John Pullinger was the National Statistician, Head of the Government Statistical Service (GSS) and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority from July 2014 to June 2019. He has also been President of the Royal Statistical Society and Chair of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC).

John's career began in 1980 when he joined the civil service after graduating in geography and statistics from Exeter University. After several roles in different departments, John joined the Central Statistical Office as a senior civil servant in 1992. He was the project manager for the creation of the Office for National Statistics and was the policy lead on the development of the GSS. He has worked on diverse projects and topics, including responsibility for flagship publications like 'Social Trends', leading the neighbourhood statistics programme as well as being actively involved in the creation of the Statistics Commission and National Statistics in 2000.

In 2004, John became the 14th librarian to the House of Commons and was appointed as a Companion of the Order of the Bath for services to Parliament and the Community in 2014.

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory @NYU (GovLab) where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology.

He is the Curator and Editor of the Living Library and The Digest.

Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance. Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good.

Links:
http://datacollaboratives.org/
https://the100questions.org/
http://datstewards.net
https://thelivinglib.org/

Matt is Deputy Director at the Resolution Foundation, one of the UK’s leading economic think tanks. He joined the then fledgling Foundation in 2008 and took a lead role in developing its research focus on the living standards of low to middle income households, helping to establish the organisation’s reputation for combining rigorous analysis with a clear social purpose. He manages the Foundation’s research output, covering a broad range of topics including the labour market, the tax and benefit system, housing, consumer debt, public finances and macroeconomic policy. He was also chair of the technical panel that supported the two-year Intergenerational Commission that concluded in 2018.

He has published more than 50 reports for the Foundation and co-authored the UK chapter of Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries, a major cross-country study of trends in inequality and growth published by OUP. He is an experienced broadcast and print media commentator, and has written for The Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times and the New Statesman among others. He serves on many working groups across Whitehall and beyond, and is a member of the National Statistician’s Advisory Panel for Consumer Price Statistics.

Links:
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/
https://twitter.com/resfoundation
https://twitter.com/MattWhittakerRF

Leon Feinstein is Director of Evidence at the Office of the Children’s Commissioner where he leads work on measurement, surveys and analysis in relation to the experiences and outcomes of children. From 2013 to 2016 Leon was Director of Evidence at the Early Intervention Foundation, an independent charity and “What Works” centre, working to evaluate the impact of early intervention.

From 2008 to 2013 Leon was a civil servant, working in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office on policy implementation and performance policy. Before joining the civil service Leon was Professor of Education and Social Policy at the Institute of Education. Leon’s academic research concerned the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage in terms of social structure, education and income. Leon is Visiting Professor of Practice at the LSE’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion.

Professor Betsy Stanko OBE retired (April 2016) as Head, Evidence and Insight, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime in London. She is currently Chair of the Ministry of Justice’s Data, Evidence, and Science Board, Strategic Advisor to a Home Office Police Transformation Fund project focused to uplift learning and development in policing across England and Wales and Academic Advisor to the Vulnerability and Serious Crime Programme at the College of Policing. Professor Stanko has been awarded a number of academic lifetime achievement awards, including the prestigious American Society of Criminology’s Vollmer Award (1996), recognising her outstanding influence on criminal justice practice.

Academic lead for Information Governance across the various Swansea University-based data intensive/linkage initiatives to ensure data protection and maximise data utility. Leading the active Innovative Governance working group of the Farr Institute: working collaboratively to advise and influence the developing data governance landscape to promote the safe reuse of data. Leading a research programme in IG, including work to inform cross-centre research and how emerging data types, such as genetic data, can be used in conjunction with structured micro-data. Strong interest in the development of innovative disease registers that incorporate patient reported data for combination with health data, notably, the UK MS Register. Regular advisor and invited speaker on data governance. Academic lead for Public Involvement and Engagement. Established a Consumer Panel for data linkage research. Leading public debates and engagement events on the use of anonymised data for research.

Rebecca Evans AM was first elected to the National Assembly for Wales in May 2011 to represent the Mid and West Wales region. In 2016 she became Assembly Member for Gower.

Rebecca received a degree in History from the University of Leeds, and a Master of Philosophy degree in Historical Studies from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Before being elected, Rebecca worked in the third sector.

Rebecca has served on the National Assembly for Wales' Environment and Sustainable Development Committee and its Common Agricultural Policy Task and Finish Group. She has also served on the Health and Social Care Committee, and the Children, Young People and Education Committee.

