UK policymakers hit by six month delay in key jobs data

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UK policymakers will endure prolonged uncertainty over the state of the jobs market after the Office for National Statistics admitted there would be a six month delay to the rollout of a more reliable data gathering process.

The delayed publication of figures based on the ONS’s “transformed” labour force survey until September 2024 will leave the Bank of England without crucial insights on unemployment as it decides when to cut rates.

The statistics agency stopped publishing unemployment figures based on its existing labour force survey in September 2023, because a drop in response rates made the sample size too small to produce a reliable result.

Since then, the ONS has been working to boost response rates while pressing ahead with the introduction of the TLFS, which is conducted largely online with a new methodology.

New figures published on Monday were badged “official statistics in development” and analysts were sceptical about their reliability.

The ONS said the TLFS would become “the primary source of information on the labour market” from September so that it could run the old and the new surveys in parallel for longer to ensure the quality of the data.

In November, the ONS said its aim was to use the TLFS in place of the LFS from March 2024, as it had already been dual-running both surveys online, by phone and through follow-up visits for three calendar quarters.

On Monday, the ONS released LFS-based estimates of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity for the months it had missed, reweighted to reflect new information on the UK’s population.

The estimates suggest the labour market was tightening at the end of 2023, with the unemployment rate falling from 4.3 per cent in early summer to 3.9 per cent in the three months to November — compared with the ONS’s previous estimate that it had been steady at 4.2 per…