Lawmakers have warned that problems with UK economic data could be widespread

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Disturbing gaps in UK jobs data could herald wider problems in the country’s statistics, a senior lawmaker has warned, adding that economic policymakers are “flying blind” over the failures.

Dame Meg Hillier, Labor Chair of the Treasury Committee, said she and her fellow MPs were “shocked” and “disappointed”. Letter Last month, the UK’s top statistician said it could be 2027 before a new Labor Force Survey is ready.

She drew parallels with other government bodies, such as the Bank of England, in warning of the damaging effects of underinvestment in systems.

“Something really, really big hit me between the eyes,” Hillier said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If there is a data gap here, what other data gaps might there be? What would be the implications of that prediction?”

A review by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last year He beat Boe. For “material-investment” in forecasting tools, with “corrective fixes” that result in a “complicated and useless system”.

There is a problem with Hillier’s labor data Office of National Statistics It was “not just a one-time thing.”

“If we’re dealing with this with labor market research, there may be other issues we need to look at,” she said. Bernanke chose some of them in the bank (in England).

The internal review conducted by the ONS last month confirmed that the failure to release reliable work data occurred Systematic investment and issues related to strategy and internal culture. The continued “uncertainty” based on the old job survey will take time to improve, leaving policymakers and investors without a clear picture of the UK labor market.

Senior officials, including Andrew Bailey, governor of the BoE, have warned that gaps in UK employment data are making it difficult to set monetary policy. In his Mansion House speech in November, Bailey emphasized his frustration that “it’s a huge problem – and not just for monetary policy – that we don’t know how many people are participating in the economy”.

The ONS has been working for the past year to increase the number of respondents to the survey – the main source of information on the state of the UK labor market. A Jump in the reaction The scale of the outbreak forced it to stop using data originally based on the Labor Force Survey and label it “statistics in development.”

Hillier said the Treasury Committee had referred Sir Ian Diamond, the National Statistician, who oversees the ONS, to Discuss the situation. “We were horrified by the letter saying we’re not going to fix this until 2027,” she said.

In a letter to the Treasury committee, Diamond said he could not provide a firm timetable for switching to the “transformed” Labor Force Survey (TLFS), although the “goal” was 2026 rather than 2027.

Although MPs want to question Diamond, Hillier said: “Pushing him in public is not something we’re talking about, how do we deal with this now – because that’s going to be a big problem.”

The problems were making it difficult to assess issues such as the UK’s weak growth, she said. Policymakers are flying blind and this is creating a real problem – we have productivity challenges (and) we don’t understand what’s going on.

He said there were broader questions about government bodies and their ability to modernize their systems due to lack of funding.

Diamond, chief executive of the UK Statistics Authority, spoke in his letter of “flat core funding, tight budgets and high inflationary impacts” following the Conservative government’s latest 2021 spending review.

“In this context, working within our budget was necessary to make difficult priority decisions and to provide efficiency and cost savings in the organization,” he wrote.

“You see this with other regulators and other bodies outside the sector – being asked to do more, not given the money to do it,” Hillier said.