Statistically Speaking

About Statistically Speaking

Statistically Speaking is the Office for National Statistics' podcast, offering in-depth interviews on the latest hot topics in the world of data, taking a peek behind the scenes of the UK's largest independent producer of official statistics and exploring the stories behind the numbers.

Publisher

Statistically Speaking

Category

news · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

24 Jan 2022

Latest episode

24 Mar 2026

Latest episodes

28 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   24 Mar 2026

   Supermarket Sweep: Measuring inflation with over a billion scanner beeps

   Miles and guests unpack how the ONS is collecting the prices from more than a billion supermarket checkout and online sales to measure UK inflation. Transcript Scanner data podcast transcript Miles: Hello and welcome to statistically speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode, we're taking an in depth look at a very big change in how the ONS produces its estimates of inflation, no longer the sole preserve of clipboard wielding prices collectors roaming the supermarket aisles. The digital revolution has now fully arrived. From this month, the UK's inflation indices are now partly based on millions of prices data gathered directly from the tills or scanners, to be precise. How is it all done? What is the role of Taylor Swift in all this? Yes, there is one. And what are the benefits for economists, decision makers and all of us ordinary folk who worry about the cost of living. Here to unpack it all for us is Mike Hardy, who has led the project here at the ONS, and top economist and former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, Jonathan Haskel, professor of economics at Imperial College London. Professor to start with you: to understand what's changed, it'd probably be helpful to remind ourselves how consumer prices inflation has until now been calculated. Essentially, it was the ONS and its agents checking the prices of 1000s of items on a monthly basis to see how they changed. Jonathan: Yeah, that's right, and the ONS has gone to an enormous amount of effort in order to make that collection representative and make it consistent. But of course, in the modern era of scanner, data, computers, e commerce, things like that, there are other ways of doing it. I guess the important point, which Mike can talk about some more, is that one of the things that we know from statistics is that having a big sample isn't necessarily going to be better if you have a representative sample to start with. So I think one of the interesting points about all of this is whilst the scanner data is collecting many more data points, it's a fascinating check on the representativeness or otherwise of the ONS survey and the procedures thus far as to whether the actual average of all of that will turn out to be very different or similar to what's done before. It's a great advantage to have all of this extra data, but one shouldn't overstate either the advantage or use it as a way of rubbishing what the ONS has been doing in the past. Miles: So to put it this way, perhaps then, what the ONS has traditionally been doing in collecting prices, is to take this big monthly snapshot of retailing and prices, and what people have been paying for items. What it's got now, what it's moving to in the digital age is moving from a still picture, perhaps to a rolling 4k video, and from that, it can find out exactly what has been missed out of the inflation calculations previously. Jonathan: Well, I'll just put a little bit of a spin on that. One of the things that the price collectors do, and they're very, very careful to do, is to make sure that that snapshot is consistent across the snapshots, if you sort of see what I mean. So there is a bit of a rolling element to those snapshots already, because, for example, if you're going to collect the price of, let us say, Ladies jeans, which is something that I was doing with the price collector recently, you want to be sure you collect the price for the same good over time. And the point about the price collectors is they're extremely conscientious about making sure that, in the case of ladies jeans, they are coloured blue. They've got either a flared leg or not a flared leg. They've got the same number of pockets, they've got the same amount of stitching, they've got different decorations on them. To make sure that those goods remain the same is actually very important, and that's something actually which the hand collection can do. And as I say, I think that means that the snapshot element is maybe not quite the right metaphor, if I may say, miles. It is the relation. It's a consistent element over time, a consistent snapshot if that's using a metaphor Miles: That said it's more than just blindly following the same list of products every month. But nonetheless, the traditional way of doing things has had significant. What do you think those are? Jonathan: I guess the limitations are that when one is collecting a sample, any kind of sample at all, one is always doing one's best to try to hope that that's a representative sample, and having more data then is going to help if it turns out that the sample is unrepresentative. So I think that's one part of it. I think the other part of it is, of course, it's becoming increasingly costly to hand collect these numbers, and you know, like any public agency, one wants to be as careful as one possibly can with taxpayers money. That's the sort of second thing. And the third thing is, especially in the era of the Internet and dynamic pricing and so forth, these prices change, you know, at sort of dizzying rates as firms change their prices throughout the product cycle of the good. And therefore the sort of consistent snapshots may miss some of that variation, Miles: And all that data, of course, is out there to be learned from, isn't it? Essentially, Mike, is that what the scanner data project has been, it's been all about harvesting that data and using it to produce what's being described as a step change in how inflation is calculated. Mike: So we've been transforming our consumer price statistics for some time, and we've been acquiring a wide range of data sources with the aim of improving the quality and granularity of our consumer price statistics. So in recent years, we've used administrative data for rail fares and second hand cars, and we will be incorporating grocery scanner data for 50% of the grocery market, where we will be moving from using around 25,000 prices for those retailers to 300 million derived from the sale of over a billion products, so much more granular and rich information on the prices within those retailers. Importantly, as well, we not only have the price of everything within a store, so we move away from the sample that Jonathan described. So taking the price of a small number of products within each store to collecting all of the prices within store, from supermarket checkouts to also getting a better understanding of how much of each product people are purchasing. So that gives us a much clearer picture of inflation by using these large administrative data sets. Miles: Because the purpose here is to get a sense of how the cost of living is changing for people as well, isn't it? And presumably, if you're just checking the same prices of the same goods month after month, you're not understanding about how price changes are influencing people's purchasing decisions. Does it help with that? Mike: Yeah, so the scanner data, as I said, gives us a complete kind of picture of all the prices within a store, and it gives us the underlying quantities, so how much of each particular product is being purchased, it also gives us the price at the till, rather than the price on the shelf. So that captures a number of different things that we were unable to capture with the sample data. So the first being if consumers switch from a premium to a value brand, for example, in response to cost of living rising. We pick that up in the scanner data and also discounting, we can better reflect that particularly store cards, because we now understand for a particular product, total spending on that product and the quantity of that product sold, which allows us to get an average price for that product. So we better capture store discount cards, which are available in many of the supermarkets. Miles: And so by getting a sense of the changing availability of products and what people are actually spending on them, it becomes much more useful then as a cost of living index as well as simply a measure of price change. Yes. Mike: So the way we currently produce our inflation statistics is that we have a large virtual shopping basket of goods and services. There are 760 items in that basket. We set the weights at the start of the year, and we set the basket, and then we track the prices of those 760 representative items throughout the year. What the scanner data allows us to do at a very detailed level for certain is what we describe as consumption segments. So a consumption segment would be rice for example, is to reflect change in consumer spending patterns within that consumption segment. So for example, if somebody changes the type of rice that they're buying, they decide to buy microwave rice instead of basmati rice, or they decide to switch from a premium rice product to a value rice product, then we'd capture that in the scanner data on a monthly basis, whereas in the previous approach, we'd just monitor the price of a small number of products. So maybe we would monitor the price of microwave rice and basmati rice just over the year. But now with the scanner data, we have the price of all rice sold within a store, and we can reflect people's changing consumer spending patterns when purchasing a particular consumption segment, which I've described here as rice. Miles: And that in turn, I guess, can also influence the way you weight the index as well in future, because that's a fundamental part of calculating inflation that perhaps a lot of people don't fully appreciate. Mike: Yeah, so it'll still be a fixed basket, but the lowest level of aggregation, so that the most detailed data that we have -  that data that's coming in from retailers, where we have the kind of total sales plus the quantity, which allows us to derive a price or a unit cost within that calculation - we would reflect kind of change in weights at that very detailed level. But it will still remain a fixed basket that most of our stakeholders are familiar with, because at a higher level in the aggregation, we constrain the weights at the start of the year. Miles: What was involved in getting these changes so far? It sounds like a huge project, and presumably, first you had to get the retailers on board. Mike: Yes, that in itself was a huge undertaking. We've been engaging with the grocery sector for a number of years. We have the Digital Economy Act in the UK, which is a legal gateway for us to access the data. But instead of using the legislation, we wanted to work collaboratively with the retailers. So we started by engaging with them and requesting the data naturally. They had a range of questions about what we needed the data for, how we were going to publish it, how it was going to be stored. We needed to ensure that we were kind of meeting all of their requirements in terms of them transferring across the data, and they needed to