UK's under-fire stats office cuts some data work to focus on priorities

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain's statistics agency, dogged by quality concerns about some of its widely used data, said on Thursday it would cut back some operations in order to focus on core economic and population figures in the face of tight funding.

The Office for National Statistics said it had made "tough choices" due to a flat cash settlement from the government at a time when it is also absorbing the costs of inflation and higher civil service salaries.

There will be an "extended pause" of the Survey of Living Conditions - which provides European-wide comparable statistics on living standards, the ONS said.

It had also paused some work to measure crime against children. Data science support to the rest of the government would be removed.

"We will increase our focus on our core economic and population statistics so that we can continue to respond to the most important needs of the nation," National Statistician Ian Diamond said.

"This will mean prioritising our efforts in areas that have the greatest impact such as Gross Domestic Product, prices, labour market and population changes."

The ONS said it had wrapped up a review into public service productivity - a key reform area for the government - a year early and would pause providing business micro-data analysis to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Britain's finance ministry was not immediately available for comment.

Earlier this week the government launched an investigation into the effectiveness and delivery of economic data published by the ONS, which has come under fire for its unreliable labour market figures.

In 2023, the statistics office detected problems with the response rates to its Labour Force Survey (LFS) which is used to calculate Britain's unemployment rate and other key measures of the jobs market. An improved version of that survey might be released in 2026 or possibly only in 2027.

In March, the ONS postponed the publication of trade and producer price inflation datasets. The trade dataset was eventually published a couple of weeks later than planned.

The Bank of England normally uses the ONS' labour statistics as part of its decision-making process on interest rates.

The ONS said it would slow its transition away from legacy systems, something that it said would increase uncertainty about future costs.

(Reporting by Suban Abdulla, editing by Andy Bruce and Hugh Lawson)