Page 60 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS563 Pete Jones
seeks to rebalance ONS’s data collection activity significantly toward wider,
more integrated use of administrative and other non-survey data sources,
thereby reducing our reliance on large population and business surveys. While
this does not eliminate a need for surveys, it does mean ONS’s traditional
approach to surveys will now differ. The ONS Integrated Survey Framework
(ISF) has been set up to deliver modernisation of social surveys with three
underlying principles to support transformation; administrative data first,
digital by default, statistical redesign and rationalisation.
Central to the ISF is a major redesign of the ONS Labour Force Survey (LFS).
The LFS is the largest social survey conducted in the UK, collecting longitudinal
information across five waves from approximately 160,000 households
annually. Topics collected from the LFS have continued to expand over recent
decades. Presently there are nearly 600 questions across the different waves
and sub-modules, covering topics that extend beyond traditional labour
market content. As censuses are undertaken every ten years in England and
Wales, the LFS provides a crucial source of information for updating statistics
for key census topics in the period between censuses. This has been supported
with strong user demand to increase samples sizes in local areas, leading to
the supplementary Annual Population Survey (APS) boost to support the LFS
collection. Using combined data from the LFS and APS, annual statistics are
produced for a range of topics including labour market, health, ethnicity,
households and families.
Consistent with the general trend towards declining response to social
1
surveys (de Leeuw and de Heer, 2002 , and De Leeuw, Hox and Luiten, 2018 ),
2
there has been a notable reduction in LFS response rates in recent decades.
The LFS collection currently uses a combination of face to face and telephone
interviewing, and between the ten-year period 2008 to 2018 response rates
have dropped from 58.2% to 40.3%. Similar to experience amongst other
National Statistics Institutes, the roll out of electronic questionnaires designed
for self-completion is now key to the future development of social survey and
census collections. The US Census Bureau document the challenges of moving
3
questionnaires online , however successful transition to online will reduce
collection costs and support strategies for reversing the recent trend towards
lower response rates.
Beyond the LFS, the ONS also conducts a range of other social surveys
covering different topics and questions, as well as using different sample
designs and collection modes. These are also the target of transformation with
examples including; the Household Financial Surveys (HFS), which comprise
three surveys covering expenditure, living conditions, and wealth and assets,
and the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN). Figure 1 below shows the
concepts behind the proposed ISF to transform these collections.

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