The National Statistician, who is the chief executive of the ONS, would be directly accountable to Parliament through a widely constituted independent governing Statistics Board.

The ONS would be a non-ministerial government department so that the staff, including the Director, would remain as civil servants but without being under direct ministerial control.

UKSA was established on 1 April 2008 by the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, and is directly accountable to the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

[citation needed] The ONS is responsible for collecting, analysing and distributing statistical information about the UK's economy, society and population.

[11] The authority has also produced reports on the impact of cuts to specific statistical activity, such as the citizenship survey, especially where these changes affect users in other bodies.

Other reports focus on statistics relating to a particular sector such as health and charities both of which have relevant data collected by more than one government body.