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The key survey on local employment levels conducted by the besieged British statistical agency has significant defects and restrictions, scientists warned, achieving the ability to predict future infrastructure needs.
According to analysts from the University of Cambridge, the National Statistics Statistics Office gave “unstable” results, which frequently significantly underestimated economic activity, especially in the latest sectors.
The verdict in the survey – which the government describes as “the official source of employee estimates and employment according to detailed geography and industry” – will increase questions on the quality of ONS data.
The agency, which is ready for official reviews in its numbers next month, was met with growing criticism by politicians and the Bank of England brought on by a loud defeat of key data of the labor market at the end of 2023.
Over the past two weeks, ONS has postponed key business data, suspended the publication of two price indicators that help to calculate GDP, and have been criticized by the Institute of Think-Tank fiscal studies for “mixed economic reasoning” in the way he registered retirement richness.
Questions about the Bres survey were raised in the evaluation conducted by the Center for Business Business research for Cambridge, a neighborhood spokeswoman in the field of city expansion, which incorporates a university, large technology corporations and developers.
Studies have shown that the annual Bres study, based on the answers of 85,000 corporations in the UK, consistently underestimated the actual level of employment in Cambridge after checking data at the level of the company taken from corporate databases.
In the years 2019–2022, ONS survey recorded a 3.8 % increase in employment in the IT sector, but data from the Business and Research Center showed a rise of 8.3 percent.
Andy Cosh, a senior research collaborator at CBR, said that several aspects led to problems with the ONS survey, including a discount in samples attributable to reduced costs and never checking the results.
He added that the study was also limited by the use of an outdated standard industrial classification (SIC), which is needed for international comparisons, but “a very poor representation of the structure of modern industry”, which was recently updated in 2007.
“No data is perfect, but we say that we think we are much closer to the truth than you [the ONS] They are – added Cosh, noting that CBR wrote to the agency in December 2023 about problems with surveys after discussions that began five years earlier.
According to ONS, Bres numbers “are widely used” by the departments of local government planning “to forecast employment trends of their specific areas.”
Dan Thorp, the head of Cambridge, said that the government’s growth mission “risked that she was undermined” by the defects of official data used by the councils, infrastructure providers and regulatory bodies for planning purposes.
“We see it first hand in Cambridge, where local employment measured ONS consistently doesn’t report what’s visible and measured on earth,” he added.
Thorp quoted the last two infrastructure projects – Cambridge North railway station and a highway with a Cambridgeshire guide – that they both experienced much more demand than planned shortly after opening.
Local government officials in Cambridgeshire said that although the planners used Bres for both projects, they commissioned separate research during the development of the current common plan of local counting due to “shortcomings” in reflecting “actual observed growth” in the region.
ONS stated in a statement that Bres provided “good quality shutter” of local employment, divided by industry and geography, but insisted that it was also clear as to the limitations of the survey among users.
“How clearly we notice in our Bulletin, the quality of sample estimates can worsen in the case of smaller geography, and this ought to be taken into consideration when drawing conclusions about data,” the agency said.
ONS added that he’s working on the revision of SIC in accordance with international requirements so as to ensure comparativeness of data in Great Britain with data from other countries.
Data visualization by Clara Murray
