Government Statistical Service

The Government Statistical Service is a government-wide umbrella body that is coordinated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and one of several professional communities within the civil service. It serves to bind together all of the statisticians and other analysts across government, as well as their support staff, who are responsible for the collection, production, analysis and dissemination of official statistics, and who are ultimately responsible to the National Statistician, acting in her capacity as the Head of the GSS, through their own departmental Head of Profession for Statistics.

The GSS is, simultaneously, a centralised, decentralised and devolved community. It comprises some 6,700 persons, the vast majority of whom are civil servants, more than half of whom work in the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The remainder work in 41 other UK Government Departments and Agencies, and in the two devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales. Although the equivalent staff in Northern Ireland are not affiliated to the GSS, they work very closely with the GSS and share a common professional culture. Together, the GSS manages a wide range of censuses, surveys and data sources from which they produce some 1,400 individual statistical products, more than 80 per cent of which are labelled as Code-compliant 'National Statistics'.

Decentralisation is a key feature of the UK statistical system and is often described as both its strength and its weakness. It keeps statisticians close to their policy customers and maintains statistical expertise across government, but because of this, it can create conflicts of loyalty.

More than 80 per cent of all professional statisticians in the GSS work alongside their policy colleagues in the 41 other government departments that are affiliated to the GSS. And about 80 per cent of all official statistics, which are designated as Code-compliant 'National Statistics', are produced by statisticians working outside ONS in other government departments.