Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he has made a recent assessment of the adequacy of the granularity of data produced by the ONS for the purposes of policy decisions relating to support for businesses.

The government is committed to working closely with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to ensure continued improvements to data and statistics.

In 2016, Sir Charles Bean published an independent review of economic statistics. This made several recommendations, including to make data more granular and timely through greater use of large scale datasets. The government fully supported those recommendations and has since provided the ONS with £25m to implement them, which led to improvements such as use of VAT data in National Accounts estimates, and the publication of monthly GDP.

Subsequently, at Spending Review 2021, the government funded ONS to undertake a further ambitious programme of improvements to its suite of economic statistics. This includes introducing scanner data into price statistics and further upgrades to the granularity of business statistics through greater use of administrative data.