ONS to spend millions on temp workers to fix ‘unusable’ UK employment data

Exclusive: Office for National Statistics to spend 8m in deal with employment agency Randstad to recruit hires

The government's statistics agency is spending 8m to hire an army of low-paid temporary workers amid efforts to fix its virtually unusable" data on unemployment and wages in Britain.

Under pressure over the quality of its data, the Office for National Statistics last month agreed the multimillion-pound deal with the employment agency Randstad to recruit interviewers to help increase the reliability of its labour force survey (LFS).