Ministers could find ways to boost the economy and improve public services by combining data from separate government departments, according to the head of the UK’s statistics watchdog.
Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said that too often government data was “siloed” because departments and other bodies were worried that people may uncover weaknesses in the data or even reach inconvenient conclusions.
He also warned that gathering official data was becoming harder as a result of budget cuts and because people were less willing to respond to surveys.
But he said that the “unrealised potential” of sharing and linking data could help the government generate new ideas and improve its policies.
Writing in the Observer, Chote said: “During the pandemic, the sense of national emergency provided an urgent impetus for sharing data. This enabled valuable insights, such as identifying where to target communication campaigns to increase vaccine uptake.
“But since then, the system has not fully capitalised on similar opportunities. Many gains remain untapped.”
Other examples include the Better Outcomes through Linked Data programme, which found that offenders with alcohol or drug problems were 10 times more likely to take their own lives than the general population in England and Wales.
Using data from the Ministry of Justice, Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, it also discovered that those deaths may be reduced by speeding up access to treatment.
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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been starting to collect more data from private companies to create its official figures. This month, it revealed it had started using anonymised data from supermarket scanners to check inflation as well as data on cars and train fares respectively from Auto Trader and the Rail Delivery Group.
It similarly takes anonymised Visa data to track credit and debit card spending to inform its travel and tourism research, and also uses live PAYE data from HM Revenue and Customs to give a more accurate number of people in work.
Yet these examples are still too rare, Chote said. Too often departments and other bodies were more concerned about the downsides of sharing information, such as risks to privacy, as well as to the reputation of bodies “if weaknesses in their own data are revealed or if they are used to reach conclusions or narratives that the institution or its leadership finds inconvenient”.
Chote also warned that the ONS and other data gatherers were “under greater strain”, partly because of tight budgets.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain the quality of the household surveys that we rely on to understand important parts of the economy and society because of falling response rates and higher collection costs, a trend seen by other statistics agencies across the world,” he said.Last year, the ONS suddenly stopped publishing monthly jobs data from the labour force survey because of concerns that the response rate made the figures unreliable.
The survey is used to estimate unemployment and jobs data, which in turn forms part of the Bank of England’s decisions about interest rates.