The Office for National Statistics has refreshed its real-time indicators dashboard, giving policymakers, businesses and researchers a weekly snapshot of UK economic activity and social change before slower official data become available.
The ONS has updated the Economic Activity and Social Change real-time indicators dashboard, which draws on rapid response surveys, novel data sources and methods not used in standard national accounts. The dashboard groups its indicators into four categories: consumer behaviour; business and workforce; energy and housing; and transport.
The ONS has been collecting and publishing faster economic and social data since March 2020. The dashboard is updated weekly, with a fuller monthly bulletin providing commentary on what the indicators show.
But users should treat the figures with care. The ONS describes the indicators as official statistics in development and experimental data — meaning they are subject to revision and carry limitations that standard quarterly or annual statistics do not. Individual readings can be affected by adverse weather, bank holidays and school holidays, and some series are seasonally adjusted to strip out recurring patterns such as the Christmas period.
The dashboard’s methodology assesses each indicator against three tests: whether it is relevant to measures such as gross domestic product, whether it is timely enough for current analysis, and whether it is a valid measure of the economic activity concerned. It is published separately from the ONS’s standard national accounts and labour-market releases.
The appeal is speed. Conventional economic statistics — GDP figures, labour-market data — can take weeks or months to compile. Real-time indicators are designed to flag emerging trends well before those numbers land.
The ONS publishes the dashboard alongside a methodology document explaining how data are collected, aggregated, analysed and presented. Any individual figure should be checked against the relevant chart metadata and that methodology before drawing firm conclusions.
Source: @ONS