be confident that we are using it for the public good, and there wouldn't be data leaks from their perspective, so that the data are tightly controlled. So that was a process in itself, which took a number of years. Then the existing systems that we have at ONS had to be moved to the cloud because they just simply weren't capable of processing the millions and millions of data points that we have for scanner data. And the scanner data is very different in nature to sample data, so we had to develop a wide range of methods to use the data. So we have two advisory panels. Jonathan's actually Chair of our stakeholder panel, but we also have a technical panel as well. So over the number of years that we've been developing this project, they've been advising us on the methods that we should be using. We've also been engaging with international experts and other national statistics institutes as well. So we had to, you know, gain access to the data. And that's a fairly new area for ONS, commercial kind of data partnerships. You know, we had to move all of the existing IT infrastructure to the cloud, because you need to aggregate the scanner data with the kind of locally collected data, so the data collected in stores. And we also had to develop a wide range of methods as well. The challenge here as well is that our risk appetite is close to zero with consumer price statistics. They are used to inform pensions, benefits, taxes, student loans. So we need to get the numbers right. So our risk appetite has been quite low, and that's quite a difficult tension to manage when you're kind of trailblazing in a number of different areas, whether that's data acquisition systems and methods, but at the same time, you need to ensure that you get the numbers right. So we've ensured that we've taken some time to make sure that, you know, we're comfortable with the methods that are in place and the processes to be able to produce our inflation statistics on a monthly basis. Miles: And one of the reasons, I guess, it's taken a few years to get all this in train and deliver the results is you had to check whether or not your new estimates of inflation were going to be radically different from the ones that have been published already, because that would itself have had some pretty profound consequences, wouldn't it? How did you provide that assurance? Mike: We make changes to our consumer price statistics every March. That's when the basket is updated. That's when the weights are updated. So going back to the beginning of last year, we felt in a reasonably good position to implement scanner data at that point in time, we were nearly ready, but working with the stakeholder advisory panel and broader group of stakeholders. So over the last year, we've been parallel running the data in the background. So every month, we obviously publish the numbers, and then alongside that in the background, we've been producing prices index and other measures, including grocery scanner data and cross checking it against the published estimates. Miles: How closely do they align now? Mike: Very well. So the impact at a headline level, for the duration of the impact analysis, which is from 2019, up to pretty much the current period, is kind of negative 0. percentage points for CPI. So that is a small impact at headline. We should note, though, that in 39 of the 66 months, the headline rate would have been different, albeit slightly different, in most of those months. A number of takeaways from this. I think we can have confidence, as Jonathan said, in the kind of sample approach that we currently take at a headline level, you know that's robust. We have a good sample design. What the scanner data allows us to do is get deeper insights into what's driving inflation. So over that period, we tended to find that inflation was slightly higher at the beginning of that period, and then lower from 2022 onwards. And that's why the average over the period is small, because there's an element of off setting. But I'll give you one example of where we've been able to provide deeper insights. So from 2022 onwards, where inflation, utilizing the scanner data was slightly lower, in some of the categories, actually inflation was higher, such as bread and cereals and oils and fats. And that can be attributed within those categories to breakfast cereals and margarine, which are products affected by the Russia, Ukraine war. So we're seeing the impact at a more granular level using the scanner data and being able to better capture changes in price, Miles Did it have a slightly predictive effect? Then you could spot early examples of inflationary pressures coming through better than has been possible before. Mike: Well, I wouldn't say early. You know, our role is to produce inflation for periods in the past, forecasting inflation is more of a job for the Bank of England, but at a more detailed level, yes, we could definitely see insights that we were not able to see with the sample data that we were using prior to the implementation of scanner data. Miles: And Jonathan, from the economist point of view, looking at the new scanner data driven inflation estimates and the path of price changes that that reveals, does it materially change the macroeconomic story? Jonathan I'm not sure it does actually miles, which may come as a big disappointment to listeners to this podcast who are thinking: well, why has Mike and his team put in all this effort? But in a sense, it's actually a very good result because it goes back to what I was trying to say earlier on, which is it suggests that the sampling frame that the ONS were using to sample a subset of all these prices was actually a pretty well chosen frame. So on the sort of headline kind of effect, it doesn't change things much. Where it does change things is in the detail, as Mike has just been saying, and especially since this is groceries data around food inflation and food prices. And the reason, Miles, I find that important, and I think the community of economists will find that important, is I had the privilege of being on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee up until a year and a half ago, and especially Mike mentioned it during the war in Ukraine, we were very attentive on the committee to changes in food prices, because changes in food prices turn out, the evidence suggests, to be extremely salient to consumers when they're thinking about, you know, how their cost of living is really affected. So since there's going to be much more colour on how it is those food prices have changed, I think that's going to help policy makers, for example, at the Bank of England, get under the hood a little bit of the types of price changes which are very salient to consumers. Miles So would it be fair to say then, looking back as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, thinking about potential changes in interest rates, it might not necessarily have led you to make a different decision, but it would have made you better informed or more confident in that decision. Jonathan I think that's right. I don't think we would have changed our decision. And in any case, one never makes policy decisions in hindsight, you know. What we know now about the covid vaccine, we didn't know then, and so of course, we would have made a different decision, but we didn't know that. Now, I don't think it would have changed the decision, but as I say, I think since especially these food prices are so salient to consumers, it's going to allow the current Committee, which you know, again, to be clear, I'm not on, so this is just me speculating. It's going to allow the current committee to have a much better view as to what these various price changes are and what it is consumers are doing. And that's going to turn out, I think, to be extremely, or potentially extremely important. Because if the current rise in energy prices is maintained for a long time that might well feed through to food prices in various ways, and then we're going to need all the detail that Mike and his team are providing in order to make better policy. Miles Lots of information about price changes here, but also we're getting an insight into sales volumes as well. Are we not, Mike, even though we're not at this stage actually using these data to compile the retail sales indices? Mike: So we're not at this stage, the focus is consumer price statistics and using the scanner data for 50% of the market in March. And then there is a plan to expand that market coverage moving forwards and onboarding more retailers. There's potential to use these data sources in other parts of the ONS, you know, for example, in national accounts, for household expenditure and for retail sales. And we'll work collaboratively with the retailers if we want to use their data for other statistics moving forwards. But there are certainly benefits to using these data sources beyond prices Miles You mentioned earlier work that had to go on with retailers to get them to get their confidence in all of this, and presumably there needs to be a clear message to shoppers, it's not about spying on people's shopping habits? Mike No, it's a really good point, actually. So we do not have access to what individuals are purchasing. We just get aggregated data. So for a product that's sold within a store, we know the total value of sales, and we know the number of that product that have been sold, we do not know what individuals are purchasing in store, so we don't have access to the loyalty card data which would give us that information. Miles And that brings us to a very important point that's always worth stating about official statistics. Generally, the ONS will never publish anything that discloses the identity of any individual or indeed any retail outlet, so we can't even say which specific retailers are taking part, although you do have good coverage of the sector, Mike Yes, so at this stage, we can just say we have coverage of 50% of the market. Co Op are the only retailer that are happy to be named, and we've previously done a press release with them. The other retailers that are included within that 50% have explicitly asked not to be named as a data provider, which we will obviously respect. Miles And as you say, it's all put into a big aggregated pot of data anyway, although it does provide some local and regional insights as well, of course, that perhaps weren't there in such quantity before Mike It does. So the scanner data that we receive for the retailers that are providing data, we have that broken down by store. So what we do by region is aggregate each of the retailers data together with our local collection data. So I should highlight that that's not disclosive. So it's not possible to identify any retailer within those statistics, but we will be publishing some micro data by region for our stakeholders. I should also note, as well Miles, we've talked a lot about the impact of the headline level being quite small, there are other benefits to this project. So one is that it de risks the ongoing production of consumer price statistics. So some of the systems that we previously had in place had been in place since the 90s and they needed to be moved to a modern alternative so as part of that work we've done that, and also it sets a really good foundation for the future. So now we have the IT infrastructure, the methods in place to be able to use alternative data sources for other parts of the basket. So