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Stats boss quits as minister says new leadership needed
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Getty ImagesSir Robert Chote has resigned as chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, the body responsible for overseeing the troubled Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Earlier this year, a highly-critical government review said the ONS had “deep-seated” issues which needed tackling.
The Bank of England has also criticised the agency for the reliability of its job market data, which the central bank considers when deciding whether to raise or cut interest rates.
Announcing Sir Robert’s resignation, Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden said “new leadership was critical” to address “the challenges identified and rapidly restore confidence in the statistics produced by ONS that underpin decision-making”.
In a letter sent to Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Cabinet Office’s most senior civil servant Catherine Little said a new chair would be “in a more credible position” to act on the findings of the investigation.
Sir Robert, who joined the UK Statistics Authority in 2022, will now take up a position as president of Trinity College, Oxford in September.
A senior Cabinet Office source denied the government had wanted Sir Robert to go and said it was his own choice to leave, but said it was “hard to make effective government policy if you don’t have statistics that have integrity”.
They added that “if we can’t know the true picture then it’s more difficult to make policy, so that’s why we’re getting on with fixing it”.
This is the second senior resignation in recent months, after Sir Ian Diamond stepped down from his position as national statistician at the ONS in May due to health reasons.
The ONS gathers and publishes data used by the government to make policy decisions in areas including state benefits, housing, migration and crime.
In April, the government asked former senior civil servant Sir Robert Devereux to investigate the ONS after a series of issues.
In his subsequent report, Sir Robert concluded “most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance”, in particular “choices made at the top of ONS, over several years.”
He cited an “interest in the new” that took attention from “less exciting but crucial task” of delivering core economic data that were good enough to guide quality decisions.
Responding to the review, acting national statistician Emma Rourke said she welcomed the report and “fully acknowledges the issues he has highlighted”.
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[NEW YORK] Microsoft is keen to show employees how much artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming its own workplace, even as the company terminates thousands of personnel.
During a presentation this week, chief commercial officer Judson Althoff said AI tools are boosting productivity in everything from sales and customer service to software engineering, according to a source familiar with his remarks.
Althoff said AI saved Microsoft more than US$500 million last year in its call centres alone and increased both employee and customer satisfaction, according to the source, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.
The company is also starting to use AI to handle interactions with smaller customers, Althoff said. This effort is nascent, but already generating tens of millions of US dollars, he said.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Tech executives have been increasingly vocal about the potential for AI to automate labour currently performed by humans. Salesforce has said that 30 per cent of internal work at the company is being handled by AI, allowing it to reduce hiring for some roles. Executives at Alphabet and Meta Platforms have said significant chunks of code are now being written with AI.
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At Microsoft, AI generated 35 per cent of the code for new products, accelerating launch times, Althoff said. The company’s GitHub Copilot is a leader in the market for AI coding tools and has 15 million users, Microsoft said in April.
AI implementation has fuelled replacement anxiety for many workers, particularly in the tech industry. Microsoft has announced cuts of about 15,000 employees this year, with a wave of layoffs last week targeting customer-facing roles such as sales.
Althoff stressed to employees that AI could make them more effective as sellers. Through the use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, each salesperson is finding more leads, closing deals quicker and generating 9 per cent more revenue, he said.
Productivity gains from AI were “not a predominant factor” in the job reductions of recent months, Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith said on Wednesday (Jul 9) during an event announcing a donation of over US$4 billion in cash and technology to schools with a focus on spreading AI skills. BLOOMBERG
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