Dear Sir,

Your article (“Student finance distortions show official statistics are awry”, published online) suggests that Office for National Statistics was slow to look at the classification of student loans. We are determined to produce high quality data and statistics to help Britain make better decisions. It is fair to say that we have not always lived up to that aim in the past, but we are delivering on ambitious plans to improve our statistics, covering a wide range of outputs including economic statistics and how we measure population and migration. For example, this week we published brand new statistics estimating the number of deaths of homeless people.

We have already made a number of improvements, but there is more to come. We are also endeavouring to be more innovative. We have developed this new method of dealing with student loans, which has received the backing of international statistical bodies.

Yours faithfully,

Jonathan Athow

Deputy National Statistician for Economic Statistics, Office for National Statistics