it gives us a very good foundation to transform our consumer price statistics moving forwards. Miles Jonathan, coming back to you and the economist's point of view, what is the potential? We talked already, obviously, about the corroborative value of producing inflation statistics with much more certainty than before, but what do you see as the broader economic value and insights that we're getting from this now? Jonathan I think there are two. One is, as I was mentioning before, a more sort of forensic vision about what it is that consumers are doing. The second, though, is a little bit more indirect, but let me put it on the table anyway. Miles, which is, as Mike has been saying, in order to implement this, the statistics agency ONS, or whoever, whichever statistics agency in the world is going to do this is going to need to invest in it and new processes and new equipment and so forth. And that, of course, spreading that good practice over all areas of this, and I'm not just talking about the ONS, I'm talking about any statistics agency anywhere in the world, will be very, very helpful, because, of course, that would improve all of the data collection processes in the statistics agency, and for economists, that would be an enormous boon. Miles Mike, can we turn to some of the other benefits and some of the other aspects of the general improvement of inflation statistics that coincide with the introduction of scanner data this month. Intrigued to hear about something called the Taylor Swift effect. Can you unpack what that is and why it's relevant to all this? Mike So the famous Taylor Swift effect. This is in relation to hotel prices. So we currently collect previously collected hotel prices on a particular date in the month, and when there was a Taylor Swift concert close to one of the cities that we were collecting hotel prices in, that had an impact on hotel prices on that particular day, so that then, in turn, had an impact on the hotels index, which then kind of fed into the headline measure. So what we've done in response to that is to collect prices on two days during the month, so that those kind of one off events such as a Taylor Swift concert or, you know, a sporting event, do not have such a disproportionate impact on our headline measures of inflation. We still want to capture that price increase, but by collecting on two dates over the month rather than one, we're softening its impact. And I think that's only right because it's not necessarily representative of hotel prices across the UK. Miles So you can't blame Taylor Swift for higher inflation. Is the message as it was simply a quirk of how prices were collected by taking those single points, which sometimes happened to fall on days when there were big events going, Mike Yes, that's because we were collecting the hotel price on, you know, one particular day during the month. We've already announced that we'll be changing that for the forthcoming year to two dates during the month. But you know, something we may consider over the medium to longer term is whether we use administrative data for hotels, and that would certainly soften the impact of one off events in a particular city, because you'd be collecting data over the entire month. We already collect data across a wide range of locations, but having many more data points would soften the impact of those kind of one off events. Jonathan You're right to ask Miles about the Taylor Swift effect on inflation. And I had the privilege of being on the Monetary Policy Committee at the time, and I remember we discussed this. There's bad news and good news so that the bad news is that I was only vaguely aware of Taylor Swift's music. Thanks to my children, I know something about it, but I was no great expert. The good news was that, because the ONS were very open about the collection protocols, which Mike has just talked about, we were actually able, as a committee, to sort of reverse engineer what inflation would have been had Taylor Swift not been there. And that enabled us to essentially look through what was just a volatile bit of the index. So I'm pleased to say that this was an example where, you know, communication between bureaucratic agencies, which can maybe be improved, and often it's maybe not as good as it might be, was a case where, actually, it worked quite well. And I think it's for others to judge, but I think the bank did not make a bad policy mistake. Miles Yeah, I guess it's a limitation, isn't it? Of calculating inflation, you've got to pick a day on which to take the sample prices. If you happen to pick the day when Taylor's in town, it's going to have a distorting effect. Jonathan Oh, and sporting, as Mike was saying, sporting effects, the World Cup and all that kind of thing. But as I say, I think this is just an example of where, in fact, the lines of communication between the bank and the ONS actually work very well. And as I say, we were very aware on the committee I was on at the time. We're very aware of what the biases were, and I think that's sort of quite a nice, sort of mini lesson for how the bureaucracy worked. Even if our musical taste didn't work quite so well, at least the bureaucracy did function on this occasion. Miles It wasn't you there pushing up the hotel prices in Cardiff then! I think we can be fairly, fairly confident of that. But we have another example, though, don't we? A more regular example recently, and that's the collection of airfares. It's similar thing, isn't it, over holiday periods gone? Jonathan Well, again, that's exactly right, but again, I sort of hate to be, you know, boring the listeners with a tale of bureaucratic interrelations. But as I say, I think this is an example where the communication between the policy making authorities and the stats agency worked well on this occasion. We're aware of the ONS protocols. They were open with us, but you know that was not to be then pushed on further about how these things are collected. And if you're aware of that, you can then go to the Monetary Policy Committee, or whatever it might be, and make them aware about what all these biases might be. And so what I think is an important effect in the headline, has less of an effect on the chances, as I say, in this in this case of the bank, of making a policy mistake, Miles You can make sure these things are priced in as they say but there's a point about public confidence as well, though, isn't there? People are rightfully sceptical, and a lot of people claim there's nothing as misleading as an average particularly when it comes to the collection of prices. Jonathan Well, it's both the average and the volatility, which I think is difficult. And so when ONS staff are on the radio explaining what the inflation numbers are, they often get rather held up in some ways of explaining particularly volatile components, such as hotels and such as airfares, and I don't know what that does for the confidence of people in the overall index. I mean, in some sense, that means that the ONS are doing their job about collecting what the index is and sticking to international protocol on all of this, which in some sense is a confidence booster. But I can quite understand that people listening to a description about how volatile these things are, they might just say, Well, you know, I'm really not sure about what this index is telling me. So I think it's a communications problem ultimately as well. Miles Well, certainly. Well, we work hard at the ONS to mitigate, as you say, but I guess the fundamental point for people to understand is that the more data that's going in, the more reliable your estimates, at least more comprehensive your estimates are going to be coming out, Jonathan But also the protocols that Mike's been talking about, if I may say, about not concentrating data collection on a particular day which might coincide with a Taylor Swift concert. Or in the case of airfares, it might be half term on that particular day, and the airfares are particularly high and so forth. So flexing those methodological issues, I think, is going to help smooth out some of this volatility. Miles Okay, in terms of the International picture, how advanced would you say the UK is now compared to other, you know, similar economies and the way it calculates inflation? Mike So there are some countries that adopted scanner data, you know, a number of years ago, such as the Netherlands: early adopters. I think they've had scanner data in their consumer price statistics for at least 10 years, perhaps more. Then there are a range of other countries that are in a similar position to us who have recently stood up projects to utilize scanner data. So, you know, during our journey, we've relied heavily on international best practice and working with other NSIs to learn from them and their experiences of utilizing scanner data. And now we're in a position where we're about to implement grocery scanner data. You know, we've ensured that we are also sharing best practice with other NSIs as well, as they start to embark on this journey. Miles So not quite the first but among the sort of first wave, then? Mike Among the chasing pack, I'd say Yes, Miles Jonathan, could I finish off with you then with a question all about the bigger distant future. When you take a big step forward like this and introduce a huge increase in the amount of data, it presents a sort of tantalizing vision of the future, Jonathan, does it not? Where we're able to measure the economy almost in in real time, and the insights that that might be able to produce is that pie in the sky, or do you think we will get there eventually, that you could almost have a daily estimate of GDP, if that was worthwhile, or, perhaps more usefully, real time estimates of household incomes, for example, see how people are getting on? Jonathan I think Miles, it's a fascinating conjecture, and my immediate reaction is, we don't want to overstate this again, for the reason I've been saying it's not necessarily the case that more data is better. We want to be sampling representatively which the ONS seems to have been doing, even though it's only collecting 25,000 prices a month. Those 25,000 appear to be fairly representative. On the other hand, if there's a lot of dynamics to those prices, you know, discounts, changes in quality, you know, sort of digital changes to all these various prices. We want us as a statistics agency and as a measurement community, to be picking all that stuff up as well. So that seems to me to be the vision about going on the digital side and collecting all of this: that we can get much finer grain information about these prices. But as I say, I don't want to overstate it. Mike won't take any of the credit, but I'm going to give him some credit. It is down to Mike and his team. As I say, that 25,000 prices turns out to be an amazingly representative sample of the approximately now 300 million prices which are being collected instead. Miles Well, it's a lovely fitting note on which to wrap it up, and that is a fitting moment to leave this topic. Our sincere thanks to guests Mike Hardy and Professor Jonathan Haskell. Also to our producer Julia short. It's time for me to say goodbye as well as this is my last podcast before I stand down as head of media for the ONS after 13 fascinating years. But you can expect these podcasts to continue as of course, will the ONS itself. So don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye.

