work for us there to sort of go in and say, right, what is going on in this system? How is it working, how we can improve it? One other thing I'll mention, if Osama doesn't mind me treading on the territory of his team, is the Stats Chat function that we've used on the ONS website. So, this is using AI to enable a far more intelligent interrogation of the vast range of statistics that we've got, so it no longer requires people to be really knowledgeable about our statistics. It enables them to ask quite open questions and to be guided to the most relevant data.  MILES FLETCHERBecause at the moment, if you want to really explore a topic by getting into the depths of the data, into the granular data, you've really got to know what you're looking for haven't you? This again is an oracle that will come up with the answers for you and just present them all ready for your digestion.  RICHARD CAMPBELLThat's right. And I tend to think of these things as a starting point, rather than the whole answer. So, what it's enabling you to do is to get to the meat of the issue a lot quicker. And then you can focus your energy as a user of our statistics in doing the analysis that you want rather than thinking "how do I find the right information in the first place?" MILES FLETCHEROsama, that sounds like an intriguing tool. Tell us precisely how it works then, what data does it capture, what's in scope? OSAMA RAHMANSo the scope is publicly available documents on the ONS website. And there's a specific reason for that. So, these AI tools, you can have it look at the whole internet, you can have it look at subsets of data, you can point it to specific bits of data, right? And what's important for us is actually the work of the ONS, that statistics we produce are quality assured and relevant. And by providing these guardrails where you know, Stats Chat only looks at ONS published data, we have a degree of assurance that the data coming back to the user is likely to be of good quality and not based on who knows what information. MILES FLETCHERBecause when you use, to name one example, ChatGPT for example, the little warning comes back saying "ChatGPT can make mistakes, consider checking important information." And I guess that's fundamental to all this isn't it. These tools, as intelligent as they might be, they're only as good - like any system - as the information that's going in the front end.  OSAMA RAHMANThat's absolutely correct, which is why we have these guardrails where, you know, the functionality on Stats Chat is focused on published ONS information.  MILES FLETCHERThat does mean that something that's offered by an organisation like the ONS does have that sort of inbuilt potential to be trustworthy and widely used. But of course, you might say, to have a really good tool it's got to be drawing on masses of information from right across the world. And it's interesting how, and you mentioned that it's open-source data, of course, that's most available for these tools at the moment, but you're seeing proprietary data coming in as well. And this week, as we're recording this, the Financial Times, for example, has announced that it's done a deal with one of the

The ONS podcast returns, this time looking at the importance of communicating uncertainty in statistics. Joining host Miles Fletcher to discuss is Sir Robert Chote, Chair of the UKSA; Dr Craig McLaren, of the ONS; and Professor Mairi Spowage, director of the Fraser of Allander Institute.    Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome back to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and to kick off this brand new season we're going to venture boldly into the world of uncertainty. Now, it is of course the case that nearly all important statistics are in fact estimates. They may be based on huge datasets calculated with the most robust methodologies, but at the end of the day they are statistical judgments subject to some degree of uncertainty. So, how should statisticians best communicate that uncertainty while still maintaining trust in the statistics themselves? It's a hot topic right now and to help us understand it, we have another cast of key players. I'm joined by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Robert Chote, Dr. Craig McLaren, head of national accounts and GDP here at the ONS, and from Scotland by Professor Mairi Spowage, director of the renowned Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde. Welcome to you all.   Well, Sir Robert, somebody once famously said that decimal points in GDP is an economist's way of showing they've got a sense of humour. And well, that's quite amusing - particularly if you're not an economist - there's an important truth in there isn't there? When we say GDP has gone up by 0.6%. We really mean that's our best estimate.    SIR ROBERT CHOTE It is. I mean, I've come at this having been a consumer of economic statistics for 30 years in different ways. I started out as a journalist on the Independent and the Financial Times writing about the new numbers as they were published each day, and then I had 10 years using them as an economic and fiscal forecaster. So I come at this very much from the spirit of a consumer and am now obviously delighted to be working with producers as well. And you're always I think, conscious in those roles of the uncertainty that lies around particular economic estimates. Now, there are some numbers that are published, they are published once, and you are conscious that that's the number that stays there. But there is uncertainty about how accurately that is reflecting the real world position and that's naturally the case. You then have the world of in particular, the national accounts, which are numbers, where you have initial estimates that the producer returns to and updates as the information sets that you have available to draw your conclusions develops over time. And it's very important to remember on the national accounts that that's not a bug, that's a feature of the system. And what you're trying to do is to measure a very complicated set of transactions you're trying to do in three ways, measuring what the economy produces, measuring incomes, measuring expenditure. You do that in different ways with information that flows in at different times. So it's a complex task and necessarily the picture evolves. So I think from the perspective of a user, it's important to be aware of the uncertainty and it's important when you're presenting and publishing statistics to help people engage with that, because if you are making decisions based on statistics, if you're simply trying to gain an understanding of what's going on in the economy or society, generally speaking you shouldn't be betting the farm on the assumption that any particular number is, as you say, going to be right to decimal places. And the more that producers can do to help people engage with that in an informed and intelligent way, and therefore mean that decisions that people take on the basis of this more informed the better.     MF  So it needs to be near enough to be reliable, but at the same time we need to know about the uncertainty. So how near is the system at the moment as far as these important indicators are concerned to getting that right?   SRC  Well, I think there's an awful lot of effort that goes into ensuring that you are presenting on the basis of the information set that you have the best available estimates that you can, and I think there's an awful lot of effort that goes into thinking about quality, that thinks about quality assurance when these are put together, that thinks about the communication how they mesh in with the rest of the, for example, the economic picture that you have, so you can reasonably assure yourself that you're providing people with the best possible estimate that you can at any given moment. But at the same time, you want to try to guide people by saying, well, this is an estimate, there's no guarantee that this is going to exactly reflect the real world, the more that you can do to put some sort of numerical context around that the more the reliable basis you have for people who are using those numbers, and thinking about as I say, particularly in the case of those statistics that may be revised in future as you get more information. You can learn things, obviously from the direction, the size of revisions to numbers that have happened in the past, in order to give people a sense of how much confidence they should place in any given number produced at any given point in that cycle of evolution as the numbers get firmer over time.   MF  If you're looking to use the statistics to make some decision with your business or personal life, where do you look for the small print? Where do you look for the guidance on how reliable this number is going to be?   SRC  Well, there's plenty of guidance published in different ways. It depends, obviously on the specific statistics in question, but I think it's very important for producers to ensure that when people come for example to websites or to releases that have the headline numbers that are going to be reported, that it's reasonably straightforward to get to a discussion of where do these numbers come from? How are they calculated? What's the degree of uncertainty that lies around that arising from these things? And so not everybody is obviously going to have an appetite for the technical discussion there. But providing that in a reasonably accessible, reasonably findable way, is important and I think a key principle is that if you're upfront about explaining how numbers are generated, explaining about the uncertainty that lies around them in as quantified way as you can, that actually increases and enhances trust in the underlying production and communication process and in the numbers rather than undermining it. I think you have to give the consumers of these numbers by and large the credit for understanding that these things are only estimates and that if you're upfront about that, and you talk as intelligently and clearly as you can about the uncertainties - potential for revision, for example - then that enhances people's confidence. It doesn't undermine it.   MF  You mentioned there about enhancing trust and that's the crux of all this. At a time we're told of growing public mistrust in national institutions and so forth, isn't there a risk that the downside of talking more about uncertainty in statistics is the more aware people will become of it and the less those statistics are going to be trusted?   SRC  I think in general, if you are clear with people about how a number is calculated, the uncertainty that lies around it, the potential for revision, how things have evolved in the past - that's not for everybody, but for most people - is likely to enhance their trust and crucially, their understanding of the numbers that you're presenting and the context that you're putting around those. So making that available - as I say, you have to recognise that different people will have different appetites for the technical detail around this - then there are different ways of presenting the uncertainty not only about, you know, outturn statistics, but in my old gig around forecasts of where things are going in the future and doing that and testing it out with your users as to what they find helpful and what they don't is a valuable thing to be doing.   MF  You've been the stats regulator for a little while now. Do you think policymakers, perhaps under pressure to achieve certain outcomes, put too much reliance on statistics when it suits them, in order to show progress against some policy objective? I mean, do the limitations of statistics sometimes go out of the window when it's convenient. What's your view of how well certainty is being treated by those in government and elsewhere?    SRC  Well, I think certainly in my time as a forecaster, you were constantly reminding users of forecasters and consumers of that, that again, they're based on the best available information set that you have at the time. You explain where the judgements have come from but in particular, if you're trying to set policy in order to achieve a target for a particular statistic at some point in the future, for example, a measure of the budget deficit, then having an understanding of the uncertainty, the nature of it, the potential size of it in that context, helps you avoid making promises that it's not really in your power to keep with the best will in the world, given those uncertainties. And sometimes that message is taken closer to heart than at other times.   MF  Time I think to bring in Craig now at this point, as head of national accounts and the team that produces GDP at the ONS to talk about uncertainty in the real world of statistical production. With this specific example, Craig, you're trying to produce a single number, one single number that sums up progress or lack of it in the economy as a whole. What do you do to make the users of the statistics and the wider public aware of the fact that you're produc

    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 had to make real judgments about how we maintain quality. And in the next few years, we will really be needing to think through exactly how we conduct our surveys and the cost of doing so.   MF  Yes. Of all the people who should be aware of inflation are the people who report it, and certainly the impacts of those relatively high rates of inflation have impacted us as much as anybody else. The challenges not withstanding of running surveys, the interest of government bodies in getting that information directly from people does continue to underline the unique value of surveys. Some people say Oh, well, they surely they can get this information from other sources I've even seen it suggested that social media could provide the answers, but there is a unique value isn't there and actually getting a statistically representative sample of people and speaking to them directly.   SID  It depends Miles, I think it absolutely depends on what the question is

