Brussels, 5 November 2024
The EU Council today adopted changes to the EU legal framework on the development, production and dissemination of European statistics, marking a significant milestone in the modernisation of the European Statistical System.
The Council also approved conclusions on EU statistics that welcome progress made on keeping comparable and reliable statistics for better policy-making, and provide guidance for further work in this field.
A statistical framework fit for the future
The revised regulation lays the foundations to make European statistics fit for the future by ensuring a sustained access to data held by businesses and public administrations for statistical purposes. It will allow the European Statistical System to tap the potential of digital data sources and technologies to satisfy increasing demands for new, more granular and timelier statistics and to be more responsive while at the same time reducing the reporting burden.
The revised regulation also establishes a mechanism for the statistical response to crisis situations, ensuring timely and effective data collection during times of need.
Conclusions on statistics
In its conclusions, the Council welcomes the progress related to information requirements in European Monetary Union, statistics on the excessive deficit procedure, surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances and structural statistics, highlighting areas of improvement.
The conclusions welcome the revision of Regulation 223/2009 on European Statistics and the improvements made in the 2024 Economic and Financial Committee status report on information requirements in the European Monetary Union.
The Council also welcomes additional statistics to implement the new European economic governance framework and encourages their further development and publication.
In its conclusions, the Council further addresses the developments made in collecting energy statistics and demographic and social statistics, innovative statistical techniques for business data, the monitoring of the implementation of the sustainable development goals at EU level, and the work of the European Statistical System to develop and improve commercial real estate statistics.
Background and next steps
This formal adoption of the regulation marks the last step in the ordinary legislative procedure. It comes following an agreement reached with the European Parliament on 1 February 2023. The regulation will now be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and will enter into force 20 days after its publication.
Regulation 223/2009 provides the legal framework at EU level for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics. Since the adoption of the regulation, society has changed profoundly. The European Statistical System now operates in a context driven by profound digital transformation that has created new information needs alongside the emergence of many digital data sources.
On 10 July 2023, the Commission proposed to amend Regulation 223/2009 to make the legal framework governing European statistics fit for the future and significantly improve the responsiveness of the European Statistical System to data needs.
The European Statistical System is the partnership of Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, and the National Statistical Institutes and other national authorities in the Member States responsible for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics. It also includes the statistical authorities of the European Economic Area (EEA) countries and Switzerland.
In addition, the Council approves conclusions on EU statistics in autumn each year, given the importance of high quality, comparable and reliable statistics for EU economic policy-making, and especially for economic policy coordination.
In its conclusions, the Council reviews the progress made on the statistical priorities set in the ECOFIN Council in the previous year and provides guidance for further work.