On Thursday, April 7 and Friday, April 8, as part of the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union, INSEE co-organized with Eurostat a High-level meeting of the DGs and Presidents of European NSIs in Lyons. This event was dedicated to the revision of the European Statistical Law (Regulation 223/2009).

Following a first revision of the regulation in 2015 on institutional aspects, this new revision aims to adapt the regulation to the increasing digitization of society and the proliferation of data and to promote innovation. This event was devoted to a presentation and discussion of the conclusions of the Partnership Group Task Force on the revision of Regulation 223. In the opening session, Martine Durand, member of the Official Statistics Authority and former Chief Statistician of the OECD, made a presentation on the future challenges of official statistics.

The event provided the opportunity to have a collective discussion on the future of European official statistics and on the needs to be taken into account in order to adapt to a changing context. This event has been an essential step and convergence point in the revision process and the discussions helped to focus the revision on the aspects that were considered as priorities, starting with the access to private data.

Following the event, Eurostat will now prepare a document that will be discussed at the next meeting of the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC) on 18-19 May. Eurostat will then draft a proposal for revision which will be submitted for opinion to the October EESC, before being adopted by the Commission by the end of 2022-early 2023.

For further information, see the programme.