  The ONS led the way informing the UK response to the Coronavirus pandemic. But what lessons can be learned and how can we best prepare not only ourselves, but the rest of the world, for the next pandemic?     Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  This is Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher, and as we approach the darkest months of winter, we're revisiting COVID-19.   Now the ONS doesn't do predictions, and we're certainly not forecasting a resurgence of the virus, either here in the UK or anywhere else. But pandemic preparedness has been the driving force behind two important pieces of work that we're going to be talking about this time. Looking beyond our shores, how well equipped now is the world in general to spot and monitor emerging infections? We'll hear from Josie Golding of the Wellcome Trust on that, including how even weather events like El Nino could affect the spread of viruses. We'll also talk to my ONS colleague, Joy Preece about the pandemic preparedness toolkit, a five-year project backed by Wellcome to create and develop resources that will help countries with health surveillance in the event of future pandemics.   But first, and closer to home, a new UK winter surveillance study to gather vital data on COVID-19 is now well underway. Jo Evans is its head of operations. Jo, this is a brand new COVID-19 survey the ONS is running in partnership with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). What is the new survey and what's it going to be monitoring over the winter?  JO EVANS  So this is now the winter COVID infection study. And we're going to be going out to, I think we've got 145,000 people signed up, and we're going to ask them to take a lateral flow test to see if they are testing positive for COVID-19. Then we'll ask them to tell us a little bit about how they're feeling, what symptoms they have and some other household information - what work do they do? Do they have caring responsibilities? And so on.   MF  So we're gonna be getting people to take a test and everyone's familiar of course now with administering their own lateral flow test, that wasn't the case back in the early days of the pandemic, when it was a new thing for the vast majority of us. So they'll take a test that'll tell us whether they are positive or negative for COVID-19. And on top of that, we're going to be gathering data in the form of a questionnaire.   JE  That's right. And then this is a collaboration this time, so we'll be working with the UKHSA. I mean, we've worked with them on the COVID infection study before, but this time what we'll be doing is looking at those responses of how many people are telling us that they have COVID-19 And we'll be trying to understand that by where people live or their age group and so on, but we'll be sharing that information with UKHSA and they will then be looking at what the impact is on hospitals. So what they call the infection hospitalisation rate, how many people are going into hospital because they have COVID, so it'll really help us understand what pressures there are on the NHS over this winter period.  MF  And that will give us some inkling, once again, about how many people are infected but not actually displaying any symptoms?  JE  Absolutely. And we do ask people about their symptoms and if they tell us they test positive, we'll then be sending them a second questionnaire, a follow up, asking them to keep testing until they get two consecutive negative tests so that we can see how long they are testing positive, but we'll also ask them how long did their symptoms last and did they need to go and see a doctor, did they take any medication, so really trying to understand how they're experiencing that period of illness.  MF  So during those critical winter months, that'll give us some insight into what's really going on on-the- ground and in communities.   JE  That's right and we're running this study from November right through to March so that we can understand that, because COVID, unlike flu, it's not a seasonal virus, but we know that the NHS really suffers through the winter with those increased pressures, with more people needing their services. And this is about understanding what's happening out there. In the community, and what impact that is having on our healthcare services.  MF  Another very important aspect of that is we're going to be monitoring for people who say they're suffering the symptoms of what is popularly known as long-COVID, ongoing impacts of the virus, and that will fill a very important evidence gap won't it.  JE  Absolutely. We will in a follow up questionnaire be asking people how long they've had COVID for and whether they have long-COVID. And interestingly, in some research we did when we were designing the questionnaire, long-COVID sufferers told us that they know precisely what date their symptoms started and how long they've had it because of the impact it's been having on their lives. So we are hopeful that this study will provide some really useful information.  MF  So 145,000 people taking part. Has it been difficult to get as many people as that involved?  JE  Do you know what, we got halfway there within the first 48 hours, people were so keen to take part in this study. We've really been surprised about that.  MF  It's probably a reflection of the success of the profile that the original study had.  JE  I think so, people are really keen to do their bit here and get involved in this study. And we've had a lot of participants, particularly in the older age groups, who have signed up so we will have to do something that we call 'weighting of the data' across the different age groups, but we do this all the time and we are also going out to those under 16s, right up to the over 70s.  MF  And as well as taking part in a very important public study, people get a COVID test for free and can see for themselves whether they've been affected.  JE Yeah, think that's one of the things people are keen to do, particularly over the winter periods when we're going to be mingling and visiting family, that reassurance really that you're going to test every month and find out whether or not you have COVID, I think we all want to make sure that we are virus free before we go and see our loved ones over Christmas, for example.  MF  Well, we're meeting to discuss this in mid-November. The first results are still a few weeks away but how are things going, we've got enough people? Are the tests out in the field yet?  JE  The tests are out in the field. I think we're looking to get two publications in before Christmas, so testing windows start next week. We're expecting around 25,000 people a week to take their tests and answer their questionnaire.  MF  And over the course of a month then, all 145 we hope will have been covered?   JE  Yes, I mean 145 is a fantastic number, and if we get all of them taking their test kits each month, then yes, that number will be higher. But even if we were looking at a 50 or 60% response rate, that is excellent for a social survey.  MF  Yes, and all the time, what we've heard in other contexts, is that it is difficult to get people to take part in surveys, but certainly in this case people can see the need for it and have come forward in their thousands. It's possibly worth pointing out though that you do have to be selected to take part, that's very important isn't it, that we've never looked for volunteers. We've selected households randomly and that approach, that's very important to make this a really, really reliable survey isn't it?  JE  Yes, and as soon as there was information about the study in the newspapers earlier this year, we had people ringing up and asking to take part and we've had to explain to them that we want a nice random sample so that we can have a fully representative study.  MF  So ONS will be producing the figures then it's over to our colleagues in the UK Health Security Agency to interpret what that means from a public health point of view, and what response might be necessary. Absolutely.  JE  Absolutely. And they'll be producing some statistics as well. Looking particularly, as I said, at that infection hospitalisation rate.  MF  So are we expecting the virus to take off again, or is it just a just a precaution to be monitoring things in this way?  JE  When we started this, it was more about understanding if there would be that impact on the NHS over the winter. But then we did see back in September, a new variant, particularly in the US, and as you know, from looking at COVID over the past few years, when you see a new variant coming, sort of appearing in one country, you know that it will come here eventually. So, it's about keeping track of that really, although because we are doing lateral flow tests, we won't actually have information about what kind of variant people have, but it will just be to look to see whether we're seeing an increase in positivity in the community.  MF  Okay, so all eyes on the first result, and we wish you, and the team getting the survey together once again, every success on what is a highly valuable and important exercise.  So we've heard how the new winter surveillance study is helping us track ongoing COVID infection here at home. But we're also using the experience the ONS gained during the last pandemic to prepare not only ourselves, but other countries around the world for another one, Josie, with that global perspective in mind, my first question to you just to get us started is what have been the biggest learnings, the biggest take homes if you like, for Wellcome from the pandemic. And what's your priority now as an organisation considering how best to respond to others?  JOSIE GOLDING  Thank you for having me today, I think this is good to be reflecting on COVID in the f

In this episode we talk about the growth of data use in the media and the potential impact of misinformation on the public's trust in official statistics.   Navigating podcast host Miles Fletcher through this minefield is Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge; Ed Humpherson, Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation; and award-winning data journalist Simon Rogers.    Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics, I'm Miles Fletcher. Now we've talked many times before in these podcasts about the rise of data and its impact on our everyday lives. It's all around us of course, and not least in the media we consume every day. But 'what' or 'who' to trust: mainstream media, public figures and national institutions like the ONS, or those random strangers bearing gifts of facts and figures in our social media feeds?  To help us step carefully through the minefields of misinformation and on, we hope, to the terra firma of reliable statistical communication, we have three interesting and distinguished voices, each with a different perspective. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a well-known voice to UK listeners. He's chair of the Winton Centre for Risk Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and was a very prominent voice on the interpretation of public health data here during the COVID pandemic. Also, we have Ed Humpherson, Director General of regulation and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the official stats watchdog if you like, and later in this podcast, I'll be joined by award winning data journalist and writer Simon Rogers, who now works as data editor at Google.  Professor, you've been one of the most prominent voices these last few years – a fascinating few years, obviously, for statistics in which we were told quite frankly, this was a golden age for statistics and data. I mean, reflecting on your personal experience as a prominent public voice in that debate, when it comes to statistics and data, to be very general, how well informed are we now as a public, or indeed, how ill-informed on statistics?     DAVID SPIEGELHALTER  I think things have improved after COVID. You know, for a couple of years we saw nothing but numbers and graphs on the news and in the newspapers and everywhere, and that went down very well. People didn't object to that. In fact, they wanted more. And I think that has led to an increased profile for data journalism, and there's some brilliant ones out there. I'm just thinking of John Burn-Murdoch on the FT but lots of others as well, who do really good work. Of course, in the mainstream media there is still the problem of non-specialists getting hold of data and getting it wrong, and dreadful clickbait headlines. It is the sub editors that wreck it all just by sticking some headline on what might be a decent story to get the attention and which is quite often misleading. So that's a standard problem. In social media, yeah, during COVID and afterwards, there are people I follow who you might consider as - I wouldn't say amateurs at all, but they're not professional pundits or media people - who just do brilliant stuff, and who I've learned so much from. There are also some terrible people out there, widespread misinformation claims which are based on data and sound convincing because they have got numbers in them. And that, I mean, it's not a new problem, but now it is widespread, and it's really tricky to counter and deal with, but very important indeed.     MF  So the issue aside from - those of us who deal with the media have heard this a hundred times - "I don't write the headlines", reporters will tell you when you challenge that misleading kind of headline. But would you say it's the mainstream media then, because they can be called out on what they report, who broadly get things right? And that the challenge is everything else - it's out there in the Wild West of social media?     DS  Yeah, mainstream media is not too bad, partly because, you know, we've got the BBC in this country, we've got regulations, and so it's not too bad. And social media, it's the Wild West. You know, there are people who really revel in using numbers and data to make inappropriate and misleading claims.     MF  Is there anything that can be done? Is it the government, or even those of us like the ONS who produce statistics, who should we be wading in more than we do? Should we be getting out there onto the social media platforms and putting people right?     DS  It's difficult I mean, I don't believe in sort of censorship. I don't think you can stop this at source at all. But just because people can say this, it doesn't give them a right for it to be broadcast wide, in a way and to be dumped into people's feeds. And so my main problem is with the recommendation algorithms of social media, where people will see things because it's getting clicks, and the right algorithm thinks persona will like it. And so we just get fed all this stuff. That is my real problem and the obscurity and the lack of accountability of recommendation algorithms right across social media is I think, a really shocking state of affairs. Of course, you know, we come on to this later, but we should be doing something about education, and actually sort of pre-empting some of the misunderstandings is something I feel very strongly about with my colleagues. You've got to get in there quick, and rather than being on the backfoot and just reacting to false claims that have been made, you've got to sort of realise how to take the initiative and to realise what misunderstandings, misinterpretations can be made, and get in there quickly to try to pre-empt them. But that of course comes down to the whole business of how ONS and others communicate their data.     MF  Because when you ask the public whether they trust them - and the UK statistics authority does this every two years - you ask the public if they trust ONS statistics, and a large proportion of them say they do. But of course, if they're not being presented with those statistics, then they're still going to end up being misled.     DS  Yeah, I mean, it's nice to get those responses back. But, you know...that's in terms of respondents and just asking a simple question, do you trust something or not? I think it's good to hear but we can't be complacent about that at all. I'm massively influenced by the approach of the philosopher, Baroness Onora O'Neill, who really makes a sharp distinction between organisations wanting to be trusted and revelling in being trusted, and she says that shouldn't be your objective to be trusted. Your objective should be to be trustworthy, to deserve trust, and then it might be offered up to you. And so the crucial thing is trustworthiness of the statistics system and in the communications, and that's what I love talking about, because I think it's absolutely important and it puts the responsibility really firmly back to the communicator to demonstrate trustworthiness.     MF  So doing more as stats producers to actually actively promote data and get people to come perhaps away from the social platforms, and to have their own websites that present data in an accessible way, in an understandable way, where people can get it for nothing without requiring an expensive subscription or something, as some of the best of the media outlets would require.     DS  The other thing I'd say is there's no point of being trustworthy if you're dull, as no one's going to look at it or take any notice, and other media aren't going to use it. So I think it's really worthwhile to invest, make a lot of effort to make what you're putting out there as attractive, as vivid and as grabbing as possible. The problem is that in trying to do that, I mean, that's what a lot of communicators and media people want to do, because of course they want people to read their stuff. But what that tends to do largely is make their stuff kind of opinionated and have a very strong line, essentially to persuade you to either do something or think something or buy something or vote something. So much communication has to do with persuading that I think it's just completely inappropriate. In this context, what we should be doing is informing people.    In a way we want to persuade them to take notice, so that's why you want to have really good quality communications, vivid, get good people out there. But in the end, they're just trying to inform people, and that's why I love working with ONS. I just think this is a really decent organisation whose job is just trying to raise the...to obviously provide official statistics...but in their communications, it's to try to raise the level of awareness raise the level of discussion, and by being part of a non -ministerial department, they're not there, the comms department, to make the minister look good, or to make anyone look good. It's just there to tell people how it is.    MF  Exactly. To put that data into context. Is this a big number or is this is a small number, right? Adjectives can sometimes be very unhelpful, but often the numbers don't speak for themselves, do they.    DS   Numbers never speak for themselves, we imbue them with meaning, which is a great quote as well from Nate Silver.    MF  And in doing that, of course, you have to walk the same line that the media do, in making them relevant and putting them into context, but not at the same time distorting them. There's been a big debate going on recently, of course, about revisions. And if you've listened to this podcast, which we'd always advise and consume other articles that the ONS has published, we've said a lot about the whole process of revising GDP, and the uncertainty that's built into those initial estimates, which a