In June 2014, Rebecca was appointed Deputy Minister for Farming and Food, and in May 2016 she became Minister for Social Services and Public Health. In November 2017, she was appointed Minister for Housing and Regeneration, and in December 2018 she joined the Cabinet as Minister for Finance and Trefnydd.

Links:
https://twitter.com/wgmin_finance

Professor Paul Boyle has recently been appointed as Vice-Chancellor Elect at Swansea University. Prior to this he was President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester. Previously, Paul was Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s largest funding agency for social science research; the International Champion of Research Councils UK, with responsibility for international strategy on behalf of all seven UK research councils; and President of Science Europe, representing over 50 European funding agencies.

Paul is a Fellow of the British Academy, The Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the Royal Geographical Society of Scotland. He is Chair of the Scottish Science Advisory Council, which is Scotland’s highest level science advisory body; a Board Member of Universities UK, who provide leadership and support to executive heads of 133 UK University institutions as well as Chair of their Research Policy Network; Vice-President of the European University Association which represents over 800 universities in 48 countries; and a Council Member and Trustee of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which has over 500 member institutions in 37 Commonwealth countries.

Paul is an ‘impact champion’ for the United Nations HeForShe global solidarity movement for gender equality and on the Advisory Board of Sporting Equals, promoting ethnic diversity in sport and physical activity.

Garry Coleman is a nationally recognised expert in Data Access, with over 25 years’ experience in NHS IT and Information Services. Garry is currently responsible for the delivery of data access, data quality and clinical trials services for NHS Digital.

He’s spent the past five years evangelising a sector-wide shift which is centred on providing access to quality data that keeps the health and care system running by fuelling research and driving improvement in treatment and public health, ensuring that the law is followed and NHS Digital acts ethically with citizen’s data rights respected. This approach has helped to rebuild trust in data sharing practice.

Throughout his career Garry has built a reputation for delivering services to help derive the benefits that can be gained from data, and working closely with researchers, NHS and Social Care organisations and commercial bodies to help achieve those benefits for all – whilst ensuring that data is kept and used appropriately and securely.

Embracing the core values of integrity, innovation and data-use transparency, Garry led the first release of the (at that time) largest health open data dataset in the UK - positioning the organisation as an exemplar of Government policy. He moved on to lead NHS Digital’s Data Access Request Service (DARS) as it became established, and now drives innovative NHS Digital services to develop, manage, disseminate and exploit linked national data assets.

Garry holds an MBA with Distinction (Health), a BSc in Mathematics and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Research Methods from Durham University. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Leeds. Garry is a valued speaker on data access, regularly speaking at events in the UK and Internationally.

ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) is a partnership transforming the way researchers access the UK’s wealth of public sector data, to enable better informed policy decisions that improve people’s lives.

By linking together data held by different parts of government, and by facilitating safe and secure access for accredited researchers to these newly joined-up data sets, ADR UK is creating a sustainable body of knowledge about how our society and economy function – tailored to give decision makers the answers they need to solve important policy questions.

ADR UK is made up of three national partnerships (ADR Scotland, ADR Wales, and ADR NI) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which ensures data provided by UK government bodies is accessed by researchers in a safe and secure form with minimal risk to data holders or the public.

The partnership is coordinated by a UK-wide Strategic Hub, which also promotes the benefits of administrative data research to the public and the wider research community, engages with UK government to secure access to data, and manages a dedicated research budget.

ADR UK is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.

To find out more, visit adruk.org or follow @ADR_UK on Twitter.

In the past few years our work at The GovLab has sought to understand pathways to make policymaking and problem solving more evidence-based and data-driven. One line of our activities starts from the recognition of the potential of use of privately processed data through Data Collaboratives — a new form of public-private partnership in which government, private industry, and civil society work together to release previously siloed data, making it available to address societal challenges. Our research suggests that Data Collaboratives offer great potential to complement public data sources - when implemented strategically under the appropriate policy and ethical frameworks. Nonetheless, this remains a nascent field, and several barriers limit the systemic use of Data Collaboratives. In this presentation I will take stock of current practice, examine the variety of operational models and lessons learned with an eye toward developing approaches to make Data Collaboratives more effective, scalable, sustainable, and, above all, responsible.

