Labour force survey 'collapsed to only five individuals' ONS internal emails reveal

'Little and falling merit' in retaining LFS

A series of significant issues were brought to senior personnel at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) about the efficacy of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) before it was suspended, emails obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request have revealed.

In an email in October 2023, Richard Heys, deputy director at the ONS, said that the "sample size for the industry in the LFS survey has collapsed to only five individuals". As such, Heys told a swathe of senior recipients of the email that "there is little and falling merit in retaining the LFS".  He added: "The key point is not when the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) is perfect, it is when it is clearly superior to the LFS." Cost of Labour Force Survey revamp nearly doubles in a year to £40.4m The emails were dated in the same month that the agency decided to pull the ...