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That would be the icing on this cake

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It is. At least on this one we suspected the data was nonsense

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Important to note that ONS is now doing the right thing and trying to find the truth. This is nothing like the 2010s when it actively sought not to change stats (RPI) that it knew were wrong

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They have just put out research that says employment growth after covid was strong, when the official data showed it was weak. And everyone spent ages thinking about why the UK alone had a weak jobs recovery after Covid

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Investigating non-response to the Labour Force Survey using administrative data - Office for National Statistics

After the ONS cast all my article about the UK productivity puzzle onto the scrap heap, it has now downgraded all articles on the UK’s weak jobs recovery after Covid to junk too…. 😖 www.ons.gov.uk/employmentan...

ons.gov.uk

Using Pay As You Earn data to identify and adjust for potential employment-related non-response to the Labour Force Survey. These are not official statistics.

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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 24/09/2026

People did but were told it was fine and ONS had checked

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Reposted by Chris Giles

Hetan Shah @hetanshah.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Reasons to be a little cheerful from @chrisgiles.ft.com. The piece also contains the comforting line ‘Britain is internationally far less useless than it appeared.’! www.ft.com/content/c819...

The accuracy of the UK's official economic picture still falls far short of what an advanced nation should expect. But the performance of the ONS is on the up. The UK economy is not as weak as we have been told. We are just as rich as we thought, but are not working ourselves into the ground.
Happy days.

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Reposted by Chris Giles

Miranda Green @greenmirandahere.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Rarely am I able to recommend an FT column that ends with "happy days" for the UK - but @chrisgiles.ft.com came through for us with this www.ft.com/content/c819...

ft.com

Why your holiday is good news for the UK

For once we should thank the Office for National Statistics for its productivity reporting

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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 23/09/2026

Probably Big moral is for us to stop thinking we’re special

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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 22/09/2026

Agreed and all in my newsletter

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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 22/09/2026

With Kevin Warsh boycotting the dot plot, it must be dying... My newsletter asks whether we should mourn? Probably not, but not because it locks people into their forecasts - it doesn't www.ft.com/content/ba73...

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Chris Giles @chrisgiles.ft.com · 21/09/2026

Was it though? Sounds awfully like the bores of Piddington

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True. Don’t have a baseline and don’t put probabilities on things is the obvious answer* * the approach taken by FT Monetary Policy Radar

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Says most about how wrong all their previous baselines were

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Which will come as people get their pay rises I’ll get my coat

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Surely the hit is happening now, since people* are already paying higher fuel costs and haven’t had a pay rise since the start of the year, yet are spending quite happily. That’s what is so interesting *obviously a simplification

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Sadly no. It is as simple as the LFS asked people hours of work. People on holiday didn’t respond so they had a biased sample. That bias worsened as LFS quality and response rates dropped in the past decade

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Less than you think, sadly. oNS just didn’t realise how much holiday people took

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Absolutey, but it's easier to believe in a continuation of a trend (we wrongly thought had stopped) and the UK not being in productivity special measures internationally. ONS could have saved all of us a lot of bother

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Absolutely. Nothing big changes except for we understand that we're not as special as we thought we were

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It's shocking how much time has been wasted on the UK's relativel underperformance here... ... talk about a waste of productivity

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Continuation of a long-term trend

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Reposted by Chris Giles

And on 1), the fact that it was the prior intention means it's important to follow through, absent some v good reason, to avoid validating the suspicion that QE was a permanent monetary financing.

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9)That is the one real downside of an otherwise sensible piece of buraucracy that should really go unremarked

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7) UK gilt market likes it - but let's not get too excited by a 10bp move in the 30-year yield. That way madness lies 8) The pause in sales until April suggests that despite working on this for a year and despite many outsiders suggesting similar stuff, UK authorities can't take decisions quickly

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6) Governments of any colour could still work with BoE on a tiered reserves scheme not to remunerate all reserves at Bank Rate if a future government wanted to (at least untile 2034). But BoE by continuing QT is reducing the interest rate risk it bears

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4) Having DMO do sales to the market is also marginal. It always set the marturity structure of issuance after knowing the BoE sales, so was always in charge. This formallises the practice 5) There is a tiny benefit to the public purse from BoE not selling small quantities of illiquid bonds

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It is marginally bad for the current budget rule and marginally good for the debt rule. Marginally is the operative word here. 3) The BoE would not have chosen to back the currency with long-dated gilts on its books, but it's not a bad thing to do with them

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The BoE, HMT, DMO decision to unwind quantatitive easing completely is NOT something to get worked up by, however tempting. 1) This was always the intention (see Mervyn King 2009) 2) It has tiny fiscal effects (nothing like George Osborne's 2012 gambit, which ONS stopped after my complaints).

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You're right on the calculation but wrong on the consequences (though your view is entirely understandable). If productivity is much better but tax revenues (a hard number) are unchanged, something else must be worse (labour supply - hours not people)

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Actually - the second tweet should have said an upward revision of annual hourly productivity growth from 0.7% to 1.3% since the GFC - apologies

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Is the UK's Productivity Revival Real, or a Measurement Illusion? - NIESR

Join me, James Benford (ONS), Richard Hughes (formerly OBR) and Terra Allas (Alliance Manchester Business School) for a webinar tomorrow on this niesr.ac.uk/event/uks-pr... As the title suggests, it will be forward looking

niesr.ac.uk

On 17 September, the ONS will publish its new component-based approach to measuring hours worked. This webinar discusses the implications of the new methodology and what it means for policymakers.

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Anyway, (for various complicated reasons due to survey quality) the upshot is measured annual UK productivity per hour since the GFC will be revised up from 1.1% to 1.3%

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Today in the occasional series "we learnt something we really should have known", the Office for National Statistics learnt that people generally don't answer surveys if they are on holiday

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These countries don't obviously have credit ratings (apart from Luxembourg) the UK would want to use. And if you don't take currency risk (ie you borrow in sterling) you won't get lower interest rates... there is no magic here

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Exactly - and some well-remunerated (probably ex Goldman) bankers making a mint - at least that is my pet theory why the Canadian PM is so keen

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I don't think you can hold the view that using the defence bank as an intermediary means you are not borrowing, yet also think that Reform UK's proposed use of a UK resident son as an intermediary for foreign donation is beyond the pale

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I would say the ONS scoring of this would be remarkable if it didn't show as borrowing, since you are procuring something for borrowed money (with a lot of intermediaries) and paying interest on it.

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Strikes me as an attempt to persuade (some) people it isn't borrowing alongside a beauracracy that will get a lot of lobbying by defence companies. Clearly, we have a problem in interoperability and joint procurement. But you are never going to take the politics out of these decisions

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So, the new game in town is to persuade a bunch of bankers (in Ottawa?) that yous is the best system to be financed and national politics won't become part of that decision at all? Have you ever visited the IMF or World Bank?

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why is the bank idea the solution to this genuine problem?

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