Statistically Speaking

Statistically Speaking is the Office for National Statistics' podcast, offering in-depth interviews on the latest hot topics in the world of data, taking a peek behind the scenes of the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics and exploring the stories behind the numbers.

Green Data: Measuring the Environment 08/02/2024

Green Data: Measuring the Environment In this episode we explore how the ONS measures our natural environment and the green economy. Relevant datasets: Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and this time we're getting back to nature as we explore the work of the ONS in measuring the economic and social value of the natural environment. Is classical economic growth - as measured by gross domestic product or GDP - always achieved at the expense of the environment? What price can we put on the amenities our environment provides? What is the green economy and what are green jobs? And what are the key data to watch as policymakers strive for net zero carbon emissions, while also seeking to improve national prosperity? Our guides through the rich and perhaps under explored landscape of environmental data are ONS’s Deputy Director for Environmental Statistics Analysis, Ian Townsend; Head of Natural Capital Accounts, Gemma Thomas; and Sophie Barrand, Monetary Accounts lead in the Environmental Accounts team. Welcome to you all. Ian to come to you first. The ONS is mainly known for measuring the economy and the population of the UK. So, what exactly is its role when it comes to the environment? What are we seeking to achieve? What do we do? What do we publish? IAN TOWNSEND So the environment is quite a broad topic that links with a lot of other issues and a lot of different national and devolved government departments and other related bodies producing statistics on the environment. And with all that range of statistics, we tend to focus at the ONS on the intersections between our environment and both the economy and society. This includes measuring what we call the Low Carbon and renewable energy economy, how many green jobs there are, the greenhouse gas emissions produced by different economic sectors, and valuing the services that nature provides to us, as well as providing rapid insights into what people and business think about climate change in the environment and their actions or indeed otherwise. MF And what are the major publications that come out of the ONS that people ought to be looking at to get a sense of what we're saying about the environment and its value? IT So I mentioned a couple in the introduction there - things like low carbon and renewable energy economy, green jobs, etc... and our emissions figures. But perhaps one that is quite worth bringing to the fore is our natural capital accounts. So, it's something we've done for several years, which basically looks at the value that ecosystems provide to nature and ecosystems provide to us, and the services that provides. So, we bring this out as a report every year - have done so for several years - and that looks beyond the economy, beyond gross domestic product, to look at all those natural resources and we found that in 2021, the total value of all those natural assets was around one and a half trillion pounds. It’s such a big figure, I think it can be quite hard for people to grasp. But a useful comparison might be that it's not that far off the 1.7 trillion pounds that homes in the UK were valued at in 2021 as well. MF It's very difficult to arrive at a financial figure or value like that. Can you just give us a brief explanation of how it’s calculated? IT Sure. So, there are internationally agreed guidelines that we follow around how to measure or indeed account for the current value of what natural capital could provide for us and our current and future generations. And all that process, all those guidelines are aligned with how we measure the GDP in the economy. It's really quite a complex exercise and includes things like the value of trees, rivers, peatlands, and many other habitats and natural resources in them. We've been developing and improving these approaches for probably at least 10 years, and probably have some of the most developed accounts in this form globally. Our estimates have improved over the years. But there are some things that we don't cover. So, in a way, this is probably best seen as a kind of partial and minimum value, even though it's already very large. And it's also part of a wider mission that the ONS has to capture the value of what's called missing capital, things that we don't currently measure so well in gross domestic product. So that's including social capital as well as natural capital. So that's called ‘inclusive wealth’ and that's another publication the ONS produces that people might be interested to have a look at. MF And it's important, I guess, to have this economic value of the environment so that can be compared against the traditional measure of economic progress and prosperity, which of course is GDP. And it's sometimes – and we've heard this in other podcasts - because GDP is like the big beast of the economic statistical world. It's very important, it's very influential, but of course it does have significant weaknesses and omissions, and notably its lack of account for environmental factors being notoriously one of those. IT Sure. And actually, there's a process going on right now internationally that would bring some of that into the way that we measure some of the key economic indicators. But I think one of the key things you say is putting out there is a measure of how our natural capital assets are doing. But I think the other real benefit of these statistics, and particularly the natural capital accounts, is that it helps literally to account for nature to give an estimate of some of the benefits that the environment does provide. So, when people make decisions, they can take that into account. We're not exactly saying that nature has this given value. It's more that that's the value that we've estimated so far that provides those. It