THE OFFICE for National Statistics (ONS) has 3,261 employees — a 2.6 per cent decrease on staffing levels in 2003-04, the losses mainly accounted for by 70 jobs cut in an efficiency drive in the high quality national statistics sources department. But honestly, who cares?

Gordon Brown’s announcement this week that he is to make the ONS independent in an attempt to improve public confidence in its figures merely makes me want to ask: why do we need an Office for National Statistics at all? No doubt these 3,000 bean-counters believe themselves to be engaged in a process of enlightenment, rather like William I’s Domesday surveyors. But in reality the collection of official data is out of control. Enter a hospital these days, even on a trolley, and the nurses don’t so much want to know how you feel: first of all they want to know how much you smoke, how much you drink and your ethnic group; just to be able to fill in forms for various statistical studies.

Worse, we are being bullied into supplying all this data about ourselves. It is one thing being rung up by a market research company offering a place in a prize draw in return for answering their questions; quite another when you receive a form from the Department of Trade and Industry, as I did recently, demanding to know your views on personal bankruptcy — under pain of a stiff fine.

Officially, the Government needs to set its number-crunchers on us so it can calculate how many houses, trains and hospital beds we will need in 2020. But how come, in spite of the mountains of figures collected by the ONS and other government agencies, we have ended up with such a shortage of flu jabs this winter, the trains are bursting at the seams and house-price inflation has been running at more than 20 per cent a year? The Office for National Statistics might just as well be renamed the Ministry of Guesswork.

The truth is that central planning has always proved a disaster, whether it be practised in Whitehall or the Soviet Union. It isn’t men with clipboards we need: it is public services that are responsive to current market demand as opposed to theoretical future demand as calculated on the basis of a five-year-old census. It would be a good start if rather more than 70 ONS staff were added to the unemployment statistics.