Office for National Statistics

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the United Kingdom government department charged with the collection and publication of statistics related to the economy, population and society of the United Kingdom at national and local levels. For historical reasons, it incorporates the General Register Office so is also responsible for the registration of births, deaths and marriages in England and Wales.

The ONS was formed on 1 April 1996 by the merger of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS).

Office Locations
The ONS has a head office in the city of Newport, South Wales, and other offices in Pimlico in London, Titchfield in Hampshire and Southport. In addition, there is the Family Records Centre in Islington, London, where censuses over 100 years old, electoral registers and indexes to the registers of births, deaths and marriages in England and Wales may be consulted, and copies of census entries and certificates can be purchased.

The London office was the head office until April 2006 when the corporate headquarters was moved to Newport following the Lyons Review on public sector relocation. Initially, the London office was in three buildings but due to reductions, most London staff are now in 1 Drummond Gate. The main London office is expected to close by April 2010 by which time the ONS policy is for its statistical activities to be concentrated in Titchfield and Newport The ONS asserts that recruitment and training of quality staff in South Wales, where data collection and analysis already takes place, will ensure that there is no risk to the quality of its services and that it is managing the risks associated with the changes which it is implementing in a planned and gradual way. However the plan to discontinue all remaining statistical activity in London is proving controversial amid claims that the shift of functions from London and the impending closure of the London office could have serious implications for the future of certain particular sets of statistics. These include health statistics, National Accounts, Retail and Consumer Prices and Labour Market Statistics. These risks derive from the fact that few of the experienced staff working in these highly technical areas are expected to be willing to relocate to Newport, resulting in a substantial loss of expertise and a consequent threat to the continued quality of the statistics. In a submission to the Parliamentary Treasury Sub Committee, the Bank of England too has expressed concern over the relocation of the ONS to Newport, saying, that "the relocation programme poses serious risks to the maintenance of the quality of macroeconomic data. If substantial numbers of ONS staff are unwilling to relocate, the loss of skilled individuals could have a severe impact on a range of statistics.". The director of ONS has vigorously defended ONS implementation of government policy on civil service relocation and the decision to concentrate staff in the three locations outside London.

Heads of the Office: National Statistician
Directors are de facto Permanent Secretaries but do not use that title. As the ONS incorporates the OPCS, the Director is also the Registrar General for England and Wales. In addition, he or she is ex officio the Head of the Government Statistical Service. The first Director of ONS was Professor Tim Holt. Subsequent Directors have had an additional title, the National Statistician. The second Director was Len Cook. He was succeeded by Karen Dunnell on 1 September 2005.

Independence
Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer (now Prime Minister), announced on 28 November 2005, that the government intended to publish plans in early 2006 to legislate to render the ONS and the statistics it generates independent of government on a model based on the independence of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. This was originally a 1997 Labour manifesto commitment and was also the policy of the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives parties. Such independence was also sought by the Royal Statistical Society and the Statistics Commission. The National Statistician would be directly accountable to Parliament through a more widely-constituted independent governing Statistics Board. The ONS would be a non-ministerial government department so that the staff, including the Director, would remain as civil servants but without being under direct ministerial control. The National Statistician, Karen Dunnell, stated that legislation would help improve public trust in official statistics although the ONS already acts independently according to its own published guidelines, the National Statistics Code of Practice, which sets out the key principles and standards that official statisticians, including those in other parts of the government statistical service, are expected to follow and uphold.

The details of the plans for independence were considered in Parliament during the 2006/2007 session and resulted in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. In July 2007, Sir Michael Scholar was nominated by the government to be the three day-a-week non-executive chairman of the Statistics Board which, to re-establish faith in the integrity of government statistics, will take on statutory responsibility for oversight of UK statistics in April 2008 and will oversee the Office for National Statistics. It will also have a duty to assess all UK government statistics. Following Gordon Brown's announcement of new constitutional arrangements for public appointments, Sir Michael also became, on 18 July, the first such nominee to appear before the House of Commons Treasury Committee and to have his nomination subject to confirmation by the House.

Work of the ONS
Where data is broken down by geographical area, this is usually done by the areas defined in the ONS geographical coding system.

The principal areas of data collection are:


 * Agriculture, Fishing and Forestry
 * Commerce, Energy and Industry
 * Crime and Justice
 * Economy
 * Education and Training
 * Health and Care (Among numerous regular surveys, such as the General Household survey, the Labour Force Survey and the census that takes place every 10 years, ONS runs the England and Wales Longitudinal Survey, which monitors the health, address changes and fertility of a 1% sample of the population of England and Wales over time for statistical purposes).
 * Labour Market
 * Natural and Built Environment
 * Population and Migration
 * Public Sector and Other
 * Social and Welfare
 * Transport, Travel and Tourism

Statisticians are also employed by many other Government departments and agencies, and these statisticians often collect and publish data. For example, data on Agriculture, Fishing and Forestry come primarily from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Along with economic data on which the Treasury and Bank of England rely for decision-making, many of the statistics that receive widespread media attention are issued by the Home Office, the Department of Health, and the Department for Education and Skills.

The statistical work of the ONS has, since June 2000, been scrutinized by the Statistics Commission, an independent body with its own chairman and small staff.

The Blue Book
Annually, the Office for National Statistics publish their findings in the so-called Blue Book. It contains the estimates of the domestic and national product, income and expenditure of the United Kingdom, and is available as hardcopy, as well as a web version.

Education of Statisticians
The Office for National Statistics collaborates with the University of Southampton in the teaching of a MSc in Official Statistics, the programme has been in running since 2003.

Criticism of the ONS
Len Cook, when National Statistician, described himself as the country's most abused civil servant. Occasional errors and revisions accounts for some past criticism while the allocation of Private Finance Initiative expenditure (albeit following OECD and international statistical guidelines according to who carries the risk) has attracted political attention. Many of the most controversial topics for statistics issued by government do not come from ONS though they are expected to meet National Statistics standards. Crime statistics and other data (e.g. health and education) that could be deemed to assess the effectiveness of government policies often attract media scepticism. The compulsory nature of the census (unlike most other surveys by academics and market researchers) differentiates ONS from other data collectors (apart from the Inland Revenue). The Office for National Statistics won the 2004 Big Brother Award for the "Most Heinous Government Organisation" from the campaigning organisation Privacy International for its Citizen Information Project. The project is one of several that lead the Government's own Information Commissioner to warn that there is a danger of the country "sleepwalking" into a surveillance society.