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8 THE RELATIONSHIP OF ADMINSTRATIVE AND SURVEY DATA The draft Code does not discuss the relationship between administrative and survey statistics. But this could be covered by the Protocol promised for Statistical Integration. A Protocol for Statistical Integration could well state that surveys should be designed in ways that aim to complement existing administrative statistics. There are a number of important examples where surveys statistics are not consistent with related administrative statistics. The Labour Force Survey, for example, fails to provide statistics on Claimant unemployment that are consistent with the Count of Claimants, and so also fails to provide statistics on non-Claimant unemployment. The Family Resources Survey undercounts the number of recipients of a number of government benefits. It is difficult to take claims of quality for these surveys seriously when they fail to provide reliable statistics on the very populations that are their main subject matter, and fail to provide reliable evidence on the individuals and households who are the principal recipients of public expenditure. The ONS keeps very quite about these quality defects. It is recognised that there may be intractible problems in achieving complete consistency between surveys such as the LFS and FRS and related administrative statistics. But the Code of Practice should make clear that National Statistics should aim to achieve consistency. Unless a problem is recognised and acknowedged it will never be solved. The Protocol for Statistical Integration should reinforce the aim of achieving consistency and indicate ways in which the problems should be tackled. Ray Thomas ****************************************************** Please note that if you press the 'Reply' button your message will go only to the sender of this message. If you want to reply to the whole list, use your mailer's 'Reply-to-All' button to send your message automatically to [log in to unmask] *******************************************************