2. 

   27 Jan 2026

   The road ahead for the ONS: a conversation with Darren Tierney

   Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a pivotal moment for the organisation. In a new episode of Statistically Speaking our host Miles Fletcher sits down with Darren to talk about what happens next. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher. Now, if you've followed the UK news much over the past year, you'll know the ONS has been under more scrutiny than at any point in its history, questions about trust, priorities, its core economic data and whether the organisation has simply been trying to do too much at once, have all been very publicly aired. Today's episode is about what happens next. Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a moment when some of the UK's most relied upon statistics, especially those based on the Labor Force Survey, were under real pressure. In this conversation, we'll talk about Darren's background in government, running large, complex public services and helping to craft and enact key policies. We'll explore how data has shaped his career so far, and what he found when he arrived at the ONS. We'll also dig into some of the hardest questions facing the organisation, and what absolutely has to be fixed first, what may need to stop, how user expectations are being balanced with that and how full confidence in official statistics can be restored. This isn't just an internal reset. What the ONS does and how well it does it matters to policymakers, businesses and the public alike. So join us as we talk about focus, priorities, and the road ahead. So then Darren, to begin at the beginning, you're not an economist or statistician by profession yourself. What motivated you to take leadership of what is the central organisation in UK statistics? DARREN TIERNEY Sure, well look as a non-statistician you can imagine I was a little bit daunted when this prospect first came along for precisely that reason.  I was kind of worried that maybe not being a statistician or an economist might be a real drawback but as I thought more about the job, and more about what was needed for the organisation at the time, and with the split of the roles, I thought actually, I can really help. But what really drew me to the role was that although I'm not a statistician, Iv'e been an avid consumer of ONS products for the 25 years that I've been a policy wonk in Whitehall. And going from a good policy professional to a great one, requires both access to good data and also a real understanding of it and knowing how to use it. And it's that background that kind of helped me and really got me into it, and so I saw it as a real opportunity to come and help an organisation that really couldn't be any more consequential for the UK. MILES FLETCHER The Devereux review said that what was needed was someone with really serious operational experience, having run serious civil service operations, and you bring plenty of that. Could you just detail some of that? You've had a very strong rise, you know, through the ranks of the civil service. Just trace that for us, if you would. DT Yeah. So I started life in what was the old Prescott empire of DETR, which was environment and transport in the regions as a policy wonk working on aviation. I then went and joined the Ministry of Justice, where I spent three years in the private offices of Harriet Harman, Jack Straw and Ken Clarke, and that kind of real frontline policy making, as it were, is the thing that I did a lot of in the first half of my career. The second half of my career, which is much more relevant to the ONS, was centred around transformation and change. And again, I spent about 12 years or so in the MOJ, and my senior career there was about transforming systems and running big programs. And I went from there to international trade, just after the Referendum, where like a lot of officials at the time, I was quite keen to run to where the energy or the fire was after Brexit. But I didn't fancy working DExEU, and this new department called Trade seemed quite interesting. So I went there, and again, this was a kind of brand new department, and it grew from a few hundred people to about four and a half thousand. And so that kind of building and running the department as a strategy director for investments and exports,  I guess those two experiences in justice and trade are the two that I rely on most in this role. MF So you spent time in the corridors of power then, the ministerial heights of the civil service, but also having to try and make the machine run efficiently as well, and to deliver public services and achieve policies in the real world. What role has data played in that? And what sort of statistics were you using? What sort of insights were you getting? Can you share some experiences of how that's shaped your career, and your understanding, particularly of the job in hand here at the ONS. DT Sure, I guess the job where it was most relevant was when I was in justice, where I worked in civil and family policy, Legal Aid and supporting on prison reform, and particularly on youth justice reform, and maybe that's a good example to pull out. Justice is one of those areas where people have very strong views about what the right policy prescription is, but there's often quite a lack of evidence that goes behind some of these strong policy positions, if I can put it like that, and one of the things that bedevilled us was trying to turn very strong ministerial desire for action across the human justice system into something that was evidence based, and where we could point to proof that these things would work, and we did that several times in the youth justice system. Perhaps the one that I look back on most fondly in the youth estate...We were constantly telling ourselves, and indeed the world, that kids in the youth estate were getting thirty hours a week of education, and that was true in the sense that that's what we were buying. We were procuring thirty hours a week from providers, but the kids in the estate were not getting thirty hours a week and we didn't really know until we sent in a team of researchers from the MOJ analytical team to do some surveys, and then we also analysed some of the ROI coming out of that estate. And of course, what we discovered was that although we were buying thirty hours of education, it was always being disrupted by all the other services that these kids needed to access. So every dentist, every doctor, every lawyer that was coming in to interact with those kids, that was happening during what would otherwise be the school day, but we didn't really know that. And for years, we were kind of running this system and telling ourselves and indeed telling the world, that this was what was going on, but having analyzed that system and got ourselves some real data we were able to change that system so that it was education first, and all of those other ancillary services would take place outside of the school day. So sometimes it can be quite basic bits of analysis that can result in the biggest changes. MF I guess the lesson there is, we always need to never totally trust the data we've got and find better insights and better ways of looking at things. And I guess that leads us into the challenge here at the ONS. What were your first impressions when you took the plunge in, suffice to say, quite interesting circumstances in the earlier part of 2025. What did you make of your earliest days here at the ONS and formulating what needed to be done? DT Your characterization of it is right. Before I even arrived, I was talking to a lot of the stakeholders, including Robert Devereux and others, and in doing that and in reading around the issues, I ended up getting quite a negative view of what was going on, perhaps understandably, because that was what was being reported. So I was expecting an organization that was perhaps much more kind of browbeaten than the one I found. And that's not to sound complacent at all, but the thing that I was surprised at when I arrived was just the desire for progress, for action, for us to kind of turn the page, and for us to get back to being a respected NSI. And that that sort of energy that I found amongst the senior team was great because I was expecting to have to do quite a lot of jigging up of the system to get us into that mode, but actually, when I arrived, people were already there. So that was my first impression. My second impression really was just the quality of the people here, the skills, the experience and the expertise here at the ONS is genuinely inspiring. And I said this to Civil Service World a few weeks ago. We abuse the phrase "world class" in Whitehall, we often claim things are world class when they're not, but we do have some genuine world class expertise in the ONS and I was genuinely inspired when getting to meet some of those people during the first few days and weeks. MF It sounds as though people had a good idea of what needed to be done, what was coming out in the media, and of the various inquiries that took place last year, was that the general feeling was that ONS had become spread too thin, and needed to prioritize on those things that ONS is best known for. It does have a worldwide reputation for, crucially, what people most rely upon it to get it right, prioritizing those. Was that what emerged? DT It really was. And that sense that getting back to the core business of an NSI (National Statistical Institute) was what people were people were really hungry for us to do. I think there is a danger when saying something like that, of sounding like no one valued that hugely innovative work that happened during the pandemic. And that's definitely not the case. I think the reputation of the ONS developed during the pandemic for innovation, for fleet footedness, and of doing some brilliant work in support of the country at a time when it was most needed, is genuinely well recognized across the system. But I think alongside that, there was a sense that perhaps the organisation took its eye off the ball on the core functions of an NSI. And certainly, in my first few weeks when I went to see the Governor of the Bank and the Chancellor, they were really clear that what they need from us right now, is a real focus back on those core economic statistics and population statistics. So yeah, that was a very strong sense in those first few weeks MF But of course, that means stopping doing some things. What is being stopped so far? What do you think is going to have to stop? How is that process proceeding? DT So alongside my arrival, and just before, the organization had done some useful internal things to prioritise. So we moved some money around from the IDP programme. MF That's the Integrated Data Programe, bringing in data from other parts of government. DT And as that programme was coming to an end, we moved some resource from that. We also moved some people from one of our specialist hubs, to get them behind the recovery plans. There was some kind of internal prioritisation as it were, that happened as I was arriving, which was essential really, just to get us on the front foot, to then begin the recruitment of 150 extra people to come and work behind the recovery plans, and we've got around one hundred of those in place, and in Q! This year we will hire the rest. But that wasn't sufficient, so alongside that we made plans for prioritizing our outputs and that resulted in the kind of engagement that we have been doing for the last few weeks. So that process is still underway, and we are hoping in the next few weeks to bring some of those elements to a conclusion. I mean, I think inevitably, as we've done that, there are lots of things that people would like us to keep doing, but I hope they understand, and in deciding what to de-prioritise, again, there's a risk that people think that no one values that work. And of course, that's not true. There are tonnes of people out there who really, really value the output that we might stop, but my message to them is that we really need to focus now, it's quite existential for us to focus on the recovery plans on economic and population statistics, to get those right. There won't be any new money coming our way, so we'll have to prioritize internally. None of that necessarily means that it will be forever, but it is important that we do it, so we're on top of what we need to be on top of for the next period. MF It's clear that the pressure is ONS, particularly to get those core economic statistics right, and we'll talk a little bit more about the detail on that. But firstly, on this broad subject of user expectations. Parliament essentially asks the ONS to do two things; that's to provide the statistics to help policy makers, but also to inform the public as well on social and economic issues. Is there a danger in these circumstances, when demands from the bank and the Treasury are to get the first part of that right, is there a risk with the public interest, data which people access to form their own judgment. Is there a risk of that taking second place? DT I think there is a risk of that, but we're very alive to it. And one of the good things that we did towards the end of last year is we were finalizing our mission statement. And in kind of doing that consultation on that mission statement internally, one of the phrases that we added at the end of our mission statement was to inform the public, and that was  a deliberate decision to remind ourselves about that statutory underpinning that we have, but also to remind ourselves that we can't just focus on one thing. So as much as we need to prioritize, I'm very clear that we have more than one function. We're not just an Economics Institute, we do far more than that, and we will continue to do more than that.  