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Analysis by the Financial Times has shown that the Office for National Statistics risks losing vital technical expertise after an exodus of staff in recent years.
Around a fifth of the UK workforce – 958 – left the UK’s official statistics office in the year to March, more than double the number who joined, according to figures obtained through a freedom of information request. Departures have increased significantly to pre-pandemic levels. About 694 people left the organization in 2018-19.
Almost 40 percent of the departures were in mid-level positions, where employees often have important technical skills and policy expertise, up from 34 percent the previous year and 24 percent five years ago.
The departures come as the agency plans to overhaul the way it produces basic economic and population data. It has come under fire from economists, business leaders and politicians in recent months for failing to produce reliable data.
Staffing pressures have been compounded by industrial action by more than 1,000 ONS staff over the decision to end flexible working policies introduced during the pandemic.
ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner said workforce turnover at the agency reflected a tight labor market, with data skills in “red hot demand” and activity “held back” after a period when fewer people changed jobs during the Covid pandemic.
He noted that the institution faced difficult decisions about setting priorities as it reviews its operations and faces a real-world budget cut of more than 5 percent for 2024-2025.
“We have to prioritize and sometimes that requires difficult decisions, but I don’t think that’s true at the ONS any more than anywhere else in government,” Fitzner said.
“One of the consequences of the budget issues we faced last year is a reduction in staffing.”
Fitzner said the agency’s budget problems were the result of high inflation and salary pressures. Headline inflation fell to 2.3 percent in April from its 42-year high of 11.1 percent in October 2022.
While the number of departures remained in line with recent years, the FOI showed that ONS recruitment fell sharply during the last financial year, with just 38 per cent more new hires than the previous year and 49 per cent more than five years ago.
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The ONS was criticized earlier this year after delaying the publication of its new labor force survey until September – six months later than previously reported. When publication finally resumed, the data set contained serious deficiencies due to low survey response rates.
Sarah Cumbers, chief executive of the Royal Society for Statistics, said ONS analysts were put in the “uncomfortable position” of deciding which key outputs to prioritize and that policy-making would “only suffer as a result”.
The ONS said it had made good progress on survey responses and was returning to a sustainable long-term operating model following a significant expansion of the post-pandemic workforce and the 2021 Census.
The agency added that its staff turnover rate was in line with pre-pandemic levels, with 93 per cent of its current roles filled.
The Public and Commercial Services Union said ONS exit polls showed one in five people leaving since November had been affected by the decision to end flexible working, but noted this could be an underestimate.
In the ONS’s 2024-25 strategic plan, published in April, national statistician Sir Ian Diamond acknowledged that increasingly important skills in areas such as data science were becoming “difficult and more expensive to attract and retain”.
“[Statistics] They are required to evolve faster than ever, using new data sources and methods that are more frequent and detailed,” he said, adding that “tight” resources “require hard decisions about prioritization.”
The strategy report outlined a plan to reduce overheads and increase internal efficiency using artificial intelligence, but noted that cutting the real-time budget by more than 5 percent would have an “inevitable” impact on the frequency and format of some outputs.