[1] Following consideration, a formal announcement was made to establish the CSO on 27 January 1941[2] with the purpose of handling the descriptive statistics required for the war effort and developing national income accounts.
After the war there was an expansion in the work of official statisticians resulting from the aim of managing the economy through controlling government income and expenditure using an integrated system of national accounts and in 1962, comprehensive financial statistics were published for the first time.
Moser had the task of implementing proposals made by the House of Commons Estimates Committee in 1966, including the setting up of the Business Statistics Office to provide a centralised system of obtaining information from industry and the Office for Population, Censuses and Surveys to collect information from individuals and households through programmes of censuses, surveys and registers.
After 35 years in the Government Statistical Service, Sir John Boreham retired on 31 July 1985 and was succeeded by Jack Hibbert, who became the fourth director of the CSO.
In November 1991 the CSO was launched as an executive agency, detached from the Cabinet Office, which helped to put focus on the quality of service provided and gave an opportunity to restate publicly the arrangements to ensure the integrity of official statistics.