And that business to inform the public is absolutely core to what we're about. So your right to raise it as a risk, but I think it's one that we've clocked, and one that we're very clear about. MF Okay, let's focus on one aspect of the turnaround plans in progress at the moment, which has attracted more attention than any single issue facing the ONS currently, and that's the very important Labour Force Survey (LFS). That's how the employment figures for the UK essentially have been complied for some decades now. It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest, regular household survey in the country, depended on by policy makers, economic commentators and, of course, politicians as well. It got itself into a bit of a state, didn't it? The response rates, it's not too dramatic to say, collapsed during the wake of the pandemic. How important is getting that right among your priorities, and what is progress to date, and what still needs to be done? DT You're right to raise that. I mean, I've been saying to people that there isn't one single thing that we will fix in the ONS where we will declare victory. This will be an ongoing effort and continuous improvement. But if there was one thing that is quite totemic in the recovery it will be the labour force survey and the transformed labour force survey. So there's a considerable amount of effort across the organization in getting behind both of those bits of work. So it is quite totemic. You're right. It's the single biggest thing that the bank and the Treasury would like us to get on top of, and it also does go to credibility, because of the credibility of the response rates. So it is hugely important. I've been really impressed by the quality of the work that's been going on to try and get on top of it. And the team that's there is absolutely laser focused, doing both of those things at the same time. So the first things is fixing the current labour force survey as far as we can, and they've made some real progress with that, so getting response rates back up to pre covid levels. We've now got a field force workforce at similar levels, and we're starting to see some real benefit from that. So the OBR at the budget included a reference to the LFS in their budget report where they said they now have more confidence in the survey and I think that's real testament to the amount of work that has gone into it. But alongside that, I think what we do recognize is that the current LFS isn't sustainable in its current setup, so that's why we are working, again, with laser like focus on the transformed survey, to make it more online, a bit shorter, a bit more focused. And I'm really hopeful that that, over the next year will prove itself to be a sustainable answer to this issue. MF The long-term plan is to go out to people with a survey, which does take a lot less time to fill in. And that was one of the criticisms of the traditional one, that it represented a big time commitment for people and perhaps it wasn't surprising that there was a challenge around getting people to take part. But at the same time, we seem to have a particular problem in the UK, where we are on what evidence is available certainly, an outlier in terms of survey response rates. Have you got a sense of what the issue is there? Was it the ONS getting things wrong? Or is it something more profound about the culture now in the UK, that makes people suspicious about taking part in official surveys? DT I think that you're right. We are a bit of an outlier now, because this kind of phenomenon happened everywhere across the globe in the pandemic but we seem to have been worse off than most. I think there is a kind of trust issue across our society in engaging with government agencies on data which is, I think, is more profound than some other societies. So I think we are fighting against that. I think it probably also suffered a bit from being quite a long-standing survey, having grown over time. I think one of the interesting things when you look across the globe though, where countries do this better than we do, at least in terms of response rates, is that most of those countries mandate their social surveys, and certainly their labour force survey equivalents. Now we don't do that here for our social surveys, but I think that's something that is a policy issue for ministers, something that we need to kind of resolve, to decide whether or not that is the long-term answer for a small number of social surveys. MF So that's a conversation in progress at the moment, whether people might be required to take part in these surveys in future. DT Yeah, it is. It was a recommendation in the Leivesley  review that we at least look at it,  so we're doing that to try and establish well what are the pros and cons of that sort of approach, so we can inform future policy decisions by ministers on this issue. I don't for a moment underestimate how tricky a policy issue that is, but I think we do need to confront it so that we can put it to bed, or we can progress it, because we are notable across the globe by not doing that. MF So, there's a clear sense of urgency in the plan with action, as you've said already, to tackle really pressing issues like the Labour Force Survey. So we're getting more people into the field doing interviews and so forth. And in the meantime, a conversation about prioritizing core statistics. But what comes next in 2026, what should people who might be following the ONS look out for from the organization next? DT I think 2026, I've been saying internally, is our year of delivery and action and recovery. So last year, we obviously had the crisis point in the summer. And since the summer, we've been doing a lot of work internally into our overall plans, our mission, how we want to lead the organization, what we want the culture to be, what are our plans for getting on top of the economic and population statistics, preparing for the Census...So there's been lots of planning, lots of strategizing, lots of structural changes, that sort of thing, that I think was absolutely necessary. But the focus for 2026 I think needs to be on execution and delivery. To spend this year delivering against the plans that we've made and that's going to be the focus of the top team for the next twelve months. MF The ONS has enjoyed a reputation for innovation, and that really came out during the pandemic. Is there a risk that innovation will cease or are there new things happening on that front to really improve the overall offering? DT So again, I think that is a risk, and it's something I've talked about within the organization. That because I've come in with such a sharp focus on the recovery plans, it could just be head head down and focus on those things for the next two years. And then wake up in two years time to realise we are vastly behind the times, on AI or some whizzy new ways of using admin data or whatever it might be, and that's why we've done some things internally to make sure we still have some space and some capacity to do that innovation. I'm really keen that we do that, it can't be at the expense of the recovery plans so that's still our number one priority, but we have carved out some expertise and some capacity to still challenge us on how we should be doing statistics in the future. A big part of that will be how do we learn from others on AI and on tech more generally. So watch this space, it's definitely still something that we're focussed on. MF Yeah, the resistance that's out there on some people to take part in those surveys. What about all this data that government has been already it's been a persistent criticism that government collectively hasn't done enough to pool that data and to and to really get get value out of it and to make public services more efficient, policies more effective. DT I think that is a legitimate criticism if I'm honest, you know, it's been a conversation live in Whitehall since I can remember - data sharing and the lack of it. Obviously, there's been huge advances in that recently, some really good innovation around data sharing, including in the ONS, but even more generally, but I still sense there's real risk averse culture around data sharing across government departments that I think we need to try and tackle. For me it's as much about culture and ways of working as it is about legislation and risk. And I'm quite keen that we play our part in pushing the rest of the system on that. I think it's going to be one of the benefits of the split of the role, so that we will have a National Statistician full time being the National Statistician who isn't worried about the running of the ONS. And I'm really keen that whoever that person is, in future, if they can help the system really galvanised around data sharing and data linkage, that will be a real benefit of the new approach. MF What about the culture of the ONS itself? And as you just said, there are two people at the top of the system now, as it were, an incoming national statistician, a you as Perm Sec. Culture has got to be your department, hasn't it? And the Devereaux review talked about some really quite deep-seated cultural issues. What was the culture that greeted you on arrival? And what mechanisms do you think are going to help to create the right culture and deliver the dramatic changes that you're working towards? DT Yes, I think what Robert set out in his report was accurate, and that's certainly what I discovered when I arrived.  I think it manifests itself in a range of ways, but perhaps the two biggest for me are probably a lack of trust across the organization. And that's trust as it was between the board and the executive team, trust between the senior civil service  and the rest of the organization, lack of trust between our trade union colleagues and management, lack of trust between some of the different teams themselves. And I think that that, having been left unchecked, is quite corrosive. I think it's led to some of the issues that Robert set out in his report. I think it also leads to a lack of collaboration, a lack of join up when that is the predominant culture. So we've spent quite a lot of time, of my personal time, has been focused on breaking through some of that. It's quite a hard thing to do within organizations - to change the culture. I've deliberately not had something called a cultural transformation program, I'm not sure they ever really work. I think what we can do instead is just start doing stuff differently, and that's what we've been doing. Some of that has been a bit managerial. We put in place a leadership statement, for example, something the organization could use to hold senior leaders to account. I 've started sharing performance panels for senior civil servants. We've put in place some slightly sharper performance management. We will start doing regular pulse surveys, just to try and instil some of that managerial approach to fixing some issues. But for me it's also about who do we reward and why. One of the things I've been banging on about since I arrived is the "three C's" - that's clarity, consistency and consequences, and these really speak to the culture. And just briefly for listeners, clarity is what are we for, does everyone know what that is, and does everyone agree with it. And that's why we've created a new mission statement. Consistency is, how do you apply that set of values to the things you do on a daily basis, and you don't let it go when times get tough. And then consequences...there has to be both positive and negative consequences for people in the organization for doing the right thing or not. And I think that that kind of framework has taken hold in the organization, and I'm quite keen that we keep using it keep using it as our bellwether for are we doing the right thing. Do we reward the right behaviours, are we all being held to account for how we want the ONS to be. I think that's how we are going to get the change here. MF What would you say to someone who might be thinking of applying to a job at the ONS, they might think well what we do is really important and really interesting, but I've read this stuff in the news which suggests, well, they've got their challenges. DT So this is a live issue. So we've been recruiting for some very senior posts in the last few months, and I've been really haertened by the response that we've had. So for example, we are interviewing later on this month for Director General for Technology in the organization, we had over 200 applications for that, and I spoke to quite a few people who were interested in advance. And, of course, the thing is that once you're away from the heat of the crisis that the organisation was in last summer, for people who want to come and work in this organization, if you're a technology leader, for example, coming to work at the ONS, which basically just does data, you know, we collect, analyse and publish data. That's hugely attractive if you're a senior leader in technology or data. And I think I've been able to persuade them that we've turned the corner on what it's like to work here. So I've been really kind of enthused by both the quality and the number of people who have wanted to come work for us for us in some of those senior roles that we've advertised, but similarly, at all levels of organization. So one of our campaigns to hire some junior analysts across the organisation attracted hundreds and hundreds of applications. So I still think that the core business of the ONSremains very, very attractive to lots of people out there. My job is to turn the page on the culture of the organisation and that remains the case. MF And as we start 2026, what gives you the most confidence that ONS is now on the right path? And what are the main objectives ahead? DT I think there were some emerging plans which were kind of credible, I think we've really strengthened those in the last four or five months. I think the quality of the people will take us a huge way in our transformation and I'm really enthused by that. I always think of Colonel Boyds aphorism of "people, ideas and machines. And in that order." And I think we have excellent people who are generating brilliant ideas, and I think we're getting on top of the machines, as it were, so that we can really transform ourselves. What I really want is for the ONS to be in the news for its outputs and not for the organisation itself, and this year is going to be all about making sure that's true. MF Because of course some people might say, well, we've got AI that's going to revolutionize everything. We're not going to need the ONS anymore. Just how wrong, or indeed right, is that? DT My sense is that AI will have a huge part to play, but it's not going to take over. So again, that aphorism of people, ideas and machines, in that order. And it's the "in that order", that I think is the most important thing. AI will be tremendously helpful to us, but it's never going to replace expertise. So I'm quite keen to harness it, and use it for our internal efficiencies and productivity of course. We should harness some of the great ideas that are emerging out there in the private sector on stats production and surveys, we should absolutely do that, but I don't think we should be naive in assuming that there's suddenly going to be this great fix, I just don't think that's true. So I'm quite keen to continue to kind of experiment with AI, and we've already been doing that in the organization with some success. We want to keep scaling that up, but I want to temper the enthusiasm with some reality, that at least for the foreseeable future, we're still going to be using surveys, we're still going to be using admin data from across the system, and then on top of that we will use some of our AI expertise to help us MF And we're going to have a census in 2031, it survives for another time around... DT It definitely does. The government's taken a very firm decision on that, and we're now ramping that up at quite some level, as we've got the senior team now firmly in place for the Census. This year will mark the ramp up phase in preparation for the test in 2027,  and it's obviously a hugely important thing for us, and I'm quite keen that we get the maximum benefit from ramping up the census at the same time as focussing on our recovery plans. So yeah, so I'm excited about the census MF Darren, thank you so much for that fascinating tour of what you've been doing and what lies ahead. Just finally then, what's your message to everyone who relies on ONS data, or who might be interested in ONS statistics, for 2026? DT My overall message is, work with us. This is a really important time for statistics in the UK. We need everyone's help. If you're a citizen, fill in the surveys that you're asked to fill in as that's hugely beneficial for your systems. If you work in the system, bear with us and lean in and help us, because we will need your help as we get through the recovery phase here. But I'm optimistic that we can turn the corner, and that the statistical system in the UK will be in good health by the time we get to the end of 2026. MF And on that note, we come to the end of this podcast. I think it's fair to say we've heard a clear sense of direction, a renewed focus on the statistics people most rely on, a commitment to improving quality and resilience and the recognition that trust in official data has to be earned and re-earned over time. My thanks to Darren Tierney for joining us, and to you for listening. You can follow developments on everything we've been discussing today by subscribing to future episodes of Statistically Speaking on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also follow us on X, previously known as Twitter, via the at ONS focus feed and do check out the national statistical blog for updates on all things ONS. You can find that at blog.ons.gov.uk, all lower case. I'm Miles Fletcher, and from myself and our producers, Julia Short and Alisha Arthur, goodbye.

