The Office for National Statistics will narrow its focus and aim to reduce its output by 10%, it has said.
The statistics department has announced reforms that will see the ONS reduce work in certain areas, including health and crime, to “free up staff” for core quality improvement activity and speed up work to improve the quality of core economic outputs and the surveys underpinning them.
The changes come as new ONS permanent secretary Darren Tierney, who was appointed to the role in August, seeks to address the performance and cultural issues highlighted in the recent Devereux Review.
The ONS said the department is aiming to reduce the number of outputs that it produces annually by around 10% in 2026 “through prioritisation and consolidation”. The changes will include creating a new website, focusing publications on “what audiences need most” and “delivering streamlined, clearer information”.
Tierney, who became ONS perm sec in August, said the reforms will prioritise “quality over quantity”.
The changes include reducing statistical work on health and reviewing funding for crime statistics.
On health, the ONS said it will continue to produce stats such as births, deaths and life expectancy that form part of its core population outputs, but will reduce other health analysis work, “engaging stakeholders and other parts of government to identify outputs that others should take forward”.
On crime, the non-ministerial department said it will continue to produce headline figures through the Crime Survey for England and Wales, but will review work beyond this to “ensure the funding we receive matches the cost of delivering the statistics”.
The department will also review how much subnational work it does, including weighing up the merits of running the Annual Population Survey, which provides information on important social and socioeconomic variables at local levels.
The ONS will also look to partner with departments on areas such as housing, the environmental economy, tourism and wellbeing, to “optimise” statistics and enable a split of responsibilities.
Other changes include narrowing the focus of the ONS's contribution to international work to themes most relevant to its core statistics, the census and continued progress on integration of data from surveys and administration sources. The department’s international work “will continue to recognise the need to support wider government priorities globally where we have the capacity to do so”.
It will also consolidate its business surveys portfolio to reduce the burden on both respondents and business areas and to improve the quality of the data collected.
Tierney said: "Our top priority is restoring the quality of our core statistics, and we are already enacting the key recommendations from Sir Robert Devereux's review.
"Today's plans take us one step further, narrowing the focus of our portfolio and reducing the number of publications so we can devote resources to our improvement work, putting quality over quantity and working closely with users to rebuild trust."