helps people to make sure that when they're taking their decisions, they take into account what would happen if we reduced or depleted that natural capital, and indeed, the benefits we might get in the future if we were to increase that natural capital as well. MF Because – and this is the other side of the question – high per capita GDP often goes with high carbon emissions in an economy, doesn't it? This way, we can look at the other side of the balance sheet and say, well, yes, you might be achieving this high economic performance in traditional terms, but look at the cost on the other side and, as you say, this is part of a big international movement to recognize that called ‘beyond GDP’, which is a topic we've covered in previous podcasts already. IT Sure. I think, just getting back to your point around GDP and emissions one of the things that we produce in the ONS is a piece around a different emissions measurements there are, and actually if you look at those, you'll see that over time, all those measures have been reducing. So there is an element to which whilst the economy is expanding, we are actually reducing emissions on all three different measures that are available. MF And we say the environment is - we're putting it at 1.5 trillion pounds – that's the capital value of the natural environment, broadly equivalent to the value of all the houses in the UK. Some people might say that's a low figure perhaps you can think we measure human capital being much, much greater than that but that's a debate for another time. But explain for us who is using this number, how does it inform decision making at the moment at national and local level? How might it influence policymakers in future do you think? IT Sure, I think it's not necessarily about the big number at the top although that is one that will get a lot of interest from people and as you say, it might be an underestimate. I mentioned that there are some aspects of nature that we don't currently measure. But in terms of how it's used lots and lots of detail that's available underneath that key figure in the natural capital accounts we publish every year, at kind of macro level. The figures we use are important considerations for decision making by UK and devolved governments. So Defra published a policy paper, for example, on the accounts, I think, a couple of years back, which looked at what the key takeaways for policy there were from there, and we think that some of the figures were used in some of the bids that departments put in for the 2021 Spending Review. I think at the micro level figures are definitely used in the analysis of costs and benefits that are used for judging different government projects. It’s part of what Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs call enabling a natural capital approach - it is in that guidance, and that has a lot of impact at kind of micro level. We're also publishing more and more data from the natural capital accounts at a local level. And making that available means that councils and others can use that in their decision making as well. And we're also building our connections and encouraging use where we can and it's also something that's being worked on internationally as well, which we’re part of working with other national statistics offices and the UN. MF Turning to Gemma then, you're the head of natural capital accounts at the ONS. Let's get into the nuts and bolts then of what contributes to this valuation, this figure, because by understanding that we can better understand what it contributes to the economy and what it contributes to our wellbeing. Talk us through those elements if you would. GEMMA THOMAS Yeah, of course. So as Ian mentioned, there's some international standards that we abide by, but essentially what we do is we say, okay, what services does nature provide to us? And we identify those services, and then we attempt to put a value on them. Now those services can fall into three broad categories. The first would be provisioning services, which might be what you would expect the environment to provide and nature to provide such as things like timber, oil and gas, so it's all the goods that are provided by the Environment, water, renewable energy, and they are what we call provisioning services... MF How we exploit the environment, to put it coldly. GT You said that Miles, not me. [Laughing] But yes, it's where we capture the goods that the environment does provide. But the other things that nature does for us is it regulates, so regulated services are another part of services and where nature helps maintain the quality of the environment. And so a sort of obvious example of this can be where vegetation removes pollutants from the air, but also nature can mitigate noise. So if you're in an urban area, and there's lots of trees that can mitigate noise pollution, or heat, it can regulate heat. So that's another example. And the other example that is maybe not so obvious is what we call cultural services and they are the non-material benefits that we obtain, such as recreation. And actually, in many of our publications, we have found that those services provide the greatest asset value, the cultural services, actually almost two thirds in 2021 of all of that 1.5 trillion figure, 950 billion of that was from cultural services. MF That's why I mentioned exploitation - like it or not it's the traditional economic exploitation of the environment, when we talk about those things that we take out of the environment. But what the ONS has established, certainly when it comes to the UK’s environment, it's actually the amenity value of the environment, which contributes more to our economy. GT Yes, exactly. And actually, when you say about that exploitation, this is one of the benefits of the natural capital accounts because we measure actually the value of 16 different services at this moment in time and it allows us to be able to see things like actually, in terms of value, for example, it is more valuable to the UK to have pollution removal from woodlands than it is to obtain timber or wood fuel, and we