In this episode, we explore ONS's work with other countries to raise the world's statistical capabilities.    Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Hello and welcome again to 'Statistically Speaking', the Office for National Statistics' Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode we're going international.   Now it hardly needs saying that global issues, climate change, population growth, inflation, to name a few are best understood and addressed with the benefit of good global statistics. So, to that end, the ONS works in partnership with a number of countries worldwide with the ultimate aim of raising the world's statistical capabilities. At the one end of Africa, for example, a continent where it's deeply involved, that includes embedding state of the art inflation indices and other economic data in Ghana. On the other side of the continent, it's meant using AI and machine learning to track the movement of displaced populations in Somalia. How do you run a census in places where nobody has a permanent address?   It's all fascinating work and here to tell us about it, Emily Poskett, Head of International Development at the ONS; Tim Harris of the ONS Data Science Campus's international development team; and joining us from Accra, our special guest, Government Statistician of the Republic of Ghana and head of the Ghanaian Statistical Service Professor Samuel Annim.  Emily then, to start give us the big overview if you would, set out for us the scale and the purpose of this international development work that the ONS is doing.    EMILY POSKETT  We work with countries around the developing world to support strong modern statistical systems wherever we see a suitable opportunity to do so.     MF  What form does that work take? Does it mean statisticians going out to these countries?     EP  Yes, it does, when that's the right way to go about things. So our work is usually through the form of medium-term partnerships with a small group of national statistical offices, or NSOs, from the developing world, and those partnerships are medium term over a number of years in order to build up a real understanding of the context in that country, that national statistical office's vision for modernization and how the ONS can be of most help to achieve their own goals under their own strategy.   That relationship will normally be led by a particular individual who spends time getting to know the context and getting to know the people, getting to know what ONS can do to help. A partnership might cover a range of topic areas from census to data science to leadership training to economic statistics, and the lead point of contact, the strategic advisor in many cases, will bring in the relevant experts from across ONS, and they'll work through virtual collaboration but also through on-site visits, and they will work out the best timing for those and the best delivery modality in order to ensure that the gains are sustained. Our primary focus really is to make sure that changes that we support in the partner organisation are sustainable, and the work that ONS does using the UK's aid budget is really impactful and leads to long term change.   We don't always work through direct partnerships, for example where we see opportunities to work alongside other organisations, so international institutions like the World Bank or other national statistics offices like Statistics Canada or Statistics Sweden, they might choose to bring us in to deliver small pieces of focussed technical assistance alongside their own programmes. One of our medium-term partnerships is with the United Nations Economic Commission For Africa (UNECA), and they work with all 54 countries of Africa, and they can choose to bring in our expertise alongside their own to target particular needs in particular countries. But I would say that 70% of our effort is through these medium-term partnerships.     MF  So the ONS is providing one part of a large patchwork of work, going on right across the developing world, but what is the ultimate purpose of that? What are all these countries trying to achieve together?     EP  Well, strong statistical systems are essential in all countries to aid effective planning and informed decision making. And this is even more important in developing countries where resources are often scarce and you're trying to use scarce resources to target a wide range of needs across the population. And that resource might include UK aid for example, and aid from other countries. The UK has been statistical capacity building for many, many years through different modalities, working with partners, and the ONS is just one implementing partner who can be called upon to provide that technical expertise. We're really proud to be a partner of choice for a number of developing countries and the ONS is seen worldwide as being a leader. We're really proud that countries like Ghana would choose to work with us, and that we want to do our bit to help them to achieve their own strategy and their own goals.     MF  Well, this seems like an excellent moment to bring in Professor Samuel Annim. Our great pleasure, great honour, to have you with us professor. From your perspective, and what you're looking to achieve in the Ghana Statistical Service, how important how useful is the work with ONS been for you?     PROFESSOR SAMUEL ANNIM  From the perspective of how it has been important for us, I mean, I look at it from several aspects. I got into office in 2019,  a year after the ONS and GSS collaboration had been established. And when I joined obviously, I had a sense of what I wanted to contribute to the office. Partnership that we've seen between National Statistical Offices over the years have always taken the dimension of statistical production partnerships, and what I simply mean by that is that they're going in to help the service deliver on its core mandate. So for example, if price statistics are the priority, then that is the area you want to focus on, but our partnership with ONS took a different dimension. In addition to focusing on the traditional mandate of the Institute, which is the production of statistics, we really have over the period achieved some milestones from the perspective of transformation, which is of high priority to me, and secondly, from the perspective of injecting technology or contemporary ways of dispensing our duty as a National Statistical Office. So from an individual point of view, it has it has been beneficial to the mission that I have, and since then we have kept on working in the area of transformation.     MF  Listening to what you have to say there, it does sound as though some of the big challenges you face at the moment are not too dissimilar from the ones faced by ONS, all about modernising statistics, particularly using big data and new technology.     SA  Indeed, and I must say that it is a wave across all national statistical offices, because we are now trying to complement traditional surveys and censuses with non-traditional data sources i.e. Big Data, administrative data, citizens generated data and other geospatial resources. So collaborating is the key thing here, because this is new to the statistical community. So it's important we collaborate to learn how you are dealing with issues that are not consistent with the production of official statistics. Now as a global community, we are all thinking about how to use citizens generated science, I mean, getting citizens to provide us with data. And this is an area in which there isn't any National Statistical Office that can claim authority, because the approach and the processes are pretty not consistent with the guidelines for production of official statistics. So it's important to learn how countries are doing it and see how we can collaborate to get this done.     MF  Yes, in the last episode of our podcast, interestingly, we talked about the challenges of getting our citizens here in the UK to take part in surveys. Are Ghanaians friendly to what you're trying to achieve? Or are they perhaps sceptical as well and difficult to engage?     SA  I wouldn't say they're sceptical, I think they really feel part of it. And that is one of the strengths of citizen generated data, because if you package it in a way that it is more demand driven, rather than supply, you don't just go and tell them 'do this because I know how it's supposed to be done', but instead give them the platform to tell the National Statistical Office what their experiences are, provide them with platforms that they can easily engage so that they can feel part of the process and they really own the product. In our case, it is not a product that is owned by the statistical service but it is a product that is owned by the sub national agencies, and that is, as I said earlier, the beauty of citizen generated data. It is co-creation and co-ownership of the statistical product. So they are not sceptical, they are very receptive to it, and they are getting a better understanding of what we do as a National Statistical Office.     MF  Thinking internationally, thinking globally, what sort of shape do you think the world's statistical system is in now, as a result of partnerships like this or other developments, generally looking across Africa and looking beyond Africa, when we think about key issues, particularly climate change - how good is the statistical system now in tracking these very important changes, and the impacts they're having?     SA  We have as national statistical offices been very content with the traditional statistics - labour statistics, price statistics, GDP - and you do that either monthly, quarterly, or in some instances annually, and even the social indicators, I mean, it's only a few countries like the UK that has been able to do social indicators annually, for those of us in the Glob

In this episode we chat to members of the ONS Social Survey Collection Division about the importance, and challenges, of getting the general public to take part in crucial surveys that help paint a picture of what life is like across Britain.   Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to 'Statistically Speaking', the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher.   Now I don't know about you - but it seems hardly a moment passes these days when we are not being asked to feed back. How was our service today? Are you satisfied with this product?  Please fill in this short survey. Your responses matter.  Well, forgive the natural bias, but today we're talking about surveys that really do matter.   ONS surveys – some of which are the very largest conducted regularly in the UK – don't just inform economic and social policy, though they are hugely important to it. The data they gathered also represent a public resource of immense and unique value.   But persuading people – some unaware, some sceptical and even hostile, others just very busy – to take part in them is a growing challenge for statistical institutions worldwide.       In this episode then we'll be discussing how the ONS gathers often personal data from members of the public right up and down the country.   Taking time out of their day to answer my questions, and to explain why it's absolutely crucial that you participate in our surveys if you get the opportunity to do so, are Emma Pendre and Beth Ferguson, who head up the ONS's face-to-face Field Operations;   and sharing their own personal experiences of life on other people's doorsteps we have two of the ONS's top Field Interviewers, Tammy Fullelove and Benjamin Land.  Welcome to you all.  Emma, if I come to you first – give us an idea of what exactly the field community in ONS is. Who are you and what do you do?   EMMA PENDRE  The Social Survey Collection Division is the largest division in ONS. We primarily collect data from households either online, face to face or by telephone using computer assisted interviewing, and also work at air, sea and rail ports collecting data from passengers. All the data collected is used to produce quite a number of our key ONS publications which help to paint a picture of what life is like in the UK. And these can include things like estimates of employment and unemployment, how we measure inflation, how we measure migration, and a key topic of interest at the moment is the cost of living. So while most of ONS relies on the data that we collect for our outputs and statistical bulletins, the statistics that we particularly generate also support research, policy development and decision making across government and other private sector businesses as well.   MF  Now Beth, bringing you in here, when it comes to household surveys, presumably someone's deciding which households are going to be approached to take part. Who makes those decisions and how is it done?   BETH FERGUSON So I'm not going to pretend to understand the clever people in the statistics team who work out how we get the right people to cover a broad spectrum of society. But yes, that's done by the sampling team and they choose a random sample for the surveys.   MF  And that's generated presumably from using the electoral roll.   BF  It's generated from something called PAF which is the Post Office Address Finder. I'll have to confirm exactly what that stands for. Yes, but essentially, it's a list of addresses across England, Scotland and Wales.   MF  And when it comes to the passenger survey, it's a question of stopping what we hope will be a representative random sample of people as they pass through those ports.   BF  Yes, it is. Yeah. But at the moment we're currently working on departures and arrivals. So yes, it's a random sample of individuals stopped and asked questions.   MF  But to make the data really representative and really valid, of course, we've got to be covering the whole of the country. The country in this case being Great Britain.  How do we ensure that that coverage is working day in day out?   BF  That's our role as the kind of management of the face-to-face field interviewers. Different surveys are done over different frequencies. So we've got the Labour Force Survey and the transformed Labour Force Survey which addresses are issued for on a weekly basis and those surveys are delivered on a weekly basis. And then we've also got our other longer, more detailed financial surveys that we're issued with a quota for on a monthly basis. So our job is to make sure we've got the right people, in the right places, to knock on the right doors, to get hold of those members of the public and, you know, encourage them to agree to complete surveys for us.   MF  And luckily for us we're joined by two of those "right people" here today. Tammy and Benjamin, welcome to our humble podcast. Now you are both at the sharp end of our survey data collection, working as field interviewers.  I'm obviously really interested in what you do day to day, but first off tell us how you got into this line of work. What was the attraction for you Tammy, how did you become a field interviewer?   TAMMY FULLELOVE  So prior to working for the ONS - I've never worked in public sector before, I've always worked in the private sector - and I've actually got a finance background. But then after being on maternity leave, having a young family, seeing the job advertised and the flexibility working with people in a very, varied job sort of pulled me to it to apply to be honest. And that was seven years ago, and I can honestly say I enjoy every single day I'm out in the field. It's great.   MF  And Benjamin how about you, what was your background?   BENJAMIN LAND  Well, I've done a variety of hospitality jobs in the past. I then applied to work on the Census at the start of 2021. And my manager at the time she had worked previously for the ONS on the basket of goods figures, and she recommended it as a really great place to work. It's funny how timing happened I saw a vacancy for a field interviewer, which I applied. And then I started in May 2021. So almost two and a half years ago now.   MF  Okay, so you've both got quite a bit of experience already under your belt. I was wondering of both of you, is there such a thing as a typical day for a field interviewer?   TF  I can honestly say no, every day is completely different. Depending on the area where you go into, where you may be working, streets apart, houses apart. You never know what door you knock on who can be behind that door, which makes every day completely varied, especially with the studies that you may be interviewing for, that they can be very different with the content. So yeah, two days are never the same.   BL  I totally agree with Tammy. It varies. My week has a sort of flow to it. So I tend to get out quite a lot at the start of the week to visit various addresses. If it's LFS they change every week. On the financial surveys it's monthly so you've got longer to familiarise yourself with the area. We tend to have a team meeting most Tuesday mornings just to check in and see how we're doing. And then obviously interviews are scheduled around respondents' timetable so that can be any time up to sort of eight, nine o'clock at night and sometimes Saturdays, if that's when they're available.   MF  Going out to people's houses on a daily basis, you no doubt encounter a wide variety of people. That must have led to one or two amusing episodes.   TF I've had occasion where people will answer the door in not the most suitable attire, shall we say, for public viewing. I don't know how much further to go into this, but yeah, definitely opening the door in towels which have fallen off and dressing gowns which haven't been completely covered. It definitely happened a couple of times over the past few years.    MF  Perhaps that's what they mean by "raw data". Beth, if I can come back to you, are there particular surveys which are considered to be especially important for us to be speaking to people in their homes in the way we've just been talking about? Ones that perhaps can't be carried out in other ways.  BETH FERGUSON  It's the more detailed financial surveys. So we've got the Family Resources Survey, the Living Costs and Food Survey, the Survey of Living Conditions, and the Household and Assets survey. They are quite long, more detailed surveys. The living costs and food survey, that requires the respondent to complete an interview, but then they also have to get hold of all their receipts of any expenditure for a two week period and annotate them and hand those over to the interviewer. So it's quite a detailed, involved survey. The Household and Assets survey, again it's dependent on how many people in the household can, you know, take up to two hours to complete and ask lots of detailed financial questions around savings and pensions and other things. If you're in the home, you can ask them to get the documents, support them to review the documents, make sure that they're actually giving the right information which, if they were to go online and do it themselves, there's no guarantee that they would get the right detail that we're actually looking for.   MF  So it's quite an intensive experience really, isn't it compared with simply asking someone to tick the boxes on a webpage? And I guess it very much depends on building a personal rapport with the survey participants?  BF  Absolutely. And that's the key. That's the key to a really successful interviewer is that ability to build rapport in a snapshot on the doorstep. You know, before they've had the opportunity to give a polite no, no thank you or sorry, not today. They reckon it is approximately 10 seconds on the doorstep to get that engagement and build that rapp

