Our visions and values

Our mission

Our mission is to improve understanding of life in the United Kingdom and enable informed decisions through trusted, relevant, and independent statistics and analysis.

Our vision to 2015

ONS - where people come first for trusted statistics

Customers value our statistics, analysis and advice to drive their decisions and meet their priorities

This vision will deliver our strategic outcomes:

Customers

Who are informed about how statistics drive their decisions, the quality of our statistics, and know how their priorities influence our plans

People

Our staff are engaged and motivated to work in ONS, adding value, innovating and contributing to our vision

Statistics

Recognised for the trust they bring, their fitness for purpose and their relevance for decision making

Please note the strategic objectives and priorities that support the vision are currently in development and will be shared with you as soon as they are available.

Our values

We embody the Civil Service core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We have also developed a set of ONS values alongside our vision, as the values describe the guiding principles that shape our behaviour. While the vision describes 'what' we will do, the values describe 'how': how we go about our business, how we deliver our vision. In short, how we do things around here.

Our values are that we:

RESPECT each other

WORK TOGETHER to make a difference

BE PROUD of what we do

Always want to DO BETTER

The following sets out what these values mean in practice for our behaviour:

We respect each other
  • communicate openly and honestly
  • listen, help and support one another

  • value equality and diversity

We work together to make a difference
  • the how is as important as the what
  • collaborating with internal and external customers and suppliers
  • working across silos, boundaries, divisions and directorates
  • build on each others' ideas
  • partnerships

  • teamwork

We are proud of what we do
  • do what we say we will do
  • do it right
  • quality, knowledge, we meet recognised and quality standards

  • recognise and celebrate achievements for our colleagues as well as ourselves

We always want to do better
  • for ourselves
  • for the community
  • for customers
  • for the environment
  • deliver value for money
  • learn from our mistakes
  • continually learning
  • innovative

  • making improvements

We will work together to embed these values in our behaviour, incorporating the outcomes of the 'Dignity and Respect' project.