Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they have taken to improve the coverage, accuracy and reliability of the Labour Force Survey, and what progress they have made in those improvements.

Answered by Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

22 October 2025

Dear Baroness Carberry of Muswell Hill,

As Permanent Secretary of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what steps the ONS have taken to improve the coverage, accuracy and reliability of the Labour Force Survey (LFS), and what progress the ONS have made in those improvements (HL11013).

Our recently published plans for economic statistics and survey improvement and enhancement reinforce the importance of, and our commitment to, delivering high-quality labour market statistics.

The LFS remains the lead measure for data on the supply of labour while further development of the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) takes place.

Over the last two years, we have taken several actions to address quality concerns with the LFS. These include:

• reinstating the sample boost

• returning to face-to-face interviewing

• increasing incentives

• the ongoing recruitment of additional interviewers

These interventions have now fed through all five waves of the survey. Response levels and rates have shown clear improvement because of these actions, with Wave 1 response levels now very close to their pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic level. The composition of respondents according to different characteristics has also shown some improvement since late 2023; however, representativeness is lower than before the pandemic and has not improved for all characteristics.

These improvements have been welcomed by the Stakeholder Advisory Panel on Labour Market Statistics, as they increase confidence that the LFS can be fit for purpose until the transition to the TLFS takes place.

We are increasing interviewer capacity for Waves 2 to 5 to further improve response rates, as these currently remain lower than their pre-pandemic level. We continue to closely monitor LFS data quality and regularly update users as part of our LFS quality articles, which assess the impact of recent changes on the statistics, response levels and rates, and respondent characteristics.

In parallel to these LFS improvements, progress with the TLFS continues. The short Core Survey (a streamlined, longitudinal, labour-market-focused questionnaire that takes 15 minutes per household to complete on average) launched in July 2025, with a Wave 1 sample size of 90,000 households per quarter across Great Britain. The new TLFS design is expected to reduce respondent burden, improve completion rates and representativeness, and enhance the overall data quality of the headline labour market indicators.

We continue to keep users informed of progress with the transformation of our labour market statistics through our quarterly Labour Market Transformation articles, with the next update scheduled for November 2025. We would be happy to send you a copy when published.

Yours sincerely,

Darren Tierney

1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/whatwedo/programmesandprojects/economicstatisticstransformation/theplanforonseconomicstatistics

2. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/ourstrategyandplans/onssurveyimprovementandenhancementplanforeconomicstatistics

3. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/labourforcesurveyqualityupdate/september2025

4. https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/labourmarkettransformationupdateonprogressandplans/july2025