Official Statistics

Consultation document: Programme for reducing published Official Statistics content

Updated 8 February 2021

1. Background

Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, undertook a review of HMRC’s official statistics, Strengthening the quality of HMRC’s official statistics published on 30 April 2020. As part of that review he recommended that HMRC focuses on producing a smaller volume of statistical products and increases the quality of those products.

HMRC’s existing approach for statistics is to generate a high volume of official statistics so that colleagues at HMRC, HM Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility can refer to this material as part of fiscal policy and forecasting processes. This approach also minimises the generation of new material in response to FOIs and makes source material widely available to the general public and research agencies.

HMRC has a limited resource to produce statistics. Recently, HMRC has developed some new, high-profile statistical releases including monthly statistics on COVID-19 schemes, such as the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, which has added to the demands on the statistical teams. In light of this and Ed Humpherson’s recommendations it is critical that we review and adapt our approach with our resourcing pressures.

2. Proposed programme of work

This document highlights the overarching programme of work.

The measures we are looking at include:

• stopping some publications altogether (we have put forward one for now and will propose others in 2021)
• reducing the frequency of some publications, for example moving from monthly to quarterly
• bringing some publications together where it will reduce duplication and will be useful to have related information together in one place
• reducing some of the general content, particularly where we can link to it elsewhere on gov.uk, (without losing any statistical content)
• reducing some statistical content within the current schedules

The aims of the reduction plans are to ensure that HMRC:

• continues to produce useful and relevant statistics for use by our stakeholders
• adapts statistics publications to reduce what we produce for those which are no longer widely used, or are duplicated elsewhere, or could be produced less frequently

This will bring about benefits in the coherence and relevance of our statistics including:

• improving the user experience of our statistics by reducing some of the general and statistical content
• enabling us to focus on developing and improving our statistics, for example by doing more to understand our data sources and streamline production and quality assurance processes

To inform our decisions we will be consulting with our stakeholders on individual strands as we move through this programme. If you want to comment on or make suggestions on the programme more generally please contact statisticsenquiries@hmrc.gov.uk. We will review all feedback we receive.

2.1 Proposals for stopping publications

We have not completed this review but the initial phase has identified one publication which we propose to stop producing. We are consulting on our proposals.

Disaggregated receipts publication

The disaggregated receipts publication is published once a year with the most recent one published in December 2019.

This publication contains apportions of each tax to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes a similar set of statistics in its ‘Country and Regional Public Sector Finances’ publication, providing equivalent and additional material (for example it provides regional breakdowns). There are two differences:

1. ONS’s tax receipts are on a National Accounts basis (consistent with the UK public sector finances), whereas HMRC’s are on a cash receipts basis (i.e. when the tax is received by the Exchequer); and
2. HMRC’s publication provides detailed commentary on selected taxes, which is not present in ONS’s publication. This includes graphs showing the growth index of tax apportioned to each country since 1999-00, allowing users to view any year-on-year changes in country proportions for each tax more easily.

Following a user consultation in 2017 we have worked with ONS to align publication dates of the two sets of statistics more closely.

Please respond by Monday 23 November to statisticsenquiries@hmrc.gov.uk if you have any views on us stopping this publication. In responses, it would be useful if you could explain the impact of us stopping this publication on you or your work.

Sean Whellams, HMRC Chief Statistician