put values on that. So yes, as you say, it's cultural and recreation. And that's in a couple of ways. There's expenditure on recreation, and tourism. But there's also, and this is the biggest asset that we've found, is health benefits from recreation that was worth in 2021, nearly half a trillion so 445 billion. MF Crikey, that is a big number! Can you unpack that for us then, what are the health benefits that we're itemizing there? GT Research has found, outside of the ONS, that spending time in nature has a positive impact on your health and wellbeing. But interestingly, you need to spend on average two hours a week in nature. So some of our figures, and this is the great thing that you can sort of dig under the hood a little bit, is you can see things like maybe more people are visiting nature, but if they're not doing it for long enough or regularly enough, they can't obtain that health benefit. And that is what our data has found in 2021 and 2022. There was a slight drop in the sort of health benefits gained from nature because people weren't going for long enough. In terms of measurement. We have experts in the team who are excellent and they work with lots of people across government, but essentially it's sort of calculated in the number of years of a life lived in perfect health and then what we do is we say how much would the NHS have to spend to provide the equivalent health benefits and that's how it's done. But yeah, it's just a really good example of how that sort of top figure can sound interesting but when you dig in is a real story and there of nuance. MF I guess that also reflects the importance of when we're talking about the environment. It's not just the great outdoors, it's not the wide open spaces necessarily. It's about having environmental areas near towns and cities as well where people can get out and feel the benefits of exercise and fresh air and so forth. GT Exactly. And actually it's really interesting you mentioned that, because some of the things that are found that can be quite difficult to explain to people is that actually nature can have more value in some situations in urban areas than in rural areas. So if you take the example of pollution, there's more pollution in urban areas and there are more people breathing in that pollution. So by having trees and woodlands, etc within them that can absorb that pollution, that means that there's a higher value in that. That's why we have to be careful in how we explain all of our figures because sometimes a higher value - not in general, not for the top level, but for some of them - is not necessarily a good thing. Because if you think about it, if there's absolutely no pollution, then trees wouldn't be removing that pollution, and the value of that would be zero. So it's a challenging thing to communicate and get across to users, yeah. MF It's a fascinating equation, isn't it? And also in terms of outputs, of course, we can't ignore the growing influence of renewables, which of course is energy from the environment. GT Yes, exactly. Yes. And that's a service that’s actually seen some really big growth in its asset size as we possibly would expect over recent years. MF Give us the numbers on that. GT The renewable energy was worth 40.7 billion, although I have to say - which will be surprising to some people - the oil and gas asset value is actually still higher than that at 111 billion. So, it shows that although things are changing and renewable energy has seen the biggest growth, at present oil and gas would still have a higher asset value. MF We'll talk a little about the dash for net zero, or progress towards Net Zero at least, a little bit later. But nonetheless, it can't be ignored that is renewable electricity provision increased by we’re saying 275% between 2011 and 2021. The last estimates - that's 21,899 gigawatt hours. So almost a threefold increase and, you know, without being political the drift of policy is to increase that much, much more. GT Yeah, we have. We have seen that, and you'll see that across all of our figures. Renewable is definitely a growing sector. MF We’ve talked about what we get out in a traditional economic sense of course, but historically the biggest example has been agriculture, and farmland. There’s a big debate going on about the use of farmland and again, in classical GDP terms, the contribution of agriculture has not been great because it’s been maintained by subsidies traditionally - at the risk of upsetting the farming community. Could we say that the decline in closed farmland being reported is because less and less of our natural environment is devoted now to agriculture? Are we saying that we can move away from that as long as the other economic benefits of the environment are being delivered on the other side of the equation? GT Well, I think with any sort of figures, you need to look at it in the round. So, you could look in isolation within the natural capital accounts, but in reality you'd need to look at, you know, employment and those sorts of things. I mean, the interesting thing about the natural capital accounts is that technically farmed land - we need to look at it in its raw state. I mean, we can't yet separate that with our figures, but it's about what nature provides us. So, for example, we wouldn't include farmed fish, but we would include wild fish catch. So, with the national capital accounts, what we aim to do is separate that out. But in terms of the amount of farmland we can record that and we can publish that and look at it, but I think for anyone making decisions, they probably need to look at the whole. MF But certainly we're saying that woodland, for example, is contributing more to the economy in terms of its beneficial effects in offsetting carbon and removing pollution, than it actually contributes through the felling of timber. GT Yes, yes, that is very clear from our figures. MF And indeed there are some other takeaways from the publication as well as. In cruder financial terms, just living closer to nature can be good for the value of your house. GT Yes, yes. So, where we