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Britain’s statistics agency 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 jobs market.
Switching to the new survey in mid-2025 was now unlikely, the Office for National Statistics 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 identify potential bias in the results.
The agency 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, and a crucial input to the Bank of England’s decisions on interest rates.
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,” the ONS 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 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”.
In May, the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee publicly called attention to “considerable uncertainty” over the jobs data that was making it “more difficult to gauge the underlying state of the labour market”.
In the same month Huw Pill, the central bank’s chief economist, criticised the ONS in a private letter, saying its efforts to fix the LFS had been insufficient to date.
The ONS announced the delay on Tuesday 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.
