The Office for National Statistics has confirmed that figures affected by an operational issue in its Labour Force Survey have been corrected, after a social media user flagged a concern.
The ONS responded directly to a user on social media, confirming the affected figures had been put right. The exchange prompted the ONS to publish further detail in a blog post titled “Learning from an operational issue temporarily impacting LFS data”, which sets out the mitigations put in place.
The Labour Force Survey is the primary source of UK employment, unemployment and economic inactivity statistics. The ONS local-statistics page currently shows an employment rate of 75.1 per cent for people aged 16 to 64, seasonally adjusted, for May to July 2026 — though The ONS has said the issue had minimal impact on headline estimates such as the employment rate, though it identified a small but noticeable effect on average-hours and total-hours-worked estimates.
The ONS published quantitative detail on the operational impact — including approximately 1,200 fewer achieved household interviews, around 19% fewer than in the preceding period — and concluded that the effect on headline employment estimates was minimal. The social media post does not identify the specific dataset, publication or error involved, and the available evidence does not establish whether the issue relates to an economic publication or another corrected dataset entirely.
Under its Code of Practice obligations, the ONS is required to correct errors as soon as practicable and to publish information about an error’s scale, nature, cause and impact. Corrections and published explanations of this kind are a standard part of the ONS quality-assurance process — the organisation regularly revises statistics through monthly, quarterly and annual revision cycles.
But without knowing which figures changed and by how much, data users cannot determine whether previously reported trends in employment or inactivity were altered by the correction.
Source: @ONS