3. 

   21 Oct 2025

   Crime data: Numbers, narratives and nuance

   In “Crime: Numbers, Narratives and Nuance” our host Miles Fletcher speaks with Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS and John Rentoul, leading commentator on crime, policing, and the media, about the challenges in interpreting crime data. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking – the official podcast on the UK’s Office for National Statistics. The time we’re returning to the scene of a major statistical topic we’ve touched on before but amid a new and sometimes highly polarised public debate, one we think fully bears further investigation: how best to understand and interpret the crime figures produced and published by ONS. Helping us with our enquiries is Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS. It’s his job to assemble and present the complex statistical picture of crime revealed in two very large and sometimes conflicting data sources. We also have an independent witness in the highly experiences shape of John Rentoul, Chief Political Commentator for the Independent and visiting professor at Kings College London. He’ll be talking about the use and possible abuse of crime figures in the media and political debate. Are the statistics and those who produce them doing enough to enable the public to understand properly the prevalence and nature of crime in our society today? Nick, a big question to start with, some people think crime is going down, other people insist it's going up. Who's right? NICK STRIPE Well, it's a question that sounds simple, doesn't it? And it’s a question I get asked quite a lot. But if you think about the concept of crime, you soon realize that it covers a really huge range of actions and behaviours. If I was a chief constable trying to reduce crime in my area, I’d want to know what kinds of crimes are causing the biggest problems.  So, is it theft, robbery, violence? Domestic abuse? sexual offenses? Maybe it's fraud. And even if you tell me it's theft, then there's still a broad spectrum. So, is that burglary from houses? Is it theft of vehicles? Is it people having things snatched off them in the street? Is there a new thing about theft from doorsteps? Each of those types of theft would have its own trends, patterns and challenges. So, what I'm really saying is that whilst I understand your desire for a single answer, the real stories are in the detail of those different crime types. But I will come back to your question, is crime going up or down? Broadly speaking, I would say we're experiencing much less crime now than we did 20 or 30 years ago. Many crime types have been declining at a fairly steady rate since the mid 1990s and in more recent years, probably since we started to emerge from the pandemic, crime levels have broadly flattened out at that lower level. But some types of crime are rising now, some are still falling, and some are changing in ways that reflect shifts in society, shifts in technology and shifts in policing. MF That's the complex and highly nuanced picture, and it's the one that is designed to best serve those who make policies around crime, those who try to contain crime, those who try to fight it? NS That's right, Miles. And it's a picture that we get from drawing on several different data sources. There are two main ones. One is police recorded crime, and the second one is our independent survey of crime across England and Wales. And then we can use other data sources to provide richness for certain crime types, or to triangulate what we're seeing in those main data sources. And when we pull all of that together, we try and give a rich, nuanced, accurate picture for policy and policing. MF That's the aim of the statistics, but when it comes to public debate and public perceptions, do we risk misleading people by not being able to come up with a single barometer of crime? You can't go on the ONS website and see whether overall offending is up or down for example, or is that a completely pointless exercise? NS Well as I said, different crime types will have different things acting on them at any one point in time. But what we can do, for example through the crime survey, that has measured what I’m going to call traditional types of crime experienced by us as the public. So that's things like theft, that's things like violence, that's things like criminal damage, and in the last 10 years or so, that also includes fraud. And when we look at those types of crimes, we can see that, if you want a single figure, the numbers have come down. And that's when I say that over the last 30 years, there's been a big reduction in crime. If you take violence, theft and criminal damage, about 30 years ago, four in 10 of us, about 40% of us, every year would experience one of those types of crime. Now it's one in 10 of us. So, I can give you that picture for certain types of crime, but there are different ways of measuring and different data sources are better for certain types of crime, so coming up with that overall number is actually quite difficult. MF John, when it comes to political and media debate around crime, there are no simple answers, and yet those are to arenas where we want simple answers. JOHN RENTOUL Well, I think Nick did give a fairly simple answer, which is that if you ask people an open-ended question - have you been the victim of crime over the past 12 months - then the number of people saying yes to that question has gone down very dramatically over the last 30 years. So, in that very simple sense, crime has gone down hugely over the past 30 years. But of course, people don’t feel that, because that requires comparative memory...collective memory over a long period of time, and people are worried about what they read in the papers and what they see on social media. So, people, just as they always think that Britain is becoming a more unequal society, they always think that crime is rising, and it's very difficult to contradict that with simple statistics. MF Isn't that because there’s always  some aspect of crime, some type of crime that’s always rising and it's opposition politicians, headline writers, particularly...of course you'll find lots of sophisticated, nuanced debate in the media...But those who write the headlines like to seize on the negative, don't they? Bad news sells. And you can see how people get these impressions because it’s just the scary stuff they're hearing about. JR Well, possibly, although I think it's probably deeper than that. I think it's just human nature to feel fearful about the threats in society and the way of dealing with that psychologically is to assume that those threats are worse now than they used to be. When you ask people has crime increased, they're not really giving you a statistical answer. They just say yes I'm afraid of various sorts of crime. And, you’re quite right, the sorts of things that stick in people's minds are phone thefts and shoplifting, the sorts of things that get highlighted on social media all the time. MF As they used to say at the end of Crime Watch every week, these types of crimes are rare,  don't have nightmares. Yet, that's no good if you've had your phone nicked or witnessed a shoplifting incident. JR That's right, and what's interesting about those two is that witnessing a shoplifting incident wouldn’t be recorded in the crime survey because you personally are not the victim of that crime. So that’s an example of an incident that has gone up, but that wouldn’t be captured in the survey statistics, although having your phone nicked is something we probably would remember. MF And how responsible would you say our political leaders have been over the years? How responsible perhaps are they being now in the way that they present crime statistics? JR Well, it’s very difficult, isn't it, because it's always partisan between government and opposition because ministers are always saying that crime has gone down, just as they're saying more nurses and doctors are employed in the NHS and all that. It’s one of those statistics that well, certainly for the past 30 years, has been true, but opposition politicians have to try to argue the opposite, and they point to the sorts of crimes that have gone up, such as shoplifting and phone theft. So, it is a constant battle between what sounds to the public like just rival political claims, and the public will just discount more or less what any politician says and just choose to believe what they want to believe. MF Like many big statistical topics, once again, people can argue diametrically opposing things and both be right in a sense... JR Yes, exactly MF ...and have some statistical basis for saying it. So it's the job of this podcast to help people untangle those sorts of complexities and decide for themselves. Let's embark on a little journey then around how the crime statistics, these are the ONS crime statistics for England and Wales, how they are put together, how best to interpret them. And nobody better to guide us through that than yourself Nick, as joint head of crime. Starting at the beginning, because this would have been the original source for crime statistics going back a very long time indeed, and that is police recorded crime. And that sort of conjures up an image of The Bill, doesn't it, or Dixon of Dock Green for older listeners of a desk sergeant sitting there and dutifully recording offenses. Is that what it’s like? NS I’m pretty old myself Miles, but that’s stretching it... MF [Laughter] Yes. Very elderly... NS But yes, police recorded crime is one of the two main sources for crime statistics, and we report what we find in that data every single quarter. It’s why John can confidently tell you that shoplifting, for example, is a current issue because we are seeing record levels of shoplifting offences in police recorded data quarter after quarter at the moment, so something’s going on. But we’ve got to remember that police recorded crime is dependent on a couple of things. The first thing it’s dependent on is what we as the public report to the police. And the second key thing is that, even if we report that to the police, how do the police record that. If we go back 20 odd years, the national crime recording standard was introduced to police recorded crime. And this introduced concepts like if I report a crime, then I am to be believed, and that crime should be recorded. It shouldn't be the case that the police officer waits to find corroborating evidence, or thinks to themselves there’s not much to go on there, I’m not likely to get very far with this and not record it. And there are some rules around that. So I might come and tell you that something's happened to me on a number of occasions, the same person has done something to me on a number of occasions over the past few weeks, that will be recorded as one crime. If I then a week later come and tell you it's happened again, that's a second one, but that first one that could have included lots of different instances, that's just one crime. Then there's a kind of weighting that goes on. So, when we count these things, there's something called the Home Office counting rules. And the most serious crime is what gets counted. You can have an incident that might involve violence, theft, criminal damage and, ultimately fraud, but it'll be the most serious of those crimes that gets counted. Now what happened is, after the introduction of this standard at the start of this century, that really meant you couldn't use police data to measure trends in crime before that, because here