A key survey on local employment levels managed by the British Statistics Agency besieged has significant faults and limitations, have warned researchers, to achieve the ability of advice to predict future infrastructure needs.
The annual survey on the business register and the employment of the National Statistics Office has given “volatile” results which often underestimated business activity considerably, in particular in the cutting-edge sectors, according to analysts at the University of Cambridge.
The verdict on the investigation – which the government describes as “the official source of employee and employment estimates by geography and detailed industry” – will add to questions about the quality of Ons data.
The agency, which has opposed official exams on its figures next month, has faced growing criticism from politicians and the Banque d'Engleterre launched by the highly publicized failure of crucial labor market data in late 2023.
In the past two weeks, the ONS have postponed key commercial data, the suspension publication of two price indices that help calculate GDP and have been criticized by the reflection group on financial studies for “blurred economic reasoning” in the way it has reassessed the richness of pensions.
Questions on the BRES survey were raised in the analysis carried out by the Center for Business Research (CBR) of the University of Cambridge (CBR), a local defense group for the expansion of the city which includes university, large companies and developers.
Research has revealed that the annual BRES survey, which is based on the responses of 85,000 companies in Great Britain, constantly underestimating the real employment levels in Cambridge when verified in relation to the company's level data drawn from corporate databases.
Between 2019 and 2022, the ONS survey recorded a 3.8% increase in employment in the IT sector, but data from the Center for Business Research revealed an increase of 8.3%.
Andy Cosh, the main research partner at the CBR, said that the survey had several problems, including the use of the Obsolete Standard Industrial Classification (SIC).
The SIC was necessary for international comparisons but “a very bad representation of the structure of modern industry”, having been updated for the last time in 2007, he said.
“No data is perfect, but what we say is that we think we are much closer to the truth you (the ons),” added Cosh, noting that the CBR wrote to the agency in December 2023 on investigation issues after discussions that started five years earlier.
According to ONS, BRES figures “are widely used” by local authorities planning services “to predict employment trends in their specific fields”.
Dan Thorp, managing director of Cambridge Ahead, said that the government's growth mission “was likely to be undermined” by the defects of the official data used by the councils, infrastructure providers and regulators for planning purposes.
“We see it from the first hand in Cambridge, where the local use measured by the ons constantly underestimates what is seen and measured on the field,” he added.
Thorp cited two recent infrastructure projects – Cambridge North station and Cambridgeshire guided Busway – both of which experienced a much more important request than what had been planned shortly after the opening.
Local government officials of Cambridgeshire said that if the planners were using BRA data for the two projects, they had ordered separate research when they established the current common joint plan of the county because of the “gaps” of the ONS by reflecting “real growth observed” in the region.
“The investigation into the register and employment of companies is one of the largest surveys on ONS employers.
He added that the BRES survey provided “a good quality snapshot” of local employment, broken down by industry and geography, but insisted that it was also clear on the limits of the survey with users.
“As we do very clearly in our bulletin, the quality of sample estimates can deteriorate for smaller geographies, and this should be taken into account when deduction of figures,” said the agency.
The ONS added that he was working to revise the SIC in accordance with international requirements to ensure the comparability of British data with that of other countries.
Visualization of data by Clara Murray
This story has been modified to clarify the scale and response rate of the BRES survey and to clarify the characterization of comments on Andy Cosh's survey.