    In this episode we discuss how the ONS has been working to transform the way we count the population, using new datasets to give more accurate, timely, and detailed measurements.  On 29 June 2023, the ONS will be launching a public consultation on its proposals for a transformed population and migration statistics system. Understanding user needs will be essential evidence in making its recommendations to Government on the future of population statistics.    More detail available at: www.ons.gov.uk   To explain more about the public consultation, and answer your questions, the ONS is holding a series of free events in July 2023:   National Statistician's launch event, London, 4 July 2023. (Online attendance also available)   National Statistician's launch event, Cardiff, 6 July 2023. (Online attendance also available)   Launch webinar, 13 July 2023. (Online only)  You can also watch our transformation journey video, which is also available with British Sign Language (BSL), and in Welsh, with BSL.    TRANSCRIPT    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to 'Statistically Speaking', the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and this time we're looking at the future of our population statistics. How best to count all of the people, all of the time, and provide the most valuable information on changing characteristics that can drive excellent research and sound public policy. All of that is the subject of a major consultation exercise that's running during the summer of 2023. It's all about the Office for National Statistics proposals to create what's described as a sustainable and future proof system for producing essential statistics on the population.   Joining me to unpack all that and explain how you can get involved in the consultation process is Jen Woolford, Director of population statistics here at the ONS. And we're joined once again by Pete Benton, Deputy National Statistician.   Pete in a previous episode, you described how the once in a decade census has been the bedrock of our population statistics for a very long time, but now it looks like some pretty fundamental change could be on the way?   PETE BENTON Well, that's the question. What's the future hold? We've been doing a census for over 200 years now once a decade, and it paints a beautiful, rich picture of our population that's fundamental to planning all of our services that we use: health care, education, transport, they all depend on the number and type of people living in a given area. But the question is, can we get more detail from other data sources every year, and might that mean that we don't need a census in 2031? Because we've got enough and that's the question that we are now talking about.   MF Okay, so before we go into the detail of how we might achieve that, then paint a picture for our listeners. When we talk about population statistics, what are they exactly? And why are they so important and to whom?   PB Well in between a census, we estimate the total population, by age and by sex and we do it nationally and we do it for local authorities. We estimate migration, how many people have moved into the country and how many people have moved out and also how people move around the country because that affects the population at any given area. And of course, we also do surveys that give us top level national level statistics about all kinds of things whether it's the labour market, or our health, things that the census asks and gives us detailed information for small areas, surveys, kind of paint a top level picture in between times.   MF So to date, how have we gone about getting those numbers, and how good has that information been?   PB So the census gives us the baseline once every 10 years. And we take that and we add births, we subtract deaths, we make an estimate of international migration. And we use that to adjust the data and we make an estimate of migration around the country, and that gives us those population estimates and those migration statistics.   MF So to do that you need, or you'd have had to have drawn on something like the census, that universal survey of the whole population.   PB That's right. The census is the benchmark by which we reset the system once a decade. But of course, after nine years, that information is getting more out of date and we do a census again, 10 years on to reset those statistics. And again, give us that rich picture. The question we're looking at now is how much can we get in between times? And how much do we then still need all the detail that a census would give us once a decade?   MF So Jen, the world has moved on in those decades since the census in its present form has been going. You would think there's an opportunity out there to transform how we go about counting the nation. Give us the background to that.   JEN WOOLFORD So we've been looking over decades to bring more and more data together to improve our population statistics. So Pete talked about how we look at the movement of people between censuses both in and out of the country and between different areas. And for some time now, we've been using what we call administrative data to understand those movements in the population. But now we have access to lots more data than we have in the past, and it gives us lots of opportunities to change how we're producing population statistics. So back in 2014, government first set out its ambition for us to build a population and migration Statistics System with administrative data at its heart. In 2018, we published a white paper, which set out our plans for a digital first census in 2021. But also that we should be making a recommendation to government about what the future of Population Statistics looks like, and that that recommendation should be based on a public consultation. And that's the consultation that we are going to be launching at the end of June.   MF The challenge therefore, is to come up with something as least as good if not, preferably better, but without using a census.   JW Absolutely. And people's needs are changing. So whatever we do has to respond to whatever the user needs are of the day. So in the past, where maybe populations didn't change so much at a local level so quickly, then having a census once a decade that gave you that detail, that detail would still be quite relevant 10 years later. But the population is changing so rapidly now that that decade old data can quite quickly become out of date. And an example of where this could be a problem for us and for policymakers is if we look at the COVID pandemic. During the pandemic, we saw really localised outbreaks of COVID infections, and we really wanted to understand what was going on in those areas and what the characteristics of people in those areas was to try and understand what might be leading to those outbreaks. But we didn't have census data, the 2021 census data then, we were having to go back to what those areas look like in 2011. So by transforming what we do, and having more up to date information about those local populations, it would have given us a much better idea of what might have been driving those local outbreaks.   MF And there was another example perhaps during the pandemic when the government was trying to work out what proportion of the population had been vaccinated at local level relying on population statistics that because they were backed up by the census was subject to quite significant margins of error.   JW That's right. So if you want to know what proportion of people in an area have been vaccinated, you need to know how many people are in that area in the first place. And if you're looking at a vaccination rate that's really high say kind of 90% that 10% is what's important, the 10% that aren't vaccinated. Now, you might only have a 5% error in your population estimates. But that could mean that you're thinking you've got 15% of the population to look at rather than the 10%.   MF Pete, we've heard this term admin data (administrative data) already. And in that we're talking about all the information that gets collected whenever someone engages with public services, tax bills, benefits, going to the dentist, that kind of thing. Now, presumably that information has been collected for quite some time. So why is it only in the last few years that we're really starting to see and begin to use the potential of that data?   PETE BENTON It takes time to develop the methods for doing it. So we've put a lot of effort into understanding the data sources and understanding the quality of the statistics that result so that we can be clear what we can and can't do, and that we can show that to the people that use the data to make decisions in order to understand the quality of what they're getting and give us their views of that.   MF Can you think of some examples of administrative data as already being used effectively in official statistics, the sort of things that the ONS produces.   PB Well we've always used them actually, when we produce our population statistics. We estimate the local population using the number of people registered with a GP and how that changes over time. So it's not new, it's just that we're expanding what we might be able to do here to try and get so much greater benefit every year, to improve decision making every year for all of our public service planning.   MF And the opportunity, as Jen has already suggested, to link that data to understand how different groups, down to really quite small groups and local level and by different characteristics, are being affected by certain issues.   PB That's right. Different datasets tell us different things. So there are datasets that tell us about educational achievement and there are datasets that tell us about household income, for example. And by bringing those together, we can understand the implications of education per outcomes

In this episode of Statistically Speaking we shine the spotlight on local data and look at how good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources.     Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode we're talking about local data for local people - How good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources.   We're going to explore, for example, how new data sources are helping to precisely calibrate economic circumstances and local communities. How we may even be able to calculate the GDP of your street or village. Now many economic forces are of course global. Some of the solutions to issues like competitiveness, productivity and inequality might begin on our doorsteps.   As ever, we have the cream of ONS expertise here on hand, this time in the shape of Emma Hickman, Deputy Director of the ONS sub national stats division, and Libby Richards, Deputy Director for UK wide coherence and head of an important new initiative called ONS Local, which we'll be hearing about in full. Also joining us is Stephen Jones, Director of Core Cities UK. Its aim is to promote the role of our great cities in creating a stronger fairer economy and society.   So Emma, to set the scene for us first then please explain precisely if you would, the value of really good local stats.   EMMA HICKMAN So the needs are multiple, really. I think the most important thing is that we are seeing a huge increase in locally targeted policymaking and that's at a range of different levels across government. So in central government, we see near the department for levelling up Housing and Communities kind of really wanting to think about how do they target policies that are going to help to level up the country but equally what we're also seeing is an increase in devolution which is giving more power to local areas and local policymakers. And so it's really also important that they have the statistics and the data that they need and the evidence that they need to make really, really good decisions for their local areas. And they can do that in a really powerful way because they also have knowledge of their local areas. And then finally, you know, actually for citizen kind of uses of our data and statistics really one of the inclusive data principles that people are able to see themselves in the data and that they feel that the data and the statistics that we're producing as an office represent them. And so having statistics and data available at really geographies that are very meaningful to people is hugely helpful in making sure that as a country, right across the UK that we are kind of reflective of the experiences of really kind of a wide range of people and you know, local economies and end users and understand kind of how they're experiencing that as well.   MF  I guess one of the fundamental principles here is that it's it's local knowledge. It's all very well and everybody thinks they know that local area, but to understand all local areas, we need comparable statistics and data produced to consistent standards.   EH Yes, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that's one of the key challenges. I think we'll probably kind of come to talk about a little bit later, but you know, absolutely. And that's really about understanding you know, where are the where are the inequalities within regions, as well as between regions? I think we have a lot of information available about, you know, kind of regions, but actually, we also know that some of the inequalities that people really feel are much greater actually within regions and between them and kind of being able to draw that out of data and statistics in a comparable way I think is really important for helping sort of policymakers and decision makers to understand where best to target resources.    MF Stephen, from a policy perspective, describe the demand for local data at the moment, what sorts of policy solutions are policy makers coming up with and how are those best informed by really good data?    STEPHEN JONES I think it covers all branches really of policymaking. I think as Emma was saying, the kind of need for really understanding and having a kind of quantitative basis for what's happening in a place is, is actually absolutely crucial for designing policy, whether that's policy about trying to make the economy grow, whether that's policies aimed at trying to reduce disadvantage and challenge facing individuals, whether that's policy about delivering the most effective and efficient public services in the right places at the right times, all of those things, whether that's done in public or private sector need to be built on a good evidence base, good understanding. I think the other thing I would add to the richness of local data can do you can kind of contextualise and understand, you know, a number on its own doesn't mean a huge amount, but if you know that you are 10% higher or 20% lower than your neighbouring place. Or the city of the same size. It's those kinds of contextual dimensions that really help nuance and finesse your policymaking.   MF And it does come back to that question of trust in data than to make those comparisons in a really reliable and meaningful way. Which I guess is where the ONS, the Office for National Statistics, where we come in. Now Libby tell us about ONS Local. This is an initiative which is all about making sure that that really high quality data is available for the policy makers   LIBBY RICHARDS ONS Local is our advisory service that is staffed by ONS analysts who are based in every nation of the UK and every region of England. And the idea is that we are here to help local policy makers, regional observatories, and lots and lots of different users of sub national data to really understand the enormous offer from ONS in terms of local data. Having said that, it's also very much about those working relationships as well. Stephen's talked a lot about context and understanding the nuances and so understanding the situations and challenges that are happening locally is absolutely key to ONS Local helping local areas understand that context better.   MF The big ONS surveys of course have long carried, many of them are typically think about the Labour Force Survey over a very long period of time, carried a great wealth and local data that obviously gets lost in the national headlines that these data releases generate. But is it a question of getting better value out of what the ONS is already creating or actually about sourcing new data from different sources?   LR It's a bit of both, very much, in being able to take people through what we already have when understanding their questions, particularly when multiple local areas are asking the same question that's really maximising what ONS already do. However, Emma's side of the house in particular, less so in the regionally and nationally distributed ONS Local is really about developing those new statistics getting into how do we get down to hyper localised sort of 400 to 1200 household building block data that then allow people to build those areas that means something to them. Emma, I don't know if you want to chip in?   EH Yeah, very happy to. There's two strands I think to that Miles. I think there's one which is about, you know, how do we make the most of survey data and kind of new administrative data sources together to enable that level of granularity? And then the second part is actually when we talk about administrative data probably, that might not really mean things to lots of people. That's data that is collected for a different purpose, but collected on a on a very, very routine basis. And there are actually a fair number of new sources of that kind of data that we're able to get into the ONS.   MF That's interesting. Can you give us an example of that?   EH So, I say relatively new. I mean, I think ONS have had this data for quite some time now. But in order to get the level of granularity that we need on Gross Value Added statistics, for example, which is a measure of productivity, we use HMRC's VAT data for businesses and then we can link that to kind of our survey data and think about how can we then apportion estimates down to the level of geography that we need, knowing that the survey is the place where we've been able to ask the question that we really want to know the answer to and then we can use the other data to model sort of some of the other granularity that we need. The other thing is we've been really successful and using card payments data throughout the pandemic to inform the government's response. And we've recently successfully acquired a really exciting new data source from Visa, it's aggregated, so there's absolutely no way of identifying people in the data, but they've aggregated it at a really granular level of geography for us. So again, it would be in the region of probably hundreds of households, but actually that's granular enough for us to get some really, really good insights into kind of how you know, consumer spending is kind of playing out in the local economy. And there are all sorts of applications for that, that we're really excited to be to be able to start taking forwards now that we've got that data in the office.   MF So just with those three very important data sources, suddenly we're creating right down to that very micro level, as you say, 400 to 1200 households really quite a full picture of local economic activity.   EH And the really exciting thing about that is that people can then build their own geographies as well from that. So you know, traditionally in statistics, we tend to produce data at the level of an authoritative boundary like a local authority, but actually yo