don't have a price, we have to look at a way to value it. And so, we know that being close to nature or having a nice view can add value to your house. I think it added around 1.5% To the average house price in 2021, or just under 5000 pounds, 4700. It did vary though by the type of property and flats and maisonettes it added around 4%. So yes, being close to nature and accessing nature, having access to green space is really important and in fact we have publications on our urban accounts, which pull that out, and as well on our house prices, where those interested can look in more detail. MF Of course this continues to be a big area of ‘work in progress’. What other measures could potentially be included, particularly as the response to global warming continues to be refined and developed? GT So yes, at the moment, I believe it was mentioned earlier that we cast this almost as an underestimate. We know there are services we're not capturing. So, for example, flood regulating services. So how much... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/32364547

AI: The Future of Data 05/20/2024

AI: The Future of Data With the public release of large language models like Chat GPT putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) firmly on our radar, this episode explores what benefits this technology might hold for statistics and analysis, as well as policymaking and public services. Joining host, Miles Fletcher, to discuss the groundbreaking work being done in this area by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and across the wider UK Government scene are: Osama Rahman, Director of the ONS Data Science Campus; Richard Campbell, Head of Reproducible Data Science and Analysis; and Sam Rose, Deputy Director of Advanced Analytics and Head of Data Science and AI at the Department for Transport. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and, if you've been a regular listener to these podcasts, you'll have heard plenty of the natural intelligence displayed by my ONS colleagues. This time though, we're looking into the artificial stuff. We'll discuss the work being done by the ONS to take advantage of this great technological leap forward; what's going on with AI across the wider UK Government scene; and also talk about the importance of making sure every use of AI is carried out safely and responsibly. Guiding us through that are my ONS colleagues - with some of the most impressive job titles we've had to date - Osama Rahman is Director of the Data Science Campus. Richard Campbell is Head of Reproducible Data Science and Analysis. And completing our lineup, Sam Rose, Deputy Director of Advanced Analytics and head of data science and AI at the Department for Transport. Welcome to you all. Osama let's kick off then with some clarity on this AI thing. It's become the big phrase of our time now of course but when it comes to artificial intelligence and public data, what precisely are we talking about? OSAMA RAHMANSo artificial intelligence quite simply is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computing systems, and the simulation is the important bit, I think. Actually, people talk about data science, and they talk about machine learning - there's no clear-cut boundaries between these things, and there's a lot of overlap. So, you think about data science. It's the study of data to extract meaningful insights. It's multidisciplinary – maths, stats, computer programming, domain expertise, and you analyse large amounts of data to ask and answer questions. And then you think about machine learning. So that focuses on the development of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience and by the use of data. So, in other words, machine learning enables computers to learn from data and make decisions or predictions without explicitly being programmed to do so. So, if you think about some of the stuff we do at the ONS, it's very important to be able to take a job and match it to an industrial classification - so that was a manually intensive process and now we use a lot of machine learning to guide that. So, machine learning is essentially a form of AI. MILES FLETCHERSo is it fair to say then that the reason, or one of the main reasons, people are talking so much about AI now is because of the public release of these large language models? The chat bots if you like, to simpletons like me, the ChatGPT’s and so forth. You know, they seem like glorified search engines or Oracles - you ask them a question and they tell you everything you need to know. OSAMA RAHMANSo that's a form of AI and the one everyone's interested in. But it's not the only form – like I said machine learning, some other applications in data science, where we try in government, you know, in trying to detect fraud and error. So, it's all interlinked. MILES FLETCHERWhen the ONS asked people recently for one of its own surveys, about how aware the public are about artificial intelligence, 42% of people said they used it in their home recently. What sort of things would people be using it for in the home? What are these everyday applications of AI and I mean, is this artificial intelligence strictly speaking? OSAMA RAHMANIf you use Spotify, or Amazon music or YouTube music, they get data on what music you listen to, and they match that with people who've been listening to similar music, and they make recommendations for you. And that's one of the ways people find out about new music or new movies if you use Netflix, so that's one pretty basic application, that I think a lot of people are using in the home. MILES FLETCHERAnd when asked about what areas of AI they'd like to know more about, more than four in 10 adults reported that they'd like to know better how to judge the accuracy of information. I guess this is where the ONS might come in. Rich then, if I could just ask you to explain what we've been up to, what the Data Science Campus has been up to, to actually bring the power of artificial intelligence to our statistics. RICHARD CAMPBELLThanks Miles. Yeah, a few things that ONS has been doing in this very broad sphere