If John Healey wants to succeed as Chancellor, he needs to get a grip on the Office for National Statistics (ONS). 

I’ve written about the troubles and tribulations of our hapless Newport-based statistics office many times now, both in this newsletter and the magazine, and the problems keep coming. Its most high-profile failure of recent years has been the delivery of the Labour Force Survey (LFS). That’s the main source of our knowledge about Britain’s jobs market: unemployment, inactivity, redundancies etc etc. 

During the pandemic, response rates to the survey collapsed and the integrity of the data it produced was diminished. That set off a chain of errors. As I’ve noted before, a decade ago, more than half of households approached took part; during lockdown that fell to 27 per cent and it has crept back to only around a third since. The sample has shrunk so badly that figures for........

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