In this episode, we focus on a powerful example of when the numbers alone are simply not enough. The most recent Census has told us how many people have some form of disability but to really understand the nature of those disabilities and the needs of people reporting them we need to do a lot more work.   Guiding us through this work, is Helen Colvin, joint lead for Census and Disability Analysis at the ONS; Shona Horter, Head of Qualitative Research at the ONS Centre for Equalities and Inclusion; David Ainslie, Principal Analyst in the Analytical Hub of ONS and Matt Mayhew, Senior Statistical Officer in the Policy Evidence and Analysis Team.    Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Hello and welcome again to another edition of Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast.   In this series, we've spent a lot of time explaining how statistics can brilliantly illuminate important issues, and this time we're focusing on a powerful example of when the numbers alone are simply not enough.   The most recent census has told us how many people have some form of disability and where they live. It's a good place to start of course, but to really understand the nature of those disabilities, and the needs of the people reporting them, we need to do a lot more work and that work is the subject of today's discussion.   Here to guide us through it we have Helen Colvin, joint lead for Census disability analysis at the ONS; Shona Horter, head of qualitative research at the ONS Centre for equalities and inclusion; David Ainslie, Principal Analyst at the analytical hub of ONS; and Matt Mayhew, senior statistical officer in the policy evidence and analysis team.   Helen to start with you, I mentioned the census there and those numbers showing us the scale of disability as defined by Census. Is it fair to say that census remains the sort of statistical bedrock of our understanding of disability - the single most important source?    HELEN COLVIN  Yes that's right. I'd agree with that. So it's the main source that covers the whole of our population. So it's the best truth that you have, if you like, of what our population is like, and the proportion of disabled people within our population.   MF  And these were people, responding in their households, to the question which said what precisely?   HC  It said: Do you have any physical or mental health conditions or illnesses lasting or expected to last 12 months or more? And if people answered yes to that, they were asked: Do any of your conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out day to day activities? A lot, a little, or not at all.   MF  What did you have to answer to that to be classified as disabled?   HC  To be classified as disabled - If you answered that you had a long term condition which affects your day to day activities a lot or a little then we regarded that as somebody as disabled. And the reason for that is that at ONS we measure disability against the Equality Act definition of disability and that really identifies somebody as disabled if they have a long term condition, and if it limits their day to day activities. And we do that so that we're able to report against the progress on the Equality Act in the UK.   MF  And the key element it would seem that - obviously we're talking about disability - is your ability to do day to day tasks and a sustained limitation.   HC  That's right, that needs to be... to be disabled under the Equality Act there needs to be a long term thing which affects you for up to 12 months or more. And it needs to be something which does impact you on your ability to carry out day to day activities. And that's really something that is arguably focusing on the medical model of disability, so focuses on how you can't do things because of your impairment because of the environment around you.   MF  Now that question is slightly different from the one asked in 2011. Why was that changed?   HC  So in 2011, we asked a very similar question, but we did remove a prompt which asked people to include problems specifically related to old age and this really was about bringing it more in line with the Equality Act, which doesn't have that emphasis. Problems related to older ages still classified as disability, but it wasn't making it the same kind of focus of the question, and another part that we changed was to remove the word disability because of course, disabled means different things to different people. And we tried to measure it slightly more objectively by using our own definition rather than asking about people's own opinions if they were disabled. And this time we also included mental health within the question, and we think that that could have influenced the raises that we saw among younger people.    MF  But how big an influence do we think that?   HC  So in census 2021, we did see an increase among younger people being classified as disabled compared to 2011. And this did stand out particularly for females slightly more than males. We think there was also possibly a real change in population at that time down to the pandemic, with more people showing signs around depression and mental health problems, particularly at the period that the census was conducted.   MF  And there remains of course, underlying all this. This is census data. This is people's own assessment of their ability. How is that benchmarked perhaps against other sources?   HC  So it's obviously a different measure from other sources. Other data might be more medically based, so GP records, that kind of thing, which is more based on actual conditions as opposed to disability.   MF  And do we think that some people perhaps consider themselves disabled who might not be defined as disabled under other circumstances?   HC  Absolutely. I think disability means different things to different people and some people who might be regarded as disabled under the Equality Act specifically wouldn't want themselves to be looked at that way. And conversely, some people which may not be captured by that definition, may want themselves to be, so there are many different ways you can conceptualise and define disability. So this is one way to try and do that and to measure disability in a slightly more objective way.   MF  And being defined as disabled within that census definition that you've set out for us, how does that match against other criteria of disability, perhaps when it comes to gaining access to benefits or services?   HC  So it has a different definition and a different way of being assessed. So for instance, if somebody wanted to access benefits, then there's a completely different threshold and set of criteria that they would need to meet through Work and Pensions.   MF  There's a tension there isn't there, perhaps between people who answered in the affirmative on this on the Census but then wouldn't qualify as a disabled in the eyes of officialdom for want of a better word.   HC  Possibly, but we don't have that data within the ONS or around the DWP benefits data for this kind of use, to look at the match between our definition and the DWP assessment criteria.   MF  So you've shown us a complex picture there, tell us about the harmonisation work that's been going on across ONS to really develop and refine our understanding of disability as a concept.   HC  Yeah, so there's an ongoing programme of work, taking place to review the current harmonised standards and update them so that they can be more aligned with current conceptualization of disability impairments and conditions and try and ensure that they really relate to and reflect people's experiences. There's been a programme of research and engagement to find out the ways in which the standards are not currently performing, and what some of the key issues and gaps are, and that's due to be published in the end of March. And then the next step will be to outline in detail the plan over the coming year. So so far, the engagement activities have included speaking to data users, a variety of different organisations, government departments, charities, really including everyone across the spectrum, who are people who would use and engage with those harmonised standards to understand a bit more about the needs. And like I said, the kind of priorities and gaps and then the next step will be undertaking research to think about how best can we change and update those standards so that they, like I said, are really reflective and current. And one thing in particular that needs to be looked at being included is adding neurodiversity as a potential category. So at the moment that's not currently listed within the impairment categories. And so feedback has been that many people who are neurodiverse don't identify with the current kind of categorization and wording that's used. So that will be really important going forward.   MF  And that's also an important reflection of the constantly changing perception of what disability is in society. And from that the challenge of assessing and measuring it, Helen on the Census we've recently published our results as we've already mentioned in this discussion, but would you like to unpack those for us? We know that the number of disabled people went up since 2011.   HC  Yes, that's right. So the number of disabled people went up, but the actual overall proportion of disabled people fell in the population. And it's important to state that we standardise this data. And that's a statistical method which enables us to, to kind of compare like with like, so it accounts for the different population age structure between 2011 and 2021. So in 2021, we saw a slight fall in the proportion of disabled people in the population. So it's currently 18% in England falling from 19% in 2011. And in Wales, it's now 21% falling from 23% in 2011.   MF  And what were the drivers of that? That's a fascinating find.    HC  That's right. So some people might be s

With news headlines proclaiming the UK has 'narrowly avoided a recession', we decode the 'r' word and explain why this sometimes misleading term is one the ONS is often cautious to avoid. We get the lowdown on GDP (Gross Domestic Product); discuss whether its time as the yardstick for measuring the success or failure of the world's economies is coming to an end; and hear how the ONS is already looking well 'Beyond GDP' and introducing broader measures of social wellbeing and the environment to provide us with a more holistic view of how society is faring.  Joining Miles is ONS Director of Economic Statistics, Darren Morgan, Chief Economist, Grant Fitzner; and Director of Public Policy Analysis, Liz McKeown.  Links Latest GDP data Measures of National Well-being Beyond GDP   Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher, and this time, we're going to talk about a very famous and long running statistic that's still regarded as the single most important economic indicator of them all. I'm talking of course about GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the expansion or contraction of which is the yardstick against which the success or failure of the world's economies is measured. It's been around a long time, since around the time of the Second World War, in fact, but is its pre-eminence now coming to an end? GDP misses some things out - that which matters, as was once memorably claimed. So we'll be talking about how the ONS has been updating GDP to keep it relevant and developing new complementary measures of economic and social wellbeing that could perhaps, in future, supplant GDP itself. And in the current economic climate, we cannot avoid the "R" word. What exactly is a recession? How much does it actually matter, if it's only a technical one? Is it the difference between economic disaster and salvation? Spoiler alert, it really isn't.   Anyway, we have a panel of top ONS folk to explain it all: Darren Morgan is director of economic statistics production and analysis, Grant Fitzner is Chief Economist and director of macro-economic statistics and analysis, and also with us is Liz McKeown, Director of Public Policy Analysis, who is leading the drive towards these broader measures on social and economic welfare.   Welcome, everyone.   Darren to start with you. You are responsible for the production of the UK's GDP estimates. So let's start by reminding ourselves what precisely it measures, it's basically seeking to put a value on all economic activity over a given period.     DARREN MORGAN  Yeah, so we look at GDP and we measure the economy in three different ways. First of all, we do it via what you call the output approach, and most simply, that's everything that's produced in the economy, and that can be cars rolling off the production line, that can be a lawyer providing advice as a service, and it can be public services as well. So surgeries, GP appointments and so on. So everything we produce in the economy. We also look at measuring the economy, everything that is spent, so that could be you and I in household, spending money in the shops or on leisure activities. It can be businesses spending money on goods and services. And it can also mean the government spending money, so everything we spend as well. And the third way we measure GDP is the income approach, which is basically everything that's earned in the economy. So for us in terms of households that's wages and salaries, for businesses it's profit, for example. So we measure everything we produce, everything we spend and everything we earn, and in principle, they should all add up.    MF  And you're boiling it down then, a vast amount of data flowing into the ONS, boiling it all down to one single indicator.   DM  We do, and we do that by approaching thousands and thousands of businesses asking them about their performance. We speak to thousands of households about their behaviour. And we also use a lot of data already available withing government, so what we call administrative data - data that already exists. And we bring all those different data sources into the building, we look at it and we confront it, and we come up with ultimately, as you suggest, a single number on the growth of the economy.   MF What's changed in the in the collection of data now? How timely a process is this?     DM  So in the UK, we've got one of the timeliest measures of the economy in the world. And we only have one of two countries who produce a monthly measure the economy, so we do it much more quickly, and obviously it is completely different to how we did it say, even 10 or 15 years ago. We collect most of our data now from businesses online. Whereas previously we used to send a questionnaire to them, used to write the questionnaire and they would send it back to us, and that could take a week or weeks to do that. Businesses can fill the form in now sat at their desk online, do it very quickly and it reaches us straightaway.   MF  And you mentioned administrative data as well. So that's coming from other parts of government. What are the main sources there? How is that gathered?   DM  So that's correct. So what we try to do is minimise the burden on businesses and households, so some businesses may have to complete a tax return to HMRC for example. So we are able to use that information and bring it in, so that's one example. Pay As You Earn, people who use pay as you earn systems, will be well aware that we use that in our labour market numbers. But we use lots of different sources that are already available across government, and we reuse them for statistical purposes, like I said, to provide better estimates, because that data tends to be very good, but also to minimise the burden, as I said on households and businesses at the same time.   MF  And what is the coverage, in terms of what's included, how has that evolved in recent years?  DM  So in a way, in terms of what we call the boundary, the economic boundary, that has actually stayed very similar over a long period of time. It is very traditional in terms of the boundary we measure. So, like I said, it's sort of business activities, household activity and government activity. But it is along those lines about how much is produced, how much is spent, how much is earned, but the boundary for the economy has been very similar for 50 years.   MF  Nevertheless, there are some things included in GDP which might surprise some people. For example, in the most recent GDP release we talked about the fall in the number of pupils in classrooms in the last quarter of 2022.  DM  The public services was actually a really key indicator for the number that we published for December, and we saw a fall in the number of GP appointments, a fall in the number of operations, less vaccinations being given because the autumn booster campaign tailed off. And we also saw lower attendance in schools, because in the lead up to Christmas not so many pupils will go into school as we normally see. And the reason why we measure that, as you can imagine we measure teacher salaries, doctor salaries, we measure how much is invested in the health service, how much is invested in schools, and obviously those schools and hospitals buy goods and services. So, it's a really important part of the economy. So of course we measure the goods and services that they produce as well. It's a really important part of the economic measurement for GDP.  MF  And I think I'm going to use it to motivate my children in the mornings as well. When they go off to school I'll be reminding them of their contribution to our economic performance.  DM  They certainly are. So it's a really good way to get them through the school day, Miles.   MF  But there's a serious point underlying this, and there's a bit of a propaganda point for the ONS here as well, as it because we are actually taking real measurements of public sector activity, and it's been said that some countries just make broad assumptions about that activity. What do we do that other countries don't?   DM  You're absolutely right, Miles. And that became most marked during the lockdowns during, the COVID pandemic. So we measured, if I can give schools and education as an example, we actually measured how much education was being provided to pupils during a lockdown, whether that was face-to-face in schools, or whether it was remote learning, or whether unfortunately, in some cases, there was no learning at all. We measured that directly, whereas perhaps some other countries basically measured the number of pupils. So as you can imagine, the number of pupils is the same whether they are getting taught or not. So in the pandemic we showed a sharp fall in education during some of the lock downs, but we've seen a faster recovery in the years that followed. Whereas if you look at other countries, their measurement of education has been far more stable over the most recent years because the numbers of pupils doesn't really change.  MF   They are pretending that the schools were open, when in fact, they weren't. Anyway, that's just part of this enormous data gathering operation, bringing in all this data, and it takes around about six weeks to produce the preliminary estimate, which you say is among the quickest of the estimates, but of course that's only part of the story, isn't it?   DM  That's pretty quick, six weeks, but we do produce an estimate for all three measures, we produce a measurement how much is produced, how much is spent, and how much is earned at that point in time. So we do that, but obviously, we only have so much data at that point. You know, we have quite a lot of data to actually because those surveys are very timely, but not everything.  MF  As a percentage, it's about 40% isn't