of artificial intelligence, and it's really in that overlap area that Osama mentioned with data science, so I'd pick out a few sorts of general areas there. So, one is automation. You know, we're always keen to look at how we can automate processes and make them more efficient. It frees up the time of our analysts to conduct more work. It means that we are more cost effective. It means that our statistics have better quality. It's something we've done for years but AI offers some new opportunities do that. The other area which Osama touched on is the use of large language models, you know, we can get into the complexities of data. We can get much more out of data; we can complete tasks that would have been too complex or too time consuming for real data scientists. And this is good news, actually, because it frees up the data scientists to add real valuable human insights. Some of the places we've been using this. So, my team for example, which is called reproducible data science and analysis, and we use data science and engineering skills to develop computer systems to produce statistics where the data is a bit big, or what I tend to call a bit messy or a bit complex for our traditional computer systems. We use AI here through automation, as I mentioned, you know, really making sure that we're making systems as efficient and high quality as possible. Another thing we're interested in doing here is quite often we’re doing something called re-platforming systems. So, this is where we take a system that's been used to produce our statistics for years and years and look to move it on to new technology. Now we're exploring with Osama's team the potential for AI to do a lot of the grunt work for us there to sort of go in and say, right, what is going on in this system? How is it working, how we can improve it? One other thing I'll mention, if Osama doesn't mind me treading on the territory of his team, is the Stats Chat function that we've used on the ONS website. So, this is using AI to enable a far more intelligent interrogation of the vast range of statistics that we've got, so it no longer requires people to be really knowledgeable about our statistics. It enables them to ask quite open questions and to be guided to the most relevant data. MILES FLETCHERBecause at the moment, if you want to really explore a topic by getting into the depths of the data, into the granular data, you’ve really got to know what you're looking for haven’t you? This again is an oracle that will come up with the answers for you and just present them all ready for your digestion. RICHARD CAMPBELLThat's right. And I tend to think of these things as a starting point, rather than the whole answer. So, what it’s enabling you to do is to get to the meat of the issue a lot quicker. And then you can focus your energy as a user of our statistics in doing the analysis that you want rather than thinking “how do I find the right information in the first place?” MILES FLETCHEROsama, that sounds like an intriguing tool. Tell us precisely how it works then, what data does it capture, what's in scope? OSAMA RAHMANSo the scope is publicly available documents on the ONS website. And there's a specific reason for that. So, these AI tools, you can have it look at the whole internet, you can have it look at subsets of data, you can point it to specific bits of data, right? And what's important for us is actually the work of the ONS, that statistics we produce are quality assured and relevant. And by providing these guardrails where you know, Stats Chat only looks at ONS published data, we have a degree of assurance that the data coming back to the user is likely to be of good quality and not based on who knows what information. MILES FLETCHERBecause when you use, to name one example, ChatGPT for example, the little warning comes back saying “ChatGPT can make mistakes, consider checking important information.” And I guess that's fundamental to all this isn't it. These tools, as intelligent as they might be, they're only as good - like any system - as the information that's going in the front end. OSAMA RAHMANThat's absolutely correct, which is why we have these guardrails where, you know, the functionality on Stats Chat is focused on published ONS information. MILES FLETCHERThat does mean that something that's offered by an organisation like the ONS does have that sort of inbuilt potential to be trustworthy and widely used. But of course, you might say, to have a really good tool it's got to be drawing on masses of information from right across the world. And it's interesting how, and you mentioned that it's open-source data, of course, that's most available for these tools at the moment, but you're seeing proprietary data coming in as well. And this week, as we're recording this, the Financial Times, for example, has announced that it's done a deal with one of the big AI firms to put all of its content into their database. Do you think there's scope for organisations like the ONS around the world to collaborate on this and to provide you know, really powerful tools for the world to exchange knowledge and data this way? OSAMA RAHMANSo there is collaboration going on. There's collaboration, both within government - we're not the only department looking at these sorts of tools; there's also collaboration internationally. I think the difference you know... our information on our website is already publicly available. That's why it's on the net, it is a publication. But there's a difference in situation with the FT where, you know, a lot of the FT information is behind a paywall. MILES FLETCHERYeah, it has a sort of democratising tendency that this publicly available information is being fed into these kinds of sources and these kinds of tools. That's big picture stuff. It's all very exciting work that's going on. But I'll come back to you Rich just for a second. What examples practically, because I think that the Stats Chat project is still a little way off actually being available publicly, isn't it? RICHARD CAMPBELLYeah, I think it is still a little way off. So, I think the