FMO panel tackles statistical shortfall

The team, from the Federation of Manufacturing Opticians, is being led by Frank Norville and aims to provide detailed facts that many of the FMO's counterparts on mainland Europe can turn to, such as volume and value details on lenses, frames and sight tests. Mr Norville said he hoped to have an interim report on ophthalmic lenses available at the meeting of EUROM 1, the European 'umbrella' organisation of manufacturers in optics, which will take place in Edinburgh in June. 'Certainly we will have something substantial by the end of the year,' said Mr Norville. He added that the work of his statistics panel - one of six service groups within the FMO - was akin to piecing together a jigsaw. It aimed to produce a larger and more cohesive picture of the profession than was currently available. The FMO is working to 'best estimates' at the moment which, for example, define the size of the UK market for spectacle frames as 10.5m a year. An accurate picture of total sales of ophthalmic lenses is even more difficult to come by, due to the many routes through which they are imported into the UK. Figures have to be extrapolated from the number of sight tests and similar data. However, Mr Norville believes that by working with other optical associations the FMO can come up with the statistical goods. An increased emphasis on statistics is one of the key aims of FMO's chairman Gerry Biggs. 'Sadly, very little information is available about the UK market,' he said in the federation's annual report presented last month. 'To provide adequate market statistics for our membership it may be necessary in the future to ask for more information on an entirely confidential basis.'