Statistics Awards

  The UK’s main statistics body needs a £10m overhaul and its top role split in two after a series of management failings and errors that have plagued the organisation for several years, a scathing report has found. The Devereux Review on performance and culture of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found “deep-seated” issues that called for radical measures and warned of the likelihood that past statistics would need to be revised. Sir Robert Devereux, a retired career civil servant, said the role of national statistician should be split in two, creating a new role of ONS permanent secretary to oversee a wide-ranging reorganisation, alongside the national statistician, who assumes responsibility for the accuracy of published data. “This new permanent secretary position could be handed to someone with a track record of leading, and turning around, an operational business,” Devereux said. He added: “I suggest temporary separation since, with more effort to...

    The data nerds are fighting back. After watching data sets be altered or disappear from US government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. Their goal is to make sure they are available in the future, believing that democracy suffers when policymakers don't have reliable data and that national statistics should be above partisan politics. There are such smart, passionate people who care deeply about not only the Census Bureau, but all the statistical agencies, and ensuring the integrity of the statistical system. And that gives me hope, even during these challenging times, Mary Jo Mitchell, director of government and public affairs for the research nonprofit the Population Association of America, said this week during an online public data-users conference. There are trillio...

                              New Delhi: Formal jobs and self-employment are on the rise in India while the youth unemployment is below the global average, the statistics ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry stated that formal employment is rising steadily, with nearly 13 million net subscribers for provident fund getting added in FY25 under the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), more than double the number in FY19. Since September 2017, more than 77.3 million net subscribers have joined, including nearly 2 million in April 2025 alone —indicating a strengthened formal workforce and greater social protection coverage, the ministry stated. A structural shift is also underway: Periodic Labour Force Survey data indicates that self-employment increased from 52.2% to 58.4%, while casual labour declined from 24.9% to 19.8%, the ministry said, adding that this reflects a move toward entrepreneurial, autono...

                                                After watching data sets be altered or disappear from U.S. government websites in unprecedented ways after President Donald Trump began his second term, an army of outside statisticians, demographers and computer scientists have joined forces to capture, preserve and share data sets, sometimes clandestinely. "There are trillions of bytes of data files, and I can't even imagine how many public dollars were spent to collect those data. ... But right now, they're sitting someplace that is inaccessible because there are no staff to appropriately manage those data," Jennifer Park, a study director for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said during the conference hosted by the Association of Public Data Users (APDU). Their goal is to make sure they are available in t...