Catalogue description Records of the Central Statistical Office

The origins of the Central Statistical Office lie in three organisations that came into being at the onset of the Second World War to provide economic information and statistics to the Prime Minister, Cabinet and departments: the Prime Minister's Statistical Branch; the Survey of Economic and Financial Plans, commonly known as the Stamp Survey; and the Economic Section of the War Cabinet.

On his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of the Second World War, Churchill formed a personal Statistical Branch under Professor Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell). Its functions were to analyse statistics and advise him of economic matters which required his attention. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 this branch became the Prime Minister's Statistical Section, housed in the War Cabinet Offices.

In June1939 a Survey of Economic and Financial Plans was set up under the chairmanship of Lord Stamp. In November of that year an Interdepartmental Committee on Economic Policy, of which Stamp was a member, approved proposals for the establishment of a Central Economic Information Service to provide the Stamp Survey with economic and statistical material on which to base its work. This unit, formed in December 1939, became known as the Economic Section of the War Cabinet.

These three bodies overlapped to some extent and it was felt that the departments were not getting consistent economic information and statistics. A Cabinet memorandum of 27 January 1941, therefore, set out revised terms for the central collection and presentation of statistical material and economic reports. The most significant development was the establishment of the Central Statistical Office within the War Cabinet Office, for the purpose of collecting a regular series of statistics from government departments covering the development of the War effort. These statistics were to be accepted and used as authoritative in interdepartmental discussions and documents circulated to the War Cabinet and its committees.

The Central Statistical Office took over the statistical work hitherto performed by the Economic Section, the economists remaining as the Economic Section of the War Cabinet to prepare such special reports as were required for the Lord President's Committee; it was transferred to the Treasury on 1 November 1953. The Stamp Survey was disbanded, holding its last meeting on 31 March 1941. The Prime Minister's Statistical Section continued to exist although the bulk of its statistical data was provided by the Central Statistical Office.

After the war the Central Statistical Office continued as part of the Cabinet Office until 1989 when it became a Department under the Treasury as a first step towards becoming an executive agency. It co-ordinates the statistics collected by departments and produces statistics needed for central economic and social policies and management, such as the national accounts, balance of payments, financial statistics and measures of output. It is responsible for a number of statistical publications.