The Sea Change in UK Strike Statistics, Implications for Public Policy, and Misrepresentation of the 2022–2023 Strike Surge

The UK state has collected data on strike activity for over a century, to inform public policy on industrial relations. This involved creating and maintaining a consistent and reliable data set, despite inevitable limitations and funding pressures. Yet how the Office for National Statistics now constructs and presents its statistics on strikes, collected through the Labour Disputes Inquiry, has been radically transformed. Two revisions to the definition of a ‘stoppage’, departing from International Labour Organisation resolutions, have broken the consistency of this longstanding series. The most egregious is that a multi‐employer strike (such as in health or education), or a multi‐union strike, no longer constitutes just one but multiple stoppages (of each employer and of each union), resulting in an ‘explosion’ of recorded stoppage numbers. Weaknesses in data collection and presentation compound these difficulties. Not only are the dimensions of the 2022–2023 strike surge misrepresented, but the historic role of strike statistics in informing public policy is now undermined. Recommendations are made on how to improve the ONS's published strike data.