Stats boss quits as minister says new leadership needed

Sir Robert Chote has resigned as chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, the body responsible for overseeing the troubled Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Earlier this year, a highly-critical government review said the ONS had “deep-seated” issues which needed tackling.

The Bank of England has also criticised the agency for the reliability of its job market data, which the central bank considers when deciding whether to raise or cut interest rates.

Announcing Sir Robert’s resignation, Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden said “new leadership was critical” to address “the challenges identified and rapidly restore confidence in the statistics produced by ONS that underpin decision-making”.

In a letter sent to Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Cabinet Office’s most senior civil servant Catherine Little said a new chair would be “in a more credible position” to act on the findings of the investigation.

Sir Robert, who joined the UK Statistics Authority in 2022, will now take up a position as president of Trinity College, Oxford in September.

A senior Cabinet Office source denied the government had forced Sir Robert to go and said it was his own choice to leave, but said it was “hard to make effective government policy if you don’t have statistics that have integrity”.

They added that “if we can’t know the true picture then it’s more difficult to make policy, so that’s why we’re getting on with fixing it”.

This is the second senior resignation in recent months, after Sir Ian Diamond stepped down from his position as national statistician at the ONS in May due to health reasons.

The ONS gathers and publishes data used by the government to make policy decisions in areas including state benefits, housing, migration and crime.

In April, the government asked former senior civil servant Sir Robert Devereux to investigate the ONS after a series of issues.

In his subsequent report, Sir Robert concluded “most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance”, in particular “choices made at the top of ONS, over several years.”

He cited an “interest in the new” that took attention from “less exciting but crucial task” of delivering core economic data that were good enough to guide quality decisions.

Responding to the review, acting national statistician Emma Rourke said she welcomed the report and “fully acknowledges the issues he has highlighted”.