Acting national statistician Emma Rourke has told MPs that the Office for National Statistics is having to rebuild its capability to listen to staff concerns and act on them from the top down.
Her comments came in an evidence session before members of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee following the publication of a review that found “deep seated issues” with performance and culture at the organisation.
Sir Robert Devereux’s analysis of the ONS’s problems found many witnesses reported “a reluctance, at senior levels, to hear and act on difficult news”.
On Tuesday, Rourke – who is also acting permanent secretary of the ONS since predecessor Prof Sir Ian Diamond stepped down on health grounds in May – told MPs that a culture of challenge had been lacking at the organisation.
Rourke said she had become aware of “frustrations” from Grade 6 and Grade 7 staff and that new programmes had been created as a result.
She told the session that the organisation’s senior civil servants should be “really fundamental” to building the culture that the ONS requires. “But I think for some time we hadn't attended to that community,” she said.
Rourke insisted that the ONS wasn’t building up a challenge culture from scratch. She said in some cases good exercises had taken place in the organisation where issues had been fed in – but they had not been acted on.
“We're an organisation that should strive to see leadership at all levels,” she said. “But I recognise that the civil service is an organisation that is inherently very hierarchical and ONS is a very hierarchical organisation. So in order for the senior civil service to role-model challenge, role model successful speaking truth to power, that does need to be in place first.”
One of the Devereux review’s main recommendations is the separation of the ONS permanent secretary and national statistician roles, with the aim of ensuring that the perm-sec job is undertaken by someone with “a track record of running a complex operational business”.
PACAC chair Simon Hoare floated a number of damning sketches of the failings at ONS, which affected the quality of its survey data in recent years.
One of them painted former national statistician Diamond as reminiscent of a Bond villain in his approach.
“Ian Diamond appears to have run this organisation [...] as a hybrid of a Medici prince and Blofeld," Hoare said. “He seemed unwilling or uninterested in anything anyone had to say, he managed to pull the wool over the eyes of ministers, the board – everything was hunky-dory, innovation was going to be the great salvation to all of our prayers.
“I'm now mixing my metaphors horribly, but when the emperor was found to be naked and not clothed in regal purple, ill health meant that he had to leave the ONS PDQ.”
Hoare said “basic organisational change” is now required at the ONS, including “a fundamental dismantling and rebuilding of the HR function”.
“If somebody can't blow a whistle in an organisation and have it dealt with in an appropriate way, heaven help us,” Hoare said. “It appears not to have been run on – in any way, shape or form – modern expectations of governance, but a sort of a slightly boosterish chumocracy. Which hasn't served the organisation very well.”
Hoare's criticism of Diamond is in sharp contrast to Devereux's comments in the review on his role in the pandemic. Devereux said the country was "fortunate" that Diamond "was at the helm of the ONS during the pandemic, during which he catalysed extraordinary work to deliver the Covid infection survey, and a range of behavioural data to help manage the pandemic".
In tandem with the publication of the Devereux review, the ONS published a recovery strategy titled Restoring confidence, improving quality: the plan for ONS economic statistics on Friday last week.
It was commissioned by the Office for Statistics Regulation in April.
PACAC will next week continue taking evidence on the work of the UK Statistics Authority, which has oversight of the ONS.