Miles explores how data linking can help tackle cross-cutting issues in an increasingly uncertain world, and how the ONS' new Integrated Data Service will provide a step-change transformation in how researchers will be able to access public data.  Joining him are ONS colleagues Bill South, Deputy Director of Research Services and Data Access; Jason Yaxley, Director of the Integrated Data Programme; and award-winning researcher Dr Becky Arnold, from the University of Keele.    TRANSCRIPT  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking - the Office for National Statistics Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to step back from the big news making numbers and take a detailed look at an aspect of the ONS which is, less well known, but arguably just as important.   The ONS gather an awful lot of data of course, and much of it remains valuable long after it's been turned into published statistics. It is used by analysts and government, universities and the wider research community. So we're going to explain how that's done and look at some really interesting and valuable examples of how successful that has been to date. And we're also going to hear about a step-change transformation that's now underway in how public data is made available to researchers, and the future potential of that really important, exciting process. Our guides through this subject are Jason Yaxley, Director of the ONS's integrated data programme, Bill South who is Deputy Director of the Research Services and Data Access Division here at the ONS, and later in the podcast we'll hear from Dr. Becky Arnold who is an award-winning researcher from Keele University.   Right Bill, set the scene for us to start with then, we are talking here about the ONS Secure Research Service, take it from the top please. What is it? What's it all about? What does it do? What do we get from it?     BILL SOUTH   Hi Miles, thank you. Yes, the Secure Research Service, or the SRS, is the ONS' trusted research environment. We've been running now for about 15 years, and we provide secure access to unpublished de-identified micro data for research that's in the public good. So in terms of numbers, we hold over 130 datasets, we've got about 5000 Researchers accredited to use the service and about 1500 of those would be working in the system at any given time on about 600 live projects.    MF  So what sort of data, what is stored and what's made available? Is this survey responses?    BS  Traditionally the SRS has held most of our ONS surveys. So that's the labour market, business...all of our surveys really. In the last four years, thanks to funding we've received from Administrative Data Research UK (ADRUK), we've been able to grow the amount of data we hold, so now we've increasingly got data coming from other government departments. And we've got more linked datasets that enable us to offer new insights into the data.    MF  And so these are people's responses to survey questions and people's records, as well as data that are held by other departments?    BS  Indeed, yes, the data coming from other departments is often administrative data, so not from surveys but more admin data.    MF  And a lot of the value in that is in being able to compare and to link this data to achieve different research insights?    BS  Absolutely. I mean, a good example of that is a dataset that's been added in the last year or so where our ONS census data from 2011 was linked to educational attainment data from the Department for Education into a research dataset called Growing up in England (GUiE). And it's hugely important because we have a lot of rich information from the census but you know, linking that with the educational attainment data offers new insights about how kids do at school, and how they're linked to the characteristics of their background.    MF  So you use the underpinning of census to provide a really universal picture of what's going on across that particular population, and therefore gain some insight into how people have achieved educationally in a way that we wouldn't have done before. Of course, all this and the power of it is clear in that example, but a lot of people might think, oh my gosh, they must know an awful lot about me that in that case, tell us about how privacy and anonymity are protected in those circumstances.    BS  Yeah, absolutely. It's a central part of their operation, and clearly the word secure in the name is key there. So we follow a five safes principle which underpins everything we do. The five safes are safe people, so that anyone who uses the SRS has to be trained and go through an assessment to be accredited by us to use the environment. Once they're accredited, they then have to apply to have a project that's running in the system, and that gets independently assessed. There are a number of checks around whether it's ethically sound, whether the use of data is appropriate, but the key thing really is around the public good. So all research projects that happen in the SRS have to be in the public good and there's a commitment to be transparent. So every project that happens in the SRS, there's a record which is published on the UK Statistics Authority website. The third safe is around the settings, so it's a very controlled environment where people access the data. The fourth stage is around the data, so although we've said it's record level data it's already identified. Names and addresses, any identifiers are stripped out of the data before researchers can access it. And the final stage, the final part of the of the researcher journey if you like, is around outputs. What that means is we do checks to ensure that when any analysis leaves the environment that no individual or business can be identified for the published results.    MF  So in essence, you must convince the ONS that you are a Bonafide researcher, and you also have to convince them that what you're doing is definitely for the public benefit.    BS  That's right. And the other thing that's worth noting is that the SRS, like a number of other trusted research environments across the country, has been accredited under the Digital Economy Act to be a data processor, which means we go through a rigorous assessment process around the security, the environment, but also our capability to run it. So that's our processes, our procedures, whether our staff are adequately trained to run the service. That's a key part of that accreditation under the Digital Economy Act.    MF  So, on that point then about anonymity, you can drill right down to individual level, but you'll never know who those individuals actually are or be able to identify them?    BS  That's right. Researchers typically will run their code against the record level data, but when they've got the results of the analysis, there are clear rules that say you won't be allowed to take out very low counts. So that means like our published outputs, there's no way of identifying anyone once the research is published.    MF  And the SRS has built up over the years a good reputation for actually doing this effectively and efficiently.    BS  Yes, I think that's fair to say. We have a good reputation, and the service is growing in terms of the number of datasets and the number of projects and the number of people using it. So, I think that speaks for itself.    MF  Okay, let's pull out another I think powerful example of why this facility is so important and that comes from the recent COVID pandemic. Many listeners will be aware that the ONS ran a very, very large survey involving upwards of 100,000 people providing samples, taking COVID tests, and they were sent off to be analysed creating an awful lot of community level data about COVID infections, and we in the ONS then publish our estimates and continue to do so as we record estimates every week of fluctuating infection levels. But behind all that work, there were expert researchers in institutions around the country who were doing far more with that data. And the SRS was fundamental to delivering the data to them. Tell us about how that operated Bill, and some of the results that we got out of it.    BS  Yeah, sure. I mean, the COVID infection survey that you refer to there, that dataset is available for accredited researchers to apply to use, and they have done, but we've also brought in a number of others, about 20 COVID related datasets are in the SRS, so things around vaccination or the schools infection survey, mortality, etc.   So since the start of the pandemic we've had over 50 projects that have either taken place and completed, or are currently underway, in the environment. Some of those are directly using the COVID related dataset. So looking, if you like, at the health impact, but there's also projects that are are looking at, if you like, non COVID data, economic data or education data, that are projects dedicated to understanding the impact of COVID.    MF  What sort of insights have we seen from those?    BS  In terms of those using the COVID related data there's been analysis to highlight the disproportionate impact of the virus on ethnic minorities, that went on to implement a number of government interventions. Another project assessed the role of schools in the in the Coronavirus transmission. We had another project that was run specifically on behalf of local authorities to inform their response to the pandemic that offered insights into the risks between occupation. Also research into footfall in retail centres and how business sectors were affected by the pandemic. So a really huge range of things. There were other research projects looking at the impact and you know, an example there was a project that looked at learning loss. So, kids not being in school for that sort of 20 to 21 academic year. Similarly, the Bank of England ran a project looking at the financial stability of the UK during the pandemi