was something that should start the current count again. Now, fortunately, we have the crime survey, which was an independent survey to go alongside it. But for the next 10 years, what we saw is that crimes recorded through police recorded crime dropped a lot faster than crimes that were recorded by the crime survey. And about 10 or 12 years ago, that led to people questioning police recorded crime, that led to some detailed audits of police recorded crime, and that led to conclusions that the police were actually not recording everything they should be. And so what's happened in the last 10 years is real dramatic improvements to police recording crime, and we now get different data patterns. So for the last 10 years or so, police recorded crime numbers have gone up, but we understand why. It's because of improvements to police recording practices. At the same time, crime survey estimates have continued to trend down, and that's where we can come and use other data sources to triangulate against those two main data sources. So if I look at data from similar countries like Scotland and Northern Ireland, they match the crime survey data we have here. They don't match  police recorded crime data. And if I look at Home Office outcomes data, which looks at the number of people that are actually charged or summoned for these offenses, the difference over the past 10 or 12 years matches crime survey data. It doesn't match the number of things that are recorded for police reported crime. And that's one of the key things that allows politicians who want to paint a different picture to seize on certain statistics that suit their agenda. MF Improved reporting was bound to lead to an apparent increase, wasn't it? So, it's that point that's got lost. It's because of the improved reporting, and it's been misinterpreted, John, just to bring you in on this, how widely understood is that point, or has it been wilfully ignored in some quarters? JR It's not widely understood, partly because there’s such a strong belief among the public that crime is rising,  that any evidence which appears to support that, such as police recorded crime, tends to get many more shares on social media than the crime survey graph showing that the level of crime is going down. [Transition music] MF So there we are, a crucial and vital source of information there in police recorded crime. John, do you think there's anything the ONS should be doing to help people better understand the strengths and limitations of police recorded crime? JR I would say that what the ONS does on crime is a model of its kind actually.  The reporting of that data is very carefully done, very soberly done, I mean, in a way, almost too restrained, because I think it sort of allows people to cherry pick the little bit that supports their argument rather than the bigger picture. But no, I don't think there is anything much more that can be done, apart from trying to explain how the crime survey works in sort of simple language. But I mean the problem is that, generally speaking, people's understanding of probability surveys, representativeness and weighting of such surveys is not high.  And if you say that the evidence that crime is much lower now than it used to be is from an opinion poll, then people will say, well I've never been asked, you can't trust them, and it's all done by You Gov and they're owned by the Tory party. I mean, it's just very difficult to explain to a lay audience how a proper representative sample survey works. MF Explaining the statistics and communicating them as well as possible, that'll always be an important priority for the ONS, but also, as we said earlier, making sure the policy makers, making sure the police, the experts, academic researchers and so on, have that detailed picture is half of the mission as well. Let's turn then to the other big source of information about crime. It’s one that we've discussed a fair bit already, but let's really unpack it, and that, of course, is the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The crime survey seeks to produce a snapshot of crime as experienced by the entire population, Nick? NS Yeah, that's right, and that removes some of those key variables that are in police reported crime. So, it's a national survey, we sample addresses around the country, we weight the data back to what the shape of the population looks like, and it's very in depth. So, it's not just anecdotal, it's rigorously designed, it's nationally representative, and it's been running for over 40 years now. Every year it involves tens of thousands of detailed interviews with members of the public, and the basic methodology has remained unchanged which is why it's so good for measuring trends over time. And what we're asking people about in terms of their experiences of crime is that we don't care whether they've reported it to the police or not. It's what's actually happened to them, and if they tell us about it, we will record it, and we will assess whether it meets the threshold for a crime or not. So, it's that independence from the police data that's key. It's removing that influence of reporting behaviour and recording practices to try and give us a much clearer picture of actual victimization. MF And how representative is it at the moment, because much has been made elsewhere of the problem ONS has unfortunately been having getting people to fill in the Labor Force Survey, are response rates for the crime survey a better story? NS Well, response rates for the crime survey are one of the, if not the best in the country. But that isn't to say that we haven't seen similar impacts from the pandemic. It's the pandemic that seems to have been this big rift that's changed things. So, for example, on the crime survey prior to the pandemic, about seven in ten addresses would eventually give you responses, and currently it's just under five in ten, so just under 50%. So, we have seen that big drop, but it is still a good response rate, generally speaking, and one of the best across the country. But what we have done, is we have checked the shape of the sample, in terms of completed responses, matches the last census, and it still does very closely. But we're keeping a close eye on it, because there could be things around crime that mean that the more people don't take part, the more chance there is for non-response bias, a technical term, to creep into results, particularly for certain types of crime. MF And that representativeness is so important, isn't it, because some groups are more likely, unfortunately, to be victims of crime than others. NS Absolutely right. Yep. So I mean, if you think about sensitive crimes like sexual offenses, you will see that younger people, particularly younger women, are more likely to be victims. If you look at things like violence or theft from a person, it's those types of people that tend to be out and about more, which again, is often younger people. And that's another example of where societal changes since the pandemic may have had an impact, and demographic changes over the past 10 or 20 years. So we've got an aging population. We've also got a population that perhaps doesn't go out as much as it used to. That reduces opportunities for crime and it reduces the demographic types of people that are more likely to both commit and be the victims of crime in the population. So there's lots of things going on underneath that we start to see reflected in the results. MF Does it tend to produce a less dynamic and less rapidly changing picture of crime? NS Yeah, it does, compared to police recorded crime. So, every reporting period that we report later from the crime survey will be based on, I mean, those interviews will have been asking respondents about their experiences in the year before that. So, in effect, each reporting period is covering about two years' worth of time, so there is more of a lag effect. That's one of the key things that police reported crime is good for. It's much quicker. You could tell that in the pandemic. Police recorded crime dropped very sharply, very quickly, and recovered relatively quickly afterwards, whereas crime survey data was much more of a slow pick up. MF And that John is, I guess, why the media and political commentators seem to be keener on the story being told by police recorded crime? JR It hadn't occurred to me, actually, that it was more sensitive to changes and would show changes more quickly. The media just responds to any dramatic negative change. I don't think we worry too much about the methodology behind them. MF Well, I mean, do people bother at all about the methodology behind it, because Nick has shared what a giant enterprise this really is. Is the value of that really understood in political debate? JR I'm afraid not. MF What can we do to underscore that? JR Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, I think it's just a matter of making the crime survey better known, because almost every debate I've taken part in on social media always goes along the lines of you can't believe the figures these days, nobody bothers to report crime anymore...And then, you know, I point out that it's not police recorded crime I’m talking about, that it’s the crime survey. And then people say, oh well you can't believe government. Certainly, it is going to be always an uphill battle on something like crime, where public perceptions are very deeply entrenched, very passionately felt, and immune to facts of this kind. I mean, I think that's just something that you've got to live with and try to educate people as best you can. MF Ah, another thing the ONS is going to have to keep on at clearly. Okay then, talking about the facts, and this is the nub of the debate that's been going on recently in UK politics, about whether crime is up or not. So, give us the big picture. You've hinted at this already, but what is the big picture, in terms of what has changed in recent decades? NS Yeah. So the big change in recent decades is those traditional types of crime. So the traditional thefts, burglaries, vehicle thefts, used to be huge.  Honestly, huge amounts of this stuff used to go on all the time, and it's things like that that have really dropped. So as I said, if you look at theft, criminal damage, and violence, with or without injury, from the crime survey, about 40% of us 30 years ago, that’s four in 10 people, experienced at least one of those every year. Now it's about one in 10 or 10%. That is a massive, seismic drop. A generational drop. And that's from the crime survey. Now police reported crime showed exactly the same picture until 10 years ago, when there were those improvements, and for things like theft, it hasn't shown much of a jump since then, because they were relatively well recorded. You tended to need a crime reference number for your insurance claim for example. Whereas for things like violence, that's where we've seen a huge jump, and particularly for lower level violence. So it used to always be the case that the police would record a lot more violence that involved injury than they did violence that didn't involve injury. But in the last 10 years, that has completely flipped around. Now there's a hell of a lot more violence that doesn't involve the injury that gets recorded. What you're not telling me is it's the nature of violence in society that has changed, and we just don't hit people as hard anymore. And you know, of course, that's not what's happened. It's the way that things are being recorded that has changed. We also see a big increase in the number of stalking and harassment offences recorded from virtually nothing to 10 to 12 years ago. MF Is that because of greater awareness? That people are more ready to report these things? NS That's right. And there's also legislative change, changes to the law, which means that these things now are more likely to be considered offenses. And there was a period of time for a few years where the instruction to the police was don't only record stalking and harassment, but record the other crime that take place alongside it. So there was another wrinkle in the counts that came in, that has since been rescinded in the last couple of years, and we're starting to see it fall down again. One other reason why you can't look at trends. But what we do see in police recorded crime, what it's good for, is the most serious types of offenses and things that the crime survey just cannot pick up because we're not asking shopkeepers, for example. So shoplifting is the one. So shop shoplifting is the one that we're at record levels for now, and have been every quarter for the past year, or 18 months or so. There's over half a million shoplifting offenses recorded every year now by the police. And you think that's quite a lot, but actually, if you were to look at the British Retail Consortium today, their estimate is that there's 20 million shoplifting offenses every year. Now, they don't publish their methodology. They do some sample of their members.  