UK regulator suspends official status for some regional labour data

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LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s statistics regulator said on Wednesday it had suspended the official status of the Annual Population Survey, which provides information about the regional labour market, citing concerns about the low response rates.

Ed Humpherson, head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), wrote in a letter that the regulator agreed with the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) request to suspend the accredited official statistics status for the ONS Annual Population Survey.

Official statistics status means that data complies with standards of trustworthiness and quality set by the OSR.

The Annual Population Survey provides detailed information about the country’s labour market at a local level and does not form the basis of the ONS’s overall population estimates for the United Kingdom.

Michael Keoghan, ONS director general for economic and social statistics, said it would do more work to improve the quality of the data and better account for population growth, especially in smaller regions in the country.

Keoghan said the ONS will publish a technical note setting out how the population estimates can be used moving forward after a workshop in November.

The ONS will start to use an improved Labour Force Survey (LFS) as its main source of data on Britain’s labour market from September 2024. It had temporarily suspended publication of official LFS data in October 2023 due to low response rates in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Reporting by Suban Abdulla, editing by Andy Bruce and Sachin Ravikumar)