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It could be argued that FT Alphaville disproportionately covers the Office for National Statistics. So let’s quickly talk about Eurostat instead.
In May 2023, we wrote about how response rates to the UK’s Labour Force Survey — the big daddy of employment surveys — had dropped to near-critical levels. Lo, a few months later the series became too unreliable to publish, and we’re still waiting for a replacement.
As we wrote at the time:
Eurostat’s figures aren’t as easy to uncover as the ONS’s, and its press officers said they don’t track aggregate non-response data as a time series. But its latest quality report for the EU LFS (covering 2020) at least points to some of the issues that can occur.
You might hope that, two years later, there would be more of those LFS quality reports available, with new nuggets of information about response rates.
That would be a fool’s hope. The relevant page hasn’t been updated since March 2022.
Alphaville emailed Eurostat to ask about this. A spokesperson told us:
2023 and 2024 quality reports will be published, but we cannot give precise information on when this will happen.
We asked why, and they’ve promised to get back to us when they find out a reason.
As a result of this situation, we will not be covering Eurostat further at this time. There’s a lesson in there about transparency, but as journalists we don’t want anyone to learn it.
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