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On Thursday, the UK’s official statistics agency postponed the imminent release of trade data after identifying an error dating back to 2023.
“As further errors in the UK trade statistics relating to international trade data for 2023 have been identified, the Bureau of National Statistics has decided to delay UK trade.
Currently, on March 28, we plan to fully publish revised trade data for both goods and services on March 28, in addition to payment balances and quarterly national account releases.
“This delay increases the time to process and modify estimates to account for these identified errors,” the agency added.
The delays announced in the day’s notice will encourage questions about the reliability of numbers generated by ONS after long-term issues have arisen in key research into labor market conditions.
The collapse in response rates to the ONS workforce survey, which are not expected to be exchanged until at least 2026, left interest rate setters without reliable employment data for almost 18 months.
It also sparked an office at the end of last year due to statistical regulations to warn that 14 sets of data would no longer be able to be classified as “official statistics.”
The researchers raised separate doubts about the quality of annual revenue data used to calculate minimum wages. Even while reducing other household surveys due to pressure on resources, ONS filed emergency lawsuits to strengthen response rates for the cost of living and food surveys, which are key inputs to GDP and inflation data.
The UK is the second largest service exporter in the world after the US, and its share of services in the UK’s total exports has steadily risen over the past decade.
In December 2024, exports of services that were not adjusted due to inflation were 50% higher than in January 2019, but according to the latest ONS figures, exports of goods that had not yet been revised had not yet recovered to pre-Covid levels.
In another statement later on Thursday, ONS said when the error was corrected by an “initial investigation” it would “have an upward revision of about 2% up to service import levels in 2023 and 5% up to service export levels.”
It added that imports of services and exports of services in 2024 will be revised upwards of approximately 5% and 6% respectively.
Last month, ONS identified another error in data given by HM Revenue & Customs, The Tax Authority related to importing goods between January 2023 and December 2024, affecting countries outside the EU. Both errors will be fixed on March 28th.
With some data collection changes, since Brexit, estimating the flow of goods for ONS has made it even more difficult for ONS.
The agency making adjustments to explain these changes have repeatedly warned that data on imports of UK goods and exports to the EU from January 2021 “still a structural break.”
ONS has also made major revisions to politically sensitive estimates of international migration in recent years. This is a sign of how difficult it is to move away from the old style of passenger surveys to better measure movements based on government-held management data.
