The government’s own UK jobs survey was so broken it got suspended – here’s how the ONS is trying to fix it
The UK’s official measure of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity has been plagued by reliability issues for years, culminating in the temporary suspension of key Labour Force Survey (LFS) estimates in late 2023.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has since scrambled to repair the damage, reintroducing reweighted data and ramping up efforts to boost response rates.
But as the March 2026 labour market bulletin shows, challenges persist, and a full transformation to a new survey is still on the horizon.
The problems trace back to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ONS shifted the LFS from face-to-face interviews to telephone-only to comply with lockdowns, triggering a sharp drop in response rates. What was once around 40-50% pre-pandemic plummeted, hitting critically low levels by mid-2023.
In October 2023, the ONS suspended detailed LFS-based publications because the data were deemed too unreliable for publication, a rare and embarrassing admission for one of the world’s leading statistical agencies.
Internal emails later revealed just how dire things had become, with sample sizes in some industry breakdowns collapsing to as few as five individuals.
The survey no longer reliably represented the population, introducing potential biases and volatility that made it risky for policymakers, including the Bank of England, to rely on it for decisions on interest rates, fiscal policy or assessing the health of the jobs market.
Patch-up measures and partial recovery
Since the suspension, the ONS has implemented a series of fixes. It reintroduced face-to-face interviewing from late 2023, boosted the sample size, hired more interviewers, and applied reweighting to align LFS figures better with other sources such as HMRC’s PAYE Real Time Information (RTI) data on payrolls and the Workforce Jobs survey.
Reweighted LFS estimates returned to monthly publications from February 2024, with further adjustments in December 2024 using updated 2022 population estimates.
Response levels have improved: the achieved sample rose from about 75,757 individuals in July-September 2025 to 77,927 in October-December 2025.
These changes have brought LFS employment measures closer to payroll data in levels, though month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter changes remain volatile and less coherent with other indicators.
In its latest March 2026 bulletin, the ONS continues to flag the LFS data as “official statistics in development” and urges caution, especially when interpreting changes over periods affected by the mid-2023 to 2024 volatility.
It now recommends triangulating LFS figures with payroll employment, the Claimant Count, vacancies and Workforce Jobs rather than relying on the survey in isolation.
The bigger fix
The long-term solution is the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS), an online-first redesign aimed at fixing the root causes.
Key features include:
- A much shorter “Core” questionnaire (around 15 minutes per household on average) focused on headline labour market indicators to boost participation.
- A larger target sample size, potentially up to 90,000 households per quarter, versus the current LFS.
- A supplementary “Plus” survey for deeper data.
- Modernised data collection and processing to reduce bias and improve representativeness.
The ONS originally hoped to transition headline statistics to the TLFS earlier, but quality concerns repeatedly pushed the timeline.
Plans now target November 2026 for the switch, though contingency planning includes a possible delay to May 2027 if technical issues or quality assessments require more testing and parallel running of old and new series.
A January 2026 quality update and ongoing quarterly monitoring reports track progress on response rates, biases and coherence with administrative data.
The ONS has also launched a project to link LFS and TLFS records at the individual level with HMRC PAYE data to better understand and correct for any remaining biases.
Reliable jobs data are critical for the Bank of England’s monetary policy decisions, Treasury budgeting, and businesses’ planning hiring.
Persistent uncertainty has drawn criticism from economists, MPs and think tanks, with some arguing the ONS “lost” nearly a million workers in its figures compared with other sources and warning of misinformed policy.
