Premature release of Labour Market Statistics in May 2009

Premature release of Labour Market Statistics: investigation concluded and actions ordered.

Issue date: 16 June 2009
Type: Statement

The investigation into the inadvertent premature release of Labour Market Statistics (LMS) in May has now been completed. The following public announcement will appear on our website today:

The investigation concluded the early release was the result of a combination of human error and a technical process that was not fail-safe.

National Statistician, Karen Dunnell, said: 'I am extremely concerned that it was possible for this mistake to happen and take full responsibility for ensuring that measures are put in place to ensure that this type of error can not happen in future. I am very sorry that this has happened. ONS has an excellent record for ensuring the fair and proper release of important statistics but this time we came up short and lessons have been learnt.'

The error occurred in part of the process of loading some statistics to a central statistical database known as WinCSDB. A human error was made in setting the statistics for immediate publication rather than after the official publication time - 9.30 am on Wednesday 13 May. The technical fault was that there is no fail-safe alert on the database to warn the person loading the statistics that they would be 'published' immediately rather than held back until after the official release time.

To prevent further incidents ONS have identified four immediate actions.

  • Specify new checks to be carried out as part of the monthly procedures for uploading data to WinCSDB
  • Issue a procedural reminder note to all ONS staff involved in copying data to public (published) status
  • Institute Recovery Plans to deal with a situation where ONS may have to advance a statistical release at short notice
  • Specify and implement changes on WinCSDB to help prevent tasks being run unintentionally

Background note

A summary of the sequence of events.

  • In preparing the detailed Q1 2009 Labour Market Statistics (LMS) for publication on Wednesday, 13 May, staff unwittingly loaded these data into the public area of the relevant database (WinCSDB) on Friday 8 May rather than in the restricted area. There were no fail-safe mechanisms in place on the system to prevent this happening, nor systems to warn staff what they had done

  • Automatic update procedures subsequently forwarded these data to five external bodies, including two City Banks, who weren't due to receive the detailed data until the Wednesday

  • This mishap first became apparent around 9.30 am on Tuesday, 12 May, when the Bank of England indicated they had inappropriate access to the data

  • A meeting of the National Statistician and senior managers was convened immediately to review the situation. Although there was no evidence that any of the five organisations had utilised the data in the public domain, the decision was taken to bring the official release of the LMS forward to 2 pm on Tuesday, 12 May. As many stakeholders as possible were informed of this decision before 2 pm