I can't vouch for that figure, but let's say the number is somewhere in between the two, and let's say it's 10 million, because that's an easy number to work with. So if we're getting half a million offenses recorded by the police, but there's actually 10 million offenses. As shopkeepers, hopefully over time, start thinking actually, the police are taking this much more seriously, it's much more worthwhile me reporting this to the police, then you might actually see an increase in police recorded shoplifting offenses that is just an artifact of people being more likely to report it, rather than any change in the underlying level of crime. And similarly, that could happen the opposite way round as well. So we do see that shoplifting is clearly up, but things like homicide, very flat, if anything, trending down over time, and things like theft from the perso. With phone theft that we've mentioned once or twice, we're seeing that spike in police recorded crime data, but we're also seeing it go up in crime survey data, particularly in London at the moment, through police recorded crime. MF Of course, one thing we haven't touched on much so far is the apparent rise in cyber-crime, very high-profile firms, brands, big name companies, getting hit. Secondly, the huge number of attempted frauds. I mean, just one example, today I get an email from a dodgy email address inviting me to renew my Spotify subscription. I haven't got a Spotify subscription, so clearly fraud there, but I'm not going to go report that to anybody, am I? Is it the case that, as some people might say, the villains have gone online in the last decade or so? NS Yeah, I think I would probably characterize some of the broader changes in crime over the last few years being that more of it, in relative terms, tends to take place either behind closed doors or online. And your description there of cyber-crime very much fits that bill. So about 10 years ago we developed a new module for the crime survey, which specifically asks people about fraud and computer misuse offenses, and it now makes up almost half, if not about half, of the individual crimes that we measure through the crime survey. They are some of the most common types of offenses people face, and we have adapted to try and include them. So for example, last year, the estimates are that nearly 1 in 12 of us experienced fraud or computer misuse where we were the intended victim. So the example that you describe where someone's asked you to confirm your Spotify account and you haven't got a Spotify account, at that point, as long as you don't click on something or go down their rabbit hole and into their dark world, you are not yet the specific intended victim. You're just one part of a big phishing exercise. It’s if you click on that link and you end up being the specifically intended victim, you may or may not end up losing money or losing your card details. At that point, you start to count in terms of a victim of that type of offense. So it's difficult to measure. It does involve quite a lot of questioning. And the police measurement of fraud is patchy, I mean, the Office for Statistics Regulation did a review of police recorded crime on fraud and said there's a lot of room for improvement, basically. So the crime survey is a much better source for that data. But they're hard to detect, they're hard to report, they're hard to measure, and that is one area where we need continued investment in data quality, and we need continued, constant investment in public awareness, because those types of crimes and the tactics that criminals are using are changing all the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the factors that has led to things like drops in response rates to surveys. I'm guilty of it. I will not answer the phone if I don't recognize the number. So it is leading to us being much more susceptible to being cynical. MF That's an interesting point. John I know you’ve taken part in an often charged social media debate around this where you've advanced the broad narrative that is told by the statistics, and yet so many people ready to doubt that.  Is that because people do feel that crime is much closer these days? Now that we are getting the dodgy calls it feels much more proximate? JR I’m not convinced about that actually. I think the reason that cyber-crime is as a separate module on the crime survey is because it wasn't traditionally thought of as crime. I mean the sort of crime that people worry about is the violence and lawlessness on the streets, being attacked or burgled. I think it’s very much to do with real world crime rather than computer crime. MF Or perhaps being more likely to witness shoplifting at first hand? JR Shoplifting and phone theft are the two things that really worry people and make them think that there's something to this idea that Britain is descending into lawless mayhem, but actually, we're safer and better off than we've ever been before. MF So Nick, what comes next in terms of how the ONS measures crime? Is it a question of refining these excellent data sources, and finding more corroboration just to improve their accuracy? Or are there game changing developments that might be available through technology or any other means that might not just improve the measuring of crime, but deal with some of these communications issues, and these trust issues, as well? NS Yeah. I mean, there's a few things there. So one I mentioned earlier is that we always need and try to keep up to date with the questions we're asking, the way that we're managing and tracking things. So as technology starts to have an impact on the types of crimes that people experience, we update and we adapt the questions. As the law itself changes, we update and we adapt the questions, and we'll continue to look at that. Just picking up on your last point around perceptions, and why they feel perhaps differently to what the stats show, we ask that as well through the crime survey. We asked people whether they perceive crime to be going up, and we ask them whether they perceive crimes to be going up in their local area and at the national level. And there's this persistent gap, and it's quite a big gap, between what people think locally and what people think nationally, which you know either points to things like, it's the kind of things that you see on the street, or it's the kind of things you're seeing on the news, it's the kind of things you're seeing on your social media feed that are sort of giving you that emotional reaction that you think, well, nationally speaking, crime must be going up, even though I might not be seeing so much of it in my local area. So we will continue to evolve those things. The government of the day are particularly interested in looking at things like violence against women and girls, neighbourhood policing and better policing of crimes that are currently showing upticks, crimes like shoplifting and theft from the person. So there is some demand for more granular data, at sort of police force area level, a more local level than we can currently provide through the crime survey. So what is next is seeing whether technology can help us in a cost-effective way, to interview more people in an online environment. And that requires a lot of testing, and there's no guarantee of success, but that's one key area that we're going to be looking at. What's the art of the possible over the course of the next sort of couple of years or so. MF John, what would you be your advice to, well, firstly, people who want to understand that fully nuanced picture of crime, and listeners of this podcast, of course, are relentless seekers of that, but also to ONS on how to provide it for them, and perhaps how to try and allay people's irrational fears and better inform the topic. JR It's difficult, isn't it, because I think we are dealing with some quite powerful social forces of irrationalism and belief about the nature of society. And as Nick said, people think the country is going to the dogs even if their own local area is nice, secure, safe, quiet. I mean, there are some remarkable figures, which I think are from the crime survey, that people  feel much safer walking around after dark in their local area than they used to, but people simply will not believe those kinds of data. So I think there's quite a lot of thinking to be done. I mean, on my part just as much as anybody else's as to how to convey a true and honest picture of what's actually happening to an audience which is just psychologically resistant to wanting to hear it. And I think that's got to do with acknowledging people's fears and saying, yes, shoplifting and phone snatching is going up, although, I mean, phone snatching is an interesting one. I don't think, I mean, I stand to be corrected on this, but I think, actually, it’s not as bad now as it has been in the past. And there was a time, maybe 10 years ago, when phone thefts in London were very bad, and by working with the phone companies to make phones, in effect, disabled the moment they were stolen, that was brought under control. There’s this sort of constant technological battle between the criminals and the phone manufactures. But you've got to acknowledge that people think correctly that some kind of crimes are increasing, although the ones that people are most worried about, such as knife crime and so on, I think the evidence is that it's not. But you've got to find some way of acknowledging people's fears before you try to get the actual information across. MF So, I hope we’ve made the point that the reality of crime is far more complex than a single headline can possibly convey. That’s why understanding the full context really matters and we hope this podcast has been helpful to that end. Thank you to our guests and thanks as always to you at home for listening. You can subscribe to future episodes of Statistically Speaking on Apple podcasts, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. I’m Miles Fletcher and from me and our producer Alisha Arthur, goodbye and mind how you go!

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