Statistician, administrator and Chairman of the Royal Opera House

Born: November 24, 1922;

Died: September 4, 2015

To number Lord Moser, who has died aged 92, among the great and the good of the British establishment would be a serious understatement of his achievements; he had a bewildering number of senior roles in academic life, the civil service and on the boards of numerous firms and charities. Yet Claus Moser's background was anything but conventional; a refugee from Hitler's Germany, he was briefly interned as an enemy alien after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Moser, like many other distinguished Jewish émigrés from Germany and Austria, such as the art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper, the scientist Max Perutz and most of the leading publishers in post-war Britain, had grown up in a culture of high-minded devotion to intellectual and cultural pursuits. His first ambition, and his greatest love, was music; he was an accomplished pianist and in later life served on the board of the Royal Opera House (as Chairman from 1974-1987) as well as Glyndebourne Opera, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the British Museum and as a governor of the Royal Academy of Music.

But his passion extended to all the arts, and to the importance of education. He was a stern critic of what he saw as the failure of British schools and universities to pursue excellence, and of the philistinism and distrust of intellectuals he detected in public life. Moser's first career was as a scholar, at the London School of Economics, where he became Professor of Social Statistics. He specialised in the administrative implications of social data, rather than the purely mathematical aspects, and his publications dealt with measures of the cost of living, town planning, social conditions and educational outcomes.

This background led to his becoming a senior civil servant as Director of the Central Statistical Office (now the Office for National Statistics) and head of statistical services for the government, a post he held from 1967 until 1978, working for the governments of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Jim Callaghan. He founded the General Household Survey, resulting in the annual publication Social Trends, which charts everything from the price of a loaf to the number of single parents, and the spread of smartphones to the probable determinants of social mobility.

This information was to be instrumental in shaping government policy during the period, when "technocratic" government was an ambition of Labour and Conservative administrations alike. Moser, though a supporter of the Labour party, was also – unhelpfully for Harold Wilson – rigorous about putting accurate spending plans and economic projections into the public sphere. Indeed, his assessment that defence expenditure placed Britain dangerously in the red, which Labour had hoped would not emerge until after the election of 1974, may have played a part in Ted Heath's unexpected victory.

Claus Adolf Moser was born in Berlin on November 24, 1922 into a prosperous Jewish family. His father Ernest was a banker, and his mother Lotte a talented musician with a wide circle of artistic and intellectual friends. The rise of Hitler persuaded Ernest Moser that the family should leave; though Britain admitted fewer refugees in the 1930s than is often assumed, the Mosers were well-connected and well-to-do enough to emigrate in 1936, although their finances were depleted by the emigration taxes levied on Jews.

Claus was sent to Frensham Heights, a liberal boarding school in Surrey, but after the outbreak of war he and his family were interred for several months near Liverpool as enemy aliens. The refugees there were mostly highly cultured German and Austrian Jews, who set up an informal university, where Claus assisted teaching mathematics. He was soon released and tried to join the RAF, but was turned down. Instead he went to the LSE, from which he graduated with the top undergraduate degree of 1943. The RAF then accepted him as a mechanic; after the war, he took British citizenship and returned to the LSE as a lecturer. By 1961, he had become professor there and began to sit on many committees and advisory boards, first as the statistical analyst for the Committee on Higher Education.

In tandem with the government work, he became a visiting professor at Oxford from 1970-75, and a fellow at Nuffield College. After leaving the Civil Service in 1978, he moved into banking as a director of NM Rothschild & Sons (where he was vice-chairman for 1978-84), as well as taking posts with The Economist (where he was also chairman of its intelligence unit) and Paul Hamlyn's publishing house Octopus.

He was also a fixture on a huge number of boards of charitable trusts, committees and governing bodies. As well as his many commitments to the arts, he served on the National Commission for Education, as president of the Royal Statistical Society and, from 1984-1993, as a popular warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and as the university's pro-vice-chancellor. In 1986, he became chancellor of Keele University and he held numerous posts, and received many honorary degrees, at other universities.

Though much of his work had involved examining the cost of living, at the Royal Opera House he made determined attempts to keep ticket prices low during a period when funding was falling in real terms. Moser, though decidedly elitist in his view of culture, nonetheless believed that the highest intellectual and artistic standards should be the aspiration of, and available to, all, regardless of income. When he became chairman of the Basic Skills Agency in 1997, he produced an embarrassing report concluding that Britons were almost the worst educated and most philistine nation in Europe, and that seven million adults could not cope with the literacy expected of 11-year-olds.

Moser had briefly defected to the Social Democratic Party when it was formed, but returned to Labour after Tony Blair became leader. He was appointed CBE in 1965, knighted in 1973 and created a peer as Baron Moser of Regent's Park in 2001.

He married, in 1949, Mary Oxlin, a fellow student at the LSE; she survives him with a son and two daughters.

ANDREW MCKIE