Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The Office for National Statistics has admitted it may not be able to replace its faulty labour force survey until 2027, leaving policymakers facing further uncertainty over the state of the UK jobs market.
Switching to the new survey in mid-2025 was now unlikely, the ONS said on Tuesday, suggesting that “aiming to complete this process in 2027” was more likely.
At the same time, the ONS said it was working to improve its existing survey, putting more interviewers in the field and boosting the number of responses, while also working to identifying potential bias in the results.
The ONS has been working for the past year to boost the number of respondents to the survey — the main source of information on the state of the UK jobs market. A plunge in the response rate forced it first to suspend LFS-based data, then to badge it as “statistics in development”.
“The changes have led to some data instability,” it said, warning that “the complexity of the issues mean that it will take time for the impact of any improvements to be fully realised”.
Adam Corlett, economist at the Resolution Foundation, said that the agency’s existing survey “presents a misleading picture of UK labour market trends, and is not fit to be used for critical decisions like setting interest rates or making fiscal projections”.
The ONS announced the delay as it revealed that under its existing survey the UK workforce was 484,000 bigger than previously estimated in the second quarter of this year, leaving productivity correspondingly lower.
It said its new estimate of 33.5mn people in employment in April to June 2024 meant the workforce had grown since the pandemic, rather than barely recovering as previous figures suggested.
With more people in work, UK productivity looks even worse than previously thought. The ONS said output per hour worked in April to June was 0.9 per cent lower than a year earlier, rather than the previous estimate of a 0.3 per cent contraction.
Credit: Source link