Leon Feinstein will present the latest findings and analysis from the Children’s Commissioner for England of levels of vulnerability, need and risk amongst children in England. To inform this work we have developed an extensive set of indicators (71) of vulnerability, and reviewed all available data on trends , characteristics and outcomes of children in each of the 71 groups. The resulting findings are important not only in what they say about levels of need but also in identifying very substantial gaps in knowledge that limits the capacity of policy and services to accurately define and address need. A substantial programme of work on data linking and other means is underway to address these gaps.

There are many opportunities for mobilising the power of administrative data to generate new insights to help governments, business, communities and individuals make better decisions. To make the most of those opportunities requires a careful understanding of the nature of administrative data.

By definition, administrative data used for research is about taking data collected for one purpose and using it for another. This presentation will explore the social licence needed to use administrative data for research, how to assess and assure the quality of data and communication of findings.

To create value from administrative data the researcher needs to care as much about respecting the data as about using it. A social licence is needed from the people or businesses included in the data. Does what is being proposed respect legal, ethical, confidentiality and security considerations? Equally a social licence is also needed from the custodial of the data. Are they convinced that these issues have been addressed and that the request being made to provide access is practical?

All aspects of survey data collection can be controlled by a research specialist and well known techniques adopted to evaluate precision and bias. Lurking beneath neat and tidy rows and columns of numbers can be errors and biases of many kinds that will invalidate analysis if not understood and taken into consideration.

Once the social licence (and the data) is obtained and the pitfalls of analysis are successfully navigated the most important test remains. How to get the findings used and not misused? How to communicate imprecision and lack of certainty without losing your audience? In short how to avoid both overclaiming and underclaiming on the new research evidence that has been generated?

Drawing on work done by the UK Statistics Authority and others, case studies will be used to bring out practical steps for researchers to ensure that the potential of administrative data is realised.

Throughout my career as a university professor of criminology turned civil servant ‘insight guru’, I sought to blend social science research methods with routine, crime and operational performance data in policing. As Director of the ESRC Violence Research Programme (1997-2002) I was continually asked why violence was so invisible. That was not the experience of the researchers on the programme, nor did I ever find it difficult in my early studies of violence against women to uncover what is now referred to as #METOO strewn across administrative records. What was difficult (then as now) is seeking the data sharing agreements to explore government held, administrative records.

When I arrived at the London Metropolitan Police to work alongside the Racial and Violent Crimes Task force in 1999, the technical capability of transforming crime data into data on and about hate crime and domestic violence was limited. Twenty years have passed, and the digital transformation of administrative information on crime is very wide indeed. Sadly, the imagery about crime, and who is responsible for it, is largely driven not by knowledge but by outdated imagination. That said, this talk is about possibility, learning and enthusiasm for transforming routine crime data into insight and evidence about harm that benefits better government policy, police responses, and ultimately contributes to reducing the harm of criminality on all of us.

Engaging with policy makers and practitioners is not difficult. Using a strategic, data driven approach in this engagement is, especially when the data is (your own) administrative data. For two decades, I have worked inside the police service to exploring the use of crime data to describe crime problems (hate crime, domestic violence, rape and sexual assault and homophobic violence); to drive a strategic understanding of police decision making and outcomes of justice; and to enable a large, complex police force to improve continuously because they value what citizens and their own staff say about how the organisation works.

The lessons will be brigaded into three areas, using examples from the hundreds of small and large analytic projects (I only have 20 minutes!):

1. Using crime data as data (on crime, on victims, on offenders; on crime hot spots);
2. Insight vs evidence: influencing policy and practice;
3. The journey so far and where we need to go next.

Child poverty rates fell sharply over the course of the late-1990s and early-2000s, thanks in part to the introduction of tax credits that supported parents – especially single mothers – into work. But, despite this improvement, the government still missed its targets (for the number of children in relative poverty to be cut by a quarter by 2004 and by half by 2010 relative to 1998-99). Or so we thought…

We know now that the Family Resources Survey data that is used to measure poverty rates under-reports household benefit receipt – by around £40 billion a year – relative to the totals we find in admin data. This talk explores the impact of adding this benefit data back into the analysis – lowering poverty levels overall, but also affecting the trends over time. Reassessing the effectiveness of tax credits in tackling child poverty under this new approach leads us to conclude that the policy was more successful than previously thought – with the stripping back of support over the austerity decade likewise doing more damage than official data would suggest.

And data limitations continue to undermine effective welfare policy making. With an eye to the future, the talk also reports on unprecedented admin data-based work that sheds new light on the realities of month-to-month fluctuations in employment income – with some important implications for the continued roll-out of Universal Credit.