Office for National Statistics awards digital consultancy Zaizi £200k contract for a solutions architect to help integrate AI and other emerging technologies in its labour market statistics and upcoming census

The Office for National Statistics has awarded a £200,000 contract to provide “strategic technical leadership” for the transformation of its labour market statistics and the running of the 2031 census in England and Wales

The architect will be asked to expected to embed emerging technologies such as cloud-native services, software containerisation through use of the likes Kubernetes, real-time data streaming such as through use of Apache Kafka and low-code software platforms.

The work will also involve the “responsible integration” of artificial intelligence, including through use of machine learning to classify data automatically, natural language processing in metadata and interactions with users and predictive analytics for both modelling labour markets and planning Census 2031.

The ONS selected Zaizi, a London-based government IT consultancy which focuses on border and national security. It has previously worked with UK Border Force on digitising its freight scanning work at ports with a service called ScanApp.

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The ONS has been working to overhaul its labour market statistics through a new Transformed Labour Force Survey, following falling response rates undermining the representativeness of the existing survey. However, it has delayed delivery of the new survey and an independent review of the ONS’s problems with key statistics including these by Sir Robert Devereux, published last month, blamed organisational cultural issues. The government accepted Sir Robert’s recommendation that the roles of national statistician and ONS permanent secretary would be separated.

Also in July the government commissioned the ONS to run a whole population census in 2031 in England and Wales, following a recommendation to do so in June by the UK Statistics Authority. This rejected the idea consulted on by the ONS in 2023 as part of the Future of Population and Migration Statistics programme that 2021 would be the last census, with administrative data collected by the government filling the gap.

In her commissioning letter for Census 2031, Cabinet Office parliamentary secretary Georgia Gould said the ONS can make use of administrative data and build on the online-first approach of the 2021 census but should make efforts “to ensure inclusivity and to capture the characteristics of harder-to-reach individuals and communities who may have limited access to the internet”.