From: Liz McKeown, Director of Economic Statistics Production and Analysis
Dr Alex Lambert, Director of Social Surveys, TLFS Senior Responsible Owner
To: Rob Kent-Smith, Deputy Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (by email)
Dear Rob,
29 April 2026
Re: Update report of progress with meeting recommendations about the Labour Force Survey and its transformation
Thank you for your letter of 29 April regarding the publication of the update report on how ONS is improving the Labour Force Survey and progressing its transformation.
We welcome the publication of the report and its recognition of our significant progress with communication, engagement and the development of the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS) Core survey. The report also acknowledges that we have fully met four of the twelve recommendations, with good progress made against the other eight. Work is already underway to ensure these are fully met. As part of our commitment to be evidence led in our decisions, including around survey design and methods, many of the outstanding recommendations rely on the outcome of ongoing analysis that cannot conclude until further data has been collected and methods refined.
As announced in our recent labour market transformation update on progress and plans: April 2026 article, we have implemented all agreed major design improvements to the TLFS including data rotation, improved pay and earnings questions, and a higher respondent incentive. We have also been open with users that while the short Core Survey is continuing to improve response quality by reducing partial household responses and increasing the number of fully responding individuals, overall response rates and attrition have not yet improved in line with expectations. These latest developments are expected to further improve data quality, overall survey performance, and to meet important user requirements. Further developments of particular relevance to the recommendations in your report include:
- extensive engagement led by the TLFS Household, Socioeconomic and Local (HSL) project team over the last few months, sponsored at Director level by our colleague Jen Woolford, to support a wide range of users around the Annual Population Survey and TLFS Plus Survey development;
- developing our approach on when to publish experimental labour market statistics based on TLFS data in collaboration with our main users, and endorsed by our Labour Market Technical Group and Stakeholder Advisory Panel;
- publishing further detail on the measures of success for transition that will form an important part of the readiness assessments and decisions;
- making TLFS updates more transparent and accessible to users via ongoing improvements to the TLFS landing page.
While further development of the TLFS continues, user confidence in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) data has also improved due to response levels for all LFS waves now being close to their pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic level.
We welcome OSR's recommendations to further strengthen public confidence, user acceptability and inform appropriate use of the statistics and remain committed to achieving full compliance with the updated Code of Practice for Statistics (Code 3.0), which we continue to embed as part of the ongoing transformation of the survey and our statistics.
We appreciate the ongoing open and constructive engagement with your teams and will continue to publicly report our progress in our regular series of labour market transformation articles.
Yours sincerely,
Liz McKeown, Director of Economic Statistics Production and Analysis
Dr Alex Lambert, Director of Social Surveys, TLFS Senior Responsible Owner