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Statistically Speaking

Statistically Speaking

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Statistically Speaking is the Office for National Statistics' podcast, offering in-depth interviews on the latest hot topics in the world of data, taking a peek behind the scenes of the UK's largest independent producer of official statistics and exploring the stories behind the numbers.© 2024 Mathematics Political Science Politics & Government Science
Episodes
  • Supermarket Sweep: Measuring inflation with over a billion scanner beeps

    Supermarket Sweep: Measuring inflation with over a billion scanner beeps
    Mar 24 2026
    Miles and guests unpack how the ONS is collecting the prices from more than a billion supermarket checkout and online sales to measure UK inflation. Transcript Scanner data podcast transcript Miles: Hello and welcome to statistically speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode, we're taking an in depth look at a very big change in how the ONS produces its estimates of inflation, no longer the sole preserve of clipboard wielding prices collectors roaming the supermarket aisles. The digital revolution has now fully arrived. From this month, the UK's inflation indices are now partly based on millions of prices data gathered directly from the tills or scanners, to be precise. How is it all done? What is the role of Taylor Swift in all this? Yes, there is one. And what are the benefits for economists, decision makers and all of us ordinary folk who worry about the cost of living. Here to unpack it all for us is Mike Hardy, who has led the project here at the ONS, and top economist and former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, Jonathan Haskel, professor of economics at Imperial College London. Professor to start with you: to understand what's changed, it'd probably be helpful to remind ourselves how consumer prices inflation has until now been calculated. Essentially, it was the ONS and its agents checking the prices of 1000s of items on a monthly basis to see how they changed. Jonathan: Yeah, that's right, and the ONS has gone to an enormous amount of effort in order to make that collection representative and make it consistent. But of course, in the modern era of scanner, data, computers, e commerce, things like that, there are other ways of doing it. I guess the important point, which Mike can talk about some more, is that one of the things that we know from statistics is that having a big sample isn't necessarily going to be better if you have a representative sample to start with. So I think one of the interesting points about all of this is whilst the scanner data is collecting many more data points, it's a fascinating check on the representativeness or otherwise of the ONS survey and the procedures thus far as to whether the actual average of all of that will turn out to be very different or similar to what's done before. It's a great advantage to have all of this extra data, but one shouldn't overstate either the advantage or use it as a way of rubbishing what the ONS has been doing in the past. Miles: So to put it this way, perhaps then, what the ONS has traditionally been doing in collecting prices, is to take this big monthly snapshot of retailing and prices, and what people have been paying for items. What it's got now, what it's moving to in the digital age is moving from a still picture, perhaps to a rolling 4k video, and from that, it can find out exactly what has been missed out of the inflation calculations previously. Jonathan: Well, I'll just put a little bit of a spin on that. One of the things that the price collectors do, and they're very, very careful to do, is to make sure that that snapshot is consistent across the snapshots, if you sort of see what I mean. So there is a bit of a rolling element to those snapshots already, because, for example, if you're going to collect the price of, let us say, Ladies jeans, which is something that I was doing with the price collector recently, you want to be sure you collect the price for the same good over time. And the point about the price collectors is they're extremely conscientious about making sure that, in the case of ladies jeans, they are coloured blue. They've got either a flared leg or not a flared leg. They've got the same number of pockets, they've got the same amount of stitching, they've got different decorations on them. To make sure that those goods remain the same is actually very important, and that's something actually which the hand collection can do. And as I say, I think that means that the snapshot element is maybe not quite the right metaphor, if I may say, miles. It is the relation. It's a consistent element over time, a consistent snapshot if that's using a metaphor Miles: That said it's more than just blindly following the same list of products every month. But nonetheless, the traditional way of doing things has had significant. What do you think those are? Jonathan: I guess the limitations are that when one is collecting a sample, any kind of sample at all, one is always doing one's best to try to hope that that's a representative sample, and having more data then is going to help if it turns out that the sample is unrepresentative. So I think that's one part of it. I think the other part of it is, of course, it's becoming increasingly costly to hand collect these numbers, and you know, like any public agency, one wants to be as careful as one possibly can with taxpayers money. ...
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    34 mins
  • The road ahead for the ONS: a conversation with Darren Tierney

