Britain’s third and final estimate of GDP growth between January and March has been delayed by more than a week over worries about some of the data, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said today.
The National Accounts data, which were due to be published tomorrow morning, will not be released until July 12.
This is only the second time in the past decade that the ONS has delayed an important set of data and the previous instance, in 2007, was because of a computer failure.
“Quality assurance by ONS revealed potential errors in some of the detailed figures in the national accounts data set,” the statistics office said in a statement.
Stephen Penneck, ONS Director General, said: “It is important to ensure the national accounts are right, rather than disseminate statistics that might be subject to question over their quality. We are really sorry that we have had to do this and apologise for the inconvenience. We will learn from this to prevent it happening again.”
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The first set of figures showed the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter. This was later revised up to 0.3 per cent. Economists forecast that this figure will be unchanged.
The ONS has also delayed publication of first-quarter balance of payments data and index of services figures for April until July 12.
It added that this would have no impact on data already published by ONS and said there was unlikely to be any knock-on effect on the dates of future releases.