Delivered by Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the UK’s National Statistician, this lecture takes as its starting point the changes that the ONS made during the Covid-19 pandemic to ensure that economic measurement not only remained of high-quality, but also became much more timely. It looks at other developments within the ONS in the pandemic, including the Covid-19 Infection Survey and Business Impacts of Coronavirus Survey (BICS).
Throughout, Sir Ian argues that, in the 2020s, a world-class National Statistical Institute needs to do be working on a wide range of data to expand both the breadth and geographical granularity of its economic measurement; doing so in a way that is open to inclusive collaboration with the broader community, and transparent in explaining the methods and context of all its analysis.