    The road ahead for the ONS: a conversation with Darren Tierney
    Jan 27 2026
    Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a pivotal moment for the organisation. In a new episode of Statistically Speaking our host Miles Fletcher sits down with Darren to talk about what happens next. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher. Now, if you've followed the UK news much over the past year, you'll know the ONS has been under more scrutiny than at any point in its history, questions about trust, priorities, its core economic data and whether the organisation has simply been trying to do too much at once, have all been very publicly aired. Today's episode is about what happens next. Late last summer, Darren Tierney stepped into the newly created role of Permanent Secretary at a moment when some of the UK's most relied upon statistics, especially those based on the Labor Force Survey, were under real pressure. In this conversation, we'll talk about Darren's background in government, running large, complex public services and helping to craft and enact key policies. We'll explore how data has shaped his career so far, and what he found when he arrived at the ONS. We'll also dig into some of the hardest questions facing the organisation, and what absolutely has to be fixed first, what may need to stop, how user expectations are being balanced with that and how full confidence in official statistics can be restored. This isn't just an internal reset. What the ONS does and how well it does it matters to policymakers, businesses and the public alike. So join us as we talk about focus, priorities, and the road ahead. So then Darren, to begin at the beginning, you're not an economist or statistician by profession yourself. What motivated you to take leadership of what is the central organisation in UK statistics? DARREN TIERNEY Sure, well look as a non-statistician you can imagine I was a little bit daunted when this prospect first came along for precisely that reason. I was kind of worried that maybe not being a statistician or an economist might be a real drawback but as I thought more about the job, and more about what was needed for the organisation at the time, and with the split of the roles, I thought actually, I can really help. But what really drew me to the role was that although I'm not a statistician, Iv'e been an avid consumer of ONS products for the 25 years that I've been a policy wonk in Whitehall. And going from a good policy professional to a great one, requires both access to good data and also a real understanding of it and knowing how to use it. And it's that background that kind of helped me and really got me into it, and so I saw it as a real opportunity to come and help an organisation that really couldn't be any more consequential for the UK. MILES FLETCHER The Devereux review said that what was needed was someone with really serious operational experience, having run serious civil service operations, and you bring plenty of that. Could you just detail some of that? You've had a very strong rise, you know, through the ranks of the civil service. Just trace that for us, if you would. DT Yeah. So I started life in what was the old Prescott empire of DETR, which was environment and transport in the regions as a policy wonk working on aviation. I then went and joined the Ministry of Justice, where I spent three years in the private offices of Harriet Harman, Jack Straw and Ken Clarke, and that kind of real frontline policy making, as it were, is the thing that I did a lot of in the first half of my career. The second half of my career, which is much more relevant to the ONS, was centred around transformation and change. And again, I spent about 12 years or so in the MOJ, and my senior career there was about transforming systems and running big programs. And I went from there to international trade, just after the Referendum, where like a lot of officials at the time, I was quite keen to run to where the energy or the fire was after Brexit. But I didn't fancy working DExEU, and this new department called Trade seemed quite interesting. So I went there, and again, this was a kind of brand new department, and it grew from a few hundred people to about four and a half thousand. And so that kind of building and running the department as a strategy director for investments and exports, I guess those two experiences in justice and trade are the two that I rely on most in this role. MF So you spent time in the corridors of power then, the ministerial heights of the civil service, but also having to try and make the machine run efficiently as well, and to deliver public services and achieve policies in the real world. What role has data played in that? And what sort of statistics were you using? What sort of insights were you getting? Can ...
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    35 mins
  • Crime data: Numbers, narratives and nuance

    Crime data: Numbers, narratives and nuance
    Oct 21 2025
    In "Crime: Numbers, Narratives and Nuance" our host Miles Fletcher speaks with Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS and John Rentoul, leading commentator on crime, policing, and the media, about the challenges in interpreting crime data. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome to another episode of Statistically Speaking – the official podcast on the UK's Office for National Statistics. The time we're returning to the scene of a major statistical topic we've touched on before but amid a new and sometimes highly polarised public debate, one we think fully bears further investigation: how best to understand and interpret the crime figures produced and published by ONS. Helping us with our enquiries is Nick Stripe, Joint Head of Crime Statistics at the ONS. It's his job to assemble and present the complex statistical picture of crime revealed in two very large and sometimes conflicting data sources. We also have an independent witness in the highly experiences shape of John Rentoul, Chief Political Commentator for the Independent and visiting professor at Kings College London. He'll be talking about the use and possible abuse of crime figures in the media and political debate. Are the statistics and those who produce them doing enough to enable the public to understand properly the prevalence and nature of crime in our society today? Nick, a big question to start with, some people think crime is going down, other people insist it's going up. Who's right? NICK STRIPE Well, it's a question that sounds simple, doesn't it? And it's a question I get asked quite a lot. But if you think about the concept of crime, you soon realize that it covers a really huge range of actions and behaviours. If I was a chief constable trying to reduce crime in my area, I'd want to know what kinds of crimes are causing the biggest problems. So, is it theft, robbery, violence? Domestic abuse? sexual offenses? Maybe it's fraud. And even if you tell me it's theft, then there's still a broad spectrum. So, is that burglary from houses? Is it theft of vehicles? Is it people having things snatched off them in the street? Is there a new thing about theft from doorsteps? Each of those types of theft would have its own trends, patterns and challenges. So, what I'm really saying is that whilst I understand your desire for a single answer, the real stories are in the detail of those different crime types. But I will come back to your question, is crime going up or down? Broadly speaking, I would say we're experiencing much less crime now than we did 20 or 30 years ago. Many crime types have been declining at a fairly steady rate since the mid 1990s and in more recent years, probably since we started to emerge from the pandemic, crime levels have broadly flattened out at that lower level. But some types of crime are rising now, some are still falling, and some are changing in ways that reflect shifts in society, shifts in technology and shifts in policing. MF That's the complex and highly nuanced picture, and it's the one that is designed to best serve those who make policies around crime, those who try to contain crime, those who try to fight it? NS That's right, Miles. And it's a picture that we get from drawing on several different data sources. There are two main ones. One is police recorded crime, and the second one is our independent survey of crime across England and Wales. And then we can use other data sources to provide richness for certain crime types, or to triangulate what we're seeing in those main data sources. And when we pull all of that together, we try and give a rich, nuanced, accurate picture for policy and policing. MF That's the aim of the statistics, but when it comes to public debate and public perceptions, do we risk misleading people by not being able to come up with a single barometer of crime? You can't go on the ONS website and see whether overall offending is up or down for example, or is that a completely pointless exercise? NS Well as I said, different crime types will have different things acting on them at any one point in time. But what we can do, for example through the crime survey, that has measured what I'm going to call traditional types of crime experienced by us as the public. So that's things like theft, that's things like violence, that's things like criminal damage, and in the last 10 years or so, that also includes fraud. And when we look at those types of crimes, we can see that, if you want a single figure, the numbers have come down. And that's when I say that over the last 30 years, there's been a big reduction in crime. If you take violence, theft and criminal damage, about 30 years ago, four in 10 of us, about 40% of us, every year would experience one of those types of crime. Now it's one in 10 of us. So, I can give you that picture for ...
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    38 mins
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