National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, joins Miles in a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking, to look back on some of the highlights and challenges for the ONS in 2022 while gazing positively, but objectively, towards 2023.    TRANSCRIPT    MILES FLETCHER  Hello, and as another statistical year draws to an end you join us for a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking.   I'm Miles Fletcher and with me this time is the national statistician himself, Sir Ian Diamond. We're going to pick out some of the key stats from another momentous year. Talk about some of its highlights and the challenges faced by the Office for National Statistics. We'll gaze positively, but objectively, into 2023 and Sir Ian will be answering some of the questions that you our listeners wanted us to ask.   Ian, welcome once again to statistically speaking.    IAN DIAMOND  First, thanks very much for that introduction. And can I offer festive greetings to all of your listeners?    MILES  Yes, it's come around again quickly, hasn't it? So much to talk about from the past year, but let's kick off with a very big number in every sense, and that's 59,597,542    IAN  ...is the population of England and Wales according to the census, and one, which I have to say is one of the greatest censuses that has ever been undertaken. And it's just an absolute thrill to commend my colleagues who have worked so hard to deliver it but also to every citizen of England and Wales who filled in those forms in 2021, and of course, those in Northern Ireland as well.    MILES  Now, you had to press the button, both on the decision to have that field operation go out in March 2021, against the backdrop of the pandemic, and then of course, to sign off on the results. How difficult were those decisions?    IAN  Well, I'm not going to say it was difficult Miles, I mean, it was a difficult decision, but if you surround yourself with all the information, so before we took the decision to go with a 2021 census, we looked at all the upsides, all the downsides. We measured the risks. We looked at the cost of delaying and we looked at the chance that we would get a decent count, and whether people were looking like they were now prepared to fill in forms, which have a whole set of risks. Was there an algorithm that told us what to do? I'm afraid there isn't an algorithm at the end of the day, I had to make a decision. I made that decision in collaboration with my colleagues. It was a decision we took together, and I think in every way it was the right decision. And it was a real privilege for me to work with the team in March and April, as we looked at the numbers, and for the first time, and I think it's a really important milestone, that for the very first time we shared our results with the local authorities. I have always believed that you need to involve the people on the ground to sense check the numbers and so for the first time ever, we invited local authorities to be part of the quality assurance process. So we contacted them under a nondisclosure agreement. You have access to the numbers, let's have a conversation and then we can co-create the numbers so that we all feel comfortable and local authorities to their great credit, really embraced this opportunity to co-create what was a great piece of work. We believe that helped, that the numbers that we were able to produce, we felt we had much more traction. And so it really was a national effort to produce those numbers. And I'm very proud of them.    MILES  In hindsight, and of course, it's easy to look at things in hindsight, but did you think it helped that essentially there was a captive audience?     IAN  Not at all. I completely disagree. I think the reason for the high numbers wasn't a captive audience. Let's remember that a very high proportion of the population were not able to lock down, they had to go out to work. The reason I think that we got high numbers was because of three reasons. Number one, engagement. A massive programme of engagement with different communities, which really, really, really meant that people in different communities of our country understood why we were asking, what the reasons were, in a way that perhaps hadn't happened before, and critically to say to people, if you give us your data we're not going away. We'll be back. And there's now a programme of going back and sharing those data for particular communities with them. So that's the first reason. The second reason was, I've always said that censuses are nine tenths logistics and 1/10 statistics and I felt that the logistics here were absolutely right. And moving to an online first model was incredibly important, it made it very easy for people to respond. You could respond on your way to work on your mobile phone. That's an awful lot easier than having someone knock on your door with a big form. And so I think that worked. And then a final piece was after the day having really good management information, which really enabled us to understand where our coverage was higher and lower, and then to target our field workers in a way that we've never been able to before. Historically when I did censuses, for example the 1981 census, every enumerate had a small area, they walked around, they found people within that area. But we were able to say right, we need more people in a particular area, less people in another area, so we were moving them around, maximising the resources and maximising the count.    MILES  Okay, so what do you think are the biggest takeaways on the data we've released so far?    IAN  I think some of the work around the ageing of our country is really important, but not just the ageing of our country because let's be honest, ageing is associated with demand for services. And what we show very clearly is a changing geography of ageing. Now, that's an ongoing situation. So if you look at the proportion of over 65s, it's a very different proportion of over 85s and so there is clearly a new internal migration which gives in some areas, for example, mid Wales and Cambridgeshire, a new demographic to think about for services over time. So here's a really interesting point about the geography of ageing, while noting that some of it is pretty traditional, the south coast of England remains a place with high levels of older people. Seaton in Devon, with the highest proportion of people over 90 in the country is an area which already knows that it has a high demand for services. Other places will be coming along, and I think that's the first thing to say. The second thing I would note Miles is the changing demographic of where people were born. And certainly we are able to reflect some of that in the work but also again to look at the geography of where different people are living. And that's important. And also, for the first time ever, we have asked questions on veterans, and I think that was a really, really interesting piece of information. I must admit that the age distribution initially looks a little surprising, because for men, almost everybody is a veteran over the age of 80 because of national service, and that goes down, but we now have the ability to identify both the geography and the age distribution of veterans and it was noticeable that the highest proportions of veterans tended to be in places with military bases, Richmond Shire, in Yorkshire, which is near to Catterick or Portsmouth near the Navy areas. That says to us that they are obviously, and I'm not saying it's surprising, but people who have been in the military tend to end up staying around the areas where perhaps they have been based, but actually being able to do that and then following that up with a survey, a survey of veterans to understand their circumstances and the services they need, and also their families, I think is really super important that I have to say that that survey which went out after the results of the census were published, and we were able to launch them on the same day with the Ministry of Veterans Affairs Johnny Mercer has been an incredibly successful survey. Great response. And we're just in the process now of analysing those data. And that's something to look out for in the new year.    MILES  And plenty more census data still to come. Of course,    IAN  Well, yes. And of course, the data will be available now for an analysis by anyone. And that's really exciting,    MILES  Well worth pointing out as well. Okay, here's another big number for you. 11.1%     IAN  Is inflation.     MILES  That was the figure in October, it's recently dropped down to 10.7.    IAN  You don't really understand inflation until you actually get down to what's driving it and what the components are. And so, we spend an enormous amount of time looking at the components to understand them. So this drop to temporary 7% In the most recent data is driven by a reduction in fuel costs, with fuel prices going down, I mean it's still too expensive don't get me wrong but they're going down a bit, and at the same time that has been offset by increases in alcohol prices at hotels, restaurants, and pubs. And so all put together, yes it's a drop, but not an enormous drop, and still a significant rise compared with the same month last year.    MILES  Now there's been a fascinating and very public debate over the cost of living of course, and particularly over the relevance and validity of headline inflation measures, CPI or CPIH. A preferred measure on the one hand, and on the other hand, the actual experience of people seeing the cost of their weekly shopping shooting up much faster than the official rate, which is just an average of course, would suggest.    IAN  I think it's an important point. I had a very good conversation with a number of influencers in this area. And I think it is important to recognise that what one is asked to do, and we are statutorily responsible for producing an inflation stat

Miles is joined by colleagues from the Health and Life Events team to explore how data is good for our health. Within the diagnosis: the Health Index, dubbed "the GDP of health"; the impacts of Covid-19 as well as an ageing society; and the increasing importance of linking data from numerous sources to generate complex insights that inform decision-making.    TRANSCRIPT    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the Office for National Statistics podcast. This time we're taking the pulse of the nation's health and exploring the role of public data in making it better. Of course, we would say that statistics are good for you. We recommend at least five a day, but more seriously, what do the ONS figures say about the state of our health now? And what are we doing to create new and better statistical insights to support a healthier population in future?   With us to examine all are ONS colleagues, Julie Stanborough, Deputy Director of Health and Life Events, Neil Bannister, Assistant Deputy Director of Health Analysis and, later in the podcast, Jonny Tinsley, Head of Health and Life Events Data Transformation.   Julie to start with you. The World Health Organisation defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Now, the ONS has begun a major project that seeks to capture the key elements of that in one place and to a certain extent in one single number. Can explain what that is, and what it's all about?    JULIE STANBOROUGH  Yes, so that will be the Health Index, and as you say, it is kind of regarded as the GDP of health. And at its simplest, it allows the health of England and local authorities to be tracked over time, which allows greater understanding of the relationships between the drivers of health and health outcomes. So the index starts in England in 2015. And we've got data up to 2019, which is available online, but we're going to be publishing 2020 figures very shortly.    MF  So tell us about the nuts and bolts, what are the data sources here and how have they been put together?    JS  We've got a huge number of different data sources that go into the Health Index. We've grouped them into three different themes, that we have healthy people, healthy lives and healthy places. And we use data sources from within ONS, but also from across government, and more broadly, to give that really in-depth breadth of all the data that goes into health.    MF  What sort of factors, what sort of elements are we looking at? People living without serious health conditions?    JS  Yeah, so it's a whole range of things. For example, looking at child poverty through to access to green spaces, life expectancy, a whole range of different factors which contribute to whether a particular area is deemed to have high health index or a low health index.    MF  Is there particular value - because you can understand wanting to understand disparities at local level and we'll talk about that a bit a bit later - but boiling it down to a single reading, a GDP. That's a very ambitious thing. How useful, how relevant, is that figure going to be? Is it something that the future will look to us regularly and take as seriously as a big number like GDP?    JS  I'd really hope so. And I think because the complexity of health is so complex, if we can boil it down to one number and be able to track that over time, at a national level, or at a local level, that really helps people understand what's going on and helps them to engage, but equally because it has all the different data sources in there, it allows those policy makers in local authorities to be able to go into that data and explore what really is happening in their particular area.    MF  More than simply measuring the outputs or successes of the health services, it's about understanding a much wider range of factors as well as the environment in which people live and their socio-economic position as well.    JS  That's right. I mean, there are so many different aspects to it. And that's why the Health Index has so many different data sources in there. But because of that complexity, it makes it really difficult for people to understand what they should be doing to improve the health in their areas. So you need that breadth, but then the ability to aggregate it up into a single number helps with the accessibility.     MF  So the index will provide this big reading of this multi factor estimate of health but perhaps it'll be the case that it isn't so much what the index says at any given time, but how it changes over time, that'll be its real value.    JS  That's right. And it's being able to track that at a national level. And at a local level. We're going to be publishing 2020 results, but we're going to have to be quite careful with those results because it'd be the first year with the pandemic and so we'd expect to be seeing some changes as a result of the pandemic. But equally, some of the data collections will have changed as a result of not being able to interview people in the same way because of lockdown. So we're going to have to monitor that data over 2020 / 2021 and further to really see the impact of the pandemic.    MF  And provide also perhaps some measure of people's changing economic circumstances at a time when there's so much concern obviously around the cost of living.   In the meantime, because this project the Health Index is still in its relative infancy of course we have a wealth of other data already that the ONS generates and brings in from elsewhere and works with. Of course the number one indicator of a nation's health is our life expectancy - how long we might be expected to survive. Tell us what's been happening - the broad picture - as far as life expectancy is concerned.    JS  Life expectancy, if I just explain what that is, is a statistical measure which estimates the average number of years a person can expect to live. So male life expectancy at birth in the United Kingdom for the years 2018 to 2020 was 79 years, and that compared to 83 years for females. And during the past two decades life expectancy has grown, but much faster growth appeared in the naughties, and during the 2010s. We've seen that life expectancy pretty much slow right down and flatten.    MF  As well as this obviously the key measure of life expectancy. There's another important dimension here and this is particularly relevant if we're talking about health and that of course is healthy life expectancy because it's all very well to be alive, but if you have not got a great quality of life, well that brings all sorts of other issues and it brings problems for the health service as well of course. Tell us about healthy life expectancy. What is that as a statistic, how is that measured? What are the characteristics that inform healthy life expectancy?     JS  It's slightly different to life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy is a measure of the average number of years someone can expect to live in good health or free from limiting illness, and in 2018 to 2020 male healthy life expectancy at birth in the UK was 63 years, which meant that you had 16 years of life in not good health. In contrast for females, they had 64 years of healthy life expectancy, which meant that they had 19 years of life in not good health.    MF  That's fascinating and obviously begs the question, has that period of healthy life expectancy been going up in line with overall life expectancy, or have people simply been living longer in poor health?     JS  Yeah, so between 2011/13 and 2018/2020, both males and females, there was no improvement in health and life expectancy.    MF  That goes some way to explaining some of the current pressures on the National Health Service.    JS  That's right. I mean, if you've got more people that aren't in good health and have limiting conditions that's going to have increasing pressure on our health services and our GP services.    MF  And it does mean also that people are dying from different things, and they might have died younger from different conditions. They're living longer, but perhaps in poorer and poorer health in many cases, and in the end, actually dying from different causes. What are the data saying?    JS  So there's a range of different factors which are associated with a healthy life expectancy, and things that you'd probably think yourself. So when we looked at areas across the country with the lowest healthy life expectancy, 29% of males aged 30 to 49 smoked compared to just 17% of those that were in the highest healthy life expectancy areas. So smoking is clearly one of the drivers. We've also looked at whether people are overweight, and more than one in eight children in the lowest healthy life expectancy areas became overweight between entering primary school and starting secondary school. In contrast, those in the highest healthy life expectancy areas, it was just one in every 10. So there's a number of different factors there that we can see are driving it.    MF  If any justification was needed on why public health campaigns tend to concentrate on issues like obesity and smoking that's starkly revealed in the numbers.   So that's the big picture. That's what's happening at a national level. But tell us about the differences from place to place because the local variations are quite significant too, aren't they?    JS  That's right. So to commit those geographical variations, Ribble Valley in Lancashire is ranked the healthiest out of 307 local authority areas in England, and that's using the Health Index.  MF  And the least healthy?  JS  So we do have all those rankings, but we do try to not think about the scores in a sort of ranking capacity. The whole point of having this information put out there is for local authorities to be able to compare themselves with similar local authorities or their nearest neighbour and see ho

