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 2012

At the heart of decision-making and opinion-forming, we will be a prestigious place to work, a world leader, innovative, geared for change and delivering more with less. Continuous improvements to our systems will allow for more analysis while maintaining the high quality of our statistics.

Our values

We believe that everyone at ONS has a part to play in achieving this vision. We want both current and future employees to see us as a prestigious employer with a world-class reputation – innovative, geared for change and producing high quality statistics

ONS has set its own organisational values, which are central to the delivery of our work. These values relate to both the quality of the work we deliver and the behaviour of our employees. Our core values are integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We embody these values in the following ways.

Commitment:

  • we are committed to the production of high-quality statistics and thorough analysis of these statistics
  • we are committed to setting and maintaining the highest professional standards in our work
  • we ensure that data are kept confidential where required
  • we have open communication with colleagues both within ONS and across government, and with other parties where appropriate
  • we encourage each member of staff to take personal responsibility for the quality of their work. We undertake to develop the skills both of individuals and of the organisation as a whole to meet future challenges

Flexibility:

  • we understand the wider environment in which we operate and ensure that as an organisation we can adapt to deliver what is required of us
  • we view change as an opportunity for development and we continually seek to make improvements to our work
  • we work closely with our customers to understand their changing needs and to meet their requirements

Respect:

  • we are committed to reducing the burden on suppliers of our data whether private individual or business
  • we recognise and respect the diversity of UK society and aim to reflect this in the production of relevant, timely and high-quality products which meet statistical codes of practice