Regional Statisticians

Managed rundown of the service (update July 2010)

The ONS Regional Statistician (RS) teams have been funded by the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) since their inception. However, in March 2010 the RDAs, whilst still highly supportive of the RS teams and the analytical capability they provide, announced their intention to pull out of the funding agreement from the end of March 2011. This was due to concerns over the future of the RDAs and because they felt that the funding model should represent the wider community that benefits from the service.

In the current financial climate ONS are unable to find additional money to fund the RDA contribution, and pressures on departmental budgets more widely mean that an alternative funding source appears unlikely. As a result, ONS have had to manage the significant risk that the RS service will cease at the end of March 2011 and have started a managed rundown of the RS service.

Background

In the March 2007 Budget Report, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the introduction of the ONS regional statistical teams, one of the recommendations from the Allsopp Review of Statistics for Economic Policymaking.

The RS teams, made up of a statistician and an analyst in each of the nine regions of England, are a source of regional expertise for ONS. They provide a key method of improving each region's information base for the benefit of the region and of ONS. The teams work with regional and sub-regional institutions to improve the comparability of regional data.

Core functions

• To gather intelligence to help improve the quality of ONS data and processes, keeping ONS up to date with changes in the regions
• To quality assure final estimates of regional GVA
• To help improve the quality of the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) and business survey data, which will feed through to regional GVA
• To provide access to IDBR data for RDAs
• To act as focus to feed views through from regional bodies, assisting ONS in its decision-making
• To provide a first point of ONS contact for key regional bodies
• To provide independent advice to regional users on the use of ONS and GSS (Government Statistical Service) statistics, including on technical issues, such as the use of statistics in monitoring performance against targets
• To work with regional partners on collaborative projects
• To facilitate provision of training to regional partners on, for instance, economic statistics

• To assess, or assist in the assessment of locally commissioned and locally held data