In this episode of Statistically Speaking Miles is helped with his enquiries by Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard from the Office for National Statistics, as he investigates how we use data to get valuable insights into the impact of crime on modern society. Along the way he debunks common misconceptions; learns how the nature of crime continues to evolve; and uncovers the work being done behind-the-scenes to make crime data more inclusive.   TRANSCRIPT   MILES FLETCHER  Hello, and welcome again to 'Statistically Speaking' the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to be investigating crime.   What is the statistical evidence that despite the impression you might have got from the media, overall crime in England and Wales has actually been falling? Or is it the case that the nature of crime has simply changed and we're more likely these days to be targeted online than in the streets, and what in any case is the value of understanding the overall level of crime when that term captures such a wide and varied range of social ills and harms?   Helping us with our enquiries today are Meghan Elkin, head of the ONS centre for crime and justice, and Billy Gazard head of acquisitive crime and stakeholder engagement.   Meghan, so much to talk about in the many and varied crime figures that ONS produces, but let's focus first on where those numbers come from. In this case, there are two major data sets and the first and arguably the most significant of those, statistically at least, is a very large survey and it's not information gathered from the police or government. It's information that comes directly from people and their experience of crime. Tell us all about that.     MEGHAN ELKIN  That's correct. So the best source we have for measuring crime is the crime survey for England and Wales and this is a massive undertaking. We interview around 34,000 people aged 16 and over each year, and over 2000 children, and we really appreciate everyone who takes the time to respond to our survey as it helps us to produce these important figures. As you said, crime covers a wide range of offences and there's no perfect source, but the crime survey has had an established methodology over a long period of time, which really helps us to get a good idea of the trends and changes in society that people are experiencing.    MF Give us a sense of the scale of this operation. Is it one of the biggest surveys the ONS runs?    ME  It is, I would say that we are consistently speaking to 34,000 people each year and what's probably different to most surveys is that we have children as part of the response as well. So when we go to a household, we'll interview an adult, so someone aged 16 and over, to ask about their experiences. If there are children aged 10 to 15 in their household. We'll also ask if one of them would be able to complete our children's survey so that we get a picture of the crime that they're experiencing as well.    MF  And what is the particular value of speaking people to people face to face in their homes like that?    ME  I mean, the real value of the crime survey for measuring the trends is that it doesn't matter if people have reported what they've experienced to the police or not, so unlike police recorded crime, it doesn't have that impact. And so we can ask people about their experiences in the last 12 months. We'll also ask them questions about their attitudes towards crime related issues such as the police and amount of security that they have, and for the most sensitive questions rather than being asked by the interviewer directly, we'll give someone a tablet so that they can complete those questions privately themselves to ensure that confidentiality and confidence in telling us such sensitive information.    MF  That's taken the survey into some quite new areas, hasn't it in recent years, would you like to talk about some of those developments? You talk about actually, and this is highly unusual, of course a very sensitive area, it's about the ability to actually speak to children as well. Tell us to what end that work has been directed...    ME  So for children in particular, we've been working closely with a number of stakeholders to understand what's most useful for us to ask children. So we do collect their general experiences of crime in the last 12 months, but we also ask them about their experiences online and that's provided some really useful data about children's lived experiences about being bullied and whether that's happening at school or online, but also the behaviours and activities that sometimes could be quite risky that they're taking part in online. And that's given some new information into that sector that we had just not understood before, and has been really useful in shaping policy and understanding how children can be better protected online.    MF  So this is quite an intensive encounter with the ONS data gatherer as they're sitting down for about 40 to 45 minutes or so. But how are the people selected? And how do you go about ensuring that they're a good representative sample and that we're not missing out important sections of the population, which, on a subject like this, of course, it's very important to get a really accurate picture of how people are experiencing crime at that grassroots level.    ME  So we use a postcode address file, basically a list of addresses to sample from, so households are chosen at random to ensure that we've got a representative sample for England and Wales. That's why it's really important and we really appreciate people responding to the survey because that's how we ensure good quality data, by getting that good, rounded sample.    MF  So there's a lot of rich data coming out of the crime survey, but by its nature, it doesn't cover some of the more serious offences does it?    ME  No that's true, particularly the higher harm but lower volume crimes, for example knife crime, those don't appear in the survey very often. And so we look to other data sources for those. It also excludes crimes that are often termed "victimless", such as possession of drugs, which again, we then measure through different sources.    MF  And that is where the other major data source starts to become more relevant. We're looking at very serious offences particularly, including murder and rape. Those offences are covered by the police and their recording of crime. Tell us about the value of that data, and how that contributes to the wider understanding of crime.    ME  So the police record all the crimes that are reported to them and those are fed into us via the Home Office as a record of police recorded crime. And it has lots of advantages as a data source in that for some crime types, it is a good measure. And unlike the crime survey for those crime types, it can be very good at looking at short term trends. So particularly through the pandemic it was helpful for some of those crime types where we know that it's a better measure. But we also know that there are a lot of crimes that people don't report to the police and that's where that source of data struggles the most, particularly for really hidden crimes. Rape would be one of those crimes, where relatively few people do report that to the police so it doesn't appear in the numbers as much. But the police figures are subject to changes in recording practices. So when new offences are introduced that obviously changes how the count is put together, but also it's impacted by police activity and how they record and that also will change the numbers. When you see increases in police recorded crime, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean that crime has gone up. And that's part of our work at ONS to unpick and understand what's going on there. But it does have benefits as you say, for some of the higher harm but lower volume crimes that we see, homicide it records very well, and for knife crime it's our best measure. So there's definitely a place for it as a data source still.    MF  So two major data sources contributing to this bigger picture. And what has that bigger picture been showing us these last few years?    ME  Well when we look across trends in general, actually, over time, crime has been decreasing since the mid 90s, and has been more flat in recent years. So the crime survey estimated around 20 million offences in 1995. And we've seen that decreasing over time and our latest data shows that it's around 5 million offences. And that's when you're using a comparable estimate. So the overall picture is very much if that crime sits much lower than it used to in the mid 90s. And that's not just a pattern that we've seen in England and Wales. It's a pattern that's reflected across other countries, across Europe and America. And it's something that lots of people have tried to understand what's really driven that long term change. More recently we have seen some decreases, some of them very much linked to the pandemic. But now as we look and compare before the pandemic to our most recent data, we have still seen some decreases. I think it's always important to point out that while total crime is a useful measure and reflection, it's only when you really start digging into the individual crime types that you can start seeing some trends that just get averaged out when you look at the total.    MF  Yes, you need to understand what kind of offences we're talking about. And if we talk about that long term picture, isn't it the case that we saw, coming out of the 1980s into the 1990s, turn of the century, violent crime decreasing, damage to property and so forth and theft from cars. Was that the broad trend that we saw?    ME  Yeah, so we've seen decreases in that time period across a number of crime types. One of the most popular explanations of the overall pattern there is the "security hypothesis", which is very much built on the widespread improvements we've see

In this episode Miles is joined by Professor Luciano Floridi of Oxford University; Simon Whitworth of the UK Statistics Authority; and Pete Stokes from the ONS to talk about data ethics and public trust in official statistics.   TRANSCRIPT   MILES FLETCHER    Hello, I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode of Statistically Speaking we're exploring data ethics and public trust in official statistics. In 2007, 15 years ago to the very day we are recording this, the UK Parliament gave the Office for National Statistics the objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. But what does, or should, the "public good" mean? How does the ONS seek to deliver it in practice? Why should the public trust us to act in their interests at a time of exponential growth in data of all kinds? Where are the lines to be drawn between individual privacy and anonymity on the one hand, the potential of data science to improve public services and government policies to achieve better health outcomes, even saving lives, on the other.   Joining me to discuss these topics today are Simon Whitworth, Head of Data Ethics at the UK statistics authority, Pete Stokes, Director of the Integrated Data programme here at the ONS and Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and the ethics of information and director of the digital ethics lab at the Oxford Internet Institute.   Professor let's start this big concept with you. What do you think Parliament meant when it said that the ONS should serve the public good in this context?     LUCIANO FLORIDI     It might have meant many things, and I suspect that a couple of them must have been in their minds. First of all, we know that data or information, depending on the vocabulary, has an enormous value if you know how to use it. And, collecting it and using it properly for the future of the country, to implement the right policies, to avoid potential mistakes and to see things in advance - knowledge is power, information is power. So, this might have been one of the things that they probably meant by "public good". The other meaning, it might be a little bit more specific...It's when we use the data appropriately, ethically, to make sure that some sector or some part of the population is not left behind, to learn who needs more help, to know what help and when to deliver it, and to whom. So, it's not just a matter of the whole nation doing better, or at least avoiding problems, but also specific sectors of the population being helped, and to make sure that the burden and the advantages are equally distributed among everybody. That's normally what we mean by public good and certainly, that analysis is there to serve it.    MF    So there's that dilemma between using the power of data to actually achieve positive outcomes. And for government, on the other hand, being seen as overbearing, or Orwellian, and spying on people through the use of data.    LF    That would be the risk that sometimes comes under the term "paternalism", that knowing a lot about your citizens might lead to the temptation of manipulating their lives, their choices, their preferences. I wouldn't over-emphasise this though. The kind of legislation that we have and the constraints, the rules, the double checking, make sure that the advantage is always in view and can more easily be squeezed out of the data that we accumulate, and sometimes the potential abuses and mistakes, the inevitable temptation to do the wrong thing, are kept in check. So yes, the State might use the government's political power, might misuse data, and so we need to be careful, but I wouldn't list that as my primary worry. My primary worry perhaps, would be under-using the data that we have, or making mistakes inadvertently.    MF    Do you think then, perhaps as a country, the UK has been too cautious in this area in the past?    LF    I don't think it has been too cautious, either intellectually or strategically. There's been a lot of talking about doing the right thing. I think it's been slightly cautious, or insufficiently radical, in implementing policies that have been around for some time. But we now have seen several governments stating the importance of that analysis, statistical approaches to evidence, and so on. But I think that there is more ambition in words than in deeds, so I would like to see more implementations, more action and less statements. Then the ambition will be matched by the actions on the ground.    MF    One of the reasons perhaps there might have been caution in the past is of course concern about how the public would react to that use of data. What do we know of public attitudes now in 2022, to how government bodies utilise data?    LF    I think the impression is that, depending on whom you ask, whether it is the younger population or slightly older people my age, people who lived in the 50s versus my students, they have different attitudes. We're getting used to the fact that our data are going to be used. The question is no longer are they going to be used, but more like, how and who is using them? For what purposes? Am I in charge? Can I do something if something goes wrong? And I would add also, in terms of attitude, one particular feature which I don't see sufficiently stressed, is who is going to help me if something goes wrong? Because the whole discussion, or discourse, should look more at how we make people empowered, so that they can check, they have control, they can go do this, do that. Well, who has the time, the ability, the skills, and indeed the will, to do that? It's much easier to say, look, there will be someone, for example the government, who will protect your rights, who you can approach, and they will do the right thing for you. Now we're getting more used to that. And so, I believe that the attitude is slightly changing towards a more positive outlook, as long as everything is in place, we are seeing an increasingly positive attitude towards public use of public data.    MF    Pete, your role is to make this happen. In practice, to make sure that government bodies, including the ONS, are making ethical use of data and serving the public good. Just before we get into that though, explain if you would, what sort of data is being gathered now, and for what purposes?    PETE STOKES    So we've got a good track record of supporting research use of survey data, that we collect largely in ONS, but on other government departments as well. But over the last few years, there's been an acceleration and a real will to make use of data that have been collected for other purposes. We make a lot of use now of administrative data, these are data that are collected by government not for an analytical purpose but for an operational purpose. For example, data that are collected by HMRC from people when they're collecting tax, or from the Department of Work and Pensions when they're collecting benefits, or from local authorities when they're collecting council tax - all of those administrative data are collected and stored. There's an increasing case to make those data available for analysis which we're looking to support. And then the other new area is what's often called "faster data", and these data that are typically readily available, usually in the public domain where you get a not so deep insight as you'd get from a survey of administrative data, but you could get a really quick answer. And a good example of that from within the ONS is that we calculate inflation. As a matter of routine, we collect prices from lots of organisations, but you can more quickly do some of that if you can pull some data that are readily available on the internet to give you those quicker indicators, faster information of where prices are rising quickly where they're dropping quickly. There's a place for all of these depending on the type of analysis that you want to do.    MF    This is another area where this ethical dilemma might arise though isn't it, because when you sit down with someone and they've agreed to take part in the survey, they know what they're going in for. But when it comes to other forms of information, perhaps tax information that you've mentioned already, some people might think, why do they want to know that?    PS    When people give their data to HMRC or to DWP as part of the process of receiving a service, like paying tax for example, I think people generally understand what they need to give that department for their specific purpose. When we then want to use this data for a different purpose, there is a larger onus on us to make sure that we are protecting those data, we're protecting the individual and that those data are only being used ethically and in areas of trust, specifically in the public interest. So, it's important that we absolutely protect the anonymity of the individuals, that we make sure where their data are used, and that we are not using the data of those data subjects as individuals, but instead as part of a large data-set to look for trends and patterns within those data. And finally, that the analysis that are then undertaken with them are explicitly and demonstrably in the public interest, that they serve the public good of all parts of society.    MF    And that's how you make the ethical side of this work in practice, by showing that it can be used to produce faster and more accurate statistics than we could possibly get from doing a sample survey?    PS    Yes, exactly, and sample surveys are very, very powerful when you want to know about a specific subject, but they're still relatively small. The largest sample survey that the ONS does is the Labour Force Survey, which collects data from around 90,000 people every quarter. Administrative datasets have got data from millions of people, which enables you to draw your insights not just at a national level and national