key thing that we're doing at the moment and something we've done for years, but AI is helping is the use of automation principles. Just making things quicker. Now in a data science context, this might be going through very, very large data sets, looking for patterns that it would take an analyst a huge amount of time and probably far too much patience than they would have to find. MILES FLETCHERSo for example, in future then we might find that - and this is one issue that recurs in these podcasts - obviously about the limitations of official statistics is they tend to lag. This is another way of making sure that data gets processed faster. And therefore, the statistics are more timely, and therefore the insights they provide are really much more actionable than perhaps they might be at the moment. RICHARD CAMPBELLYeah, that's spot on. There's potential in there for pace of getting the statistics from the point that the data exists to getting it into published statistics. There's potential there for us to be able to combine and bring more sources together. There's also some behind the scenes stuff that helps as well. So, for example, quite often we are coding up the systems to produce new or improved versions of official statistics. And we're looking at the possibility of AI speeding up and supporting that process, perhaps for example, by giving us an initial draft of the code. Now, why does that matter for people in the public, you know, does anybody actually care? Well, what it means is that we can do things quicker and more to the point we can focus the time of our expert data scientists and other analysts in really helping people understand the data and the analysis that we're producing. MILES FLETCHEROkay, so lots of interesting stuff in the pipeline there. But I’d like to bring in Sam now to talk about how AI is actually being used in government right now. Because in your work Sam at the Department for Transport, you've actually been working on some practical projects that have been gaining results in the real world. SAM ROSEWe have - we've been doing loads actually, and my poor team probably haven't had any time to sit still for the last 18 months or so. And I think like most ministerial departments, we're doing lots and lots of work to automate existing processes, so much like Rich has alluded to in your space, we're looking at the things that take up most of the time for our policy colleagues and looking at how we can automate those. So, for example, drafting correspondence, or automating policy consultation processes, or all of that kind of corporate memory type stuff. Can we mine big banks of data be it text or otherwise and summarise that information or generate new insights that we wouldn't have been able to do previously? But I think slightly more relevant maybe for you guys, is the stuff we're doing on creating new datasets or improving datasets. So, a few things. We're training a machine learning model to identify heavy goods vehicles from Earth observation data. And that's because we don't have a single nationally representative data set that tells us where these heavy goods vehicles park or stop outside of existing kind of service stations, and what we want to understand is where are those big areas of tarmac or concrete where they're all parking up as part of their routine journeys, so that we can look at when we're rolling out the green infrastructure for heavy goods vehicles, we're looking at where the important places that we need to put that infrastructure are. And that data doesn't exist at the moment. So we're using machine learning to generate a new dataset that we wouldn't otherwise have. MILES FLETCHERAnd how widespread are these kinds of projects across government in the UK now? SAM ROSESo I think that there are loads of different things and I wouldn't be able to speak on behalf of everybody but I know lots of different areas of government are looking at similar kind of automation and productivity projects like our kind of drafting all of the knowledge management area. I think there's things like Osama alluded to where DEFRA for example, I think they're using Earth observation data to assess biodiversity for example. So, there's lots of stuff that's common between lots of government departments, and then there's lots of stuff that's very specific to individual departments. But all along the way there's lots of collaboration and working together to make sure we're all learning continuously and where we can collaborate on a single solution that we are. MILES FLETCHERI guess one of the central public concerns about the spread of AI once again that it will cost jobs, that it will do people out of the means of making a living that they've become used to. And I guess from government's point of view, it's all about doing much, much more with the resources that we have and making government much more effective. SAM ROSEYes, absolutely. And it's not necessarily - and I think Rich mentioned this earlier - it's not necessarily about doing our jobs for us. It's about improving how we can do our jobs and being able to do more with less, I think, so freeing up the human to do the bit that the human really needs to do and enabling the technology to do their very repeatable very automatable parts of the job. And indeed, in some instances, this technology can actually do the work better than humans. So be it identifying really complex patterns and datasets, for example. Or a good example from us in transport is we've trained machine learning model to be able to look at images of electric vehicle charge point installations and be able to identify that similar or the same image that has been submitted more than once. Now that's estimated to have saved over 130 man years of time, you know, that's not a task that we would have been able to do with just humans. MILES FLETCHERAnd you would have to be pretty alert as a human and have a very high boredom threshold to process all that material yourself and spot the fraudsters. SAM ROSEYeah, well, quite. And that's, I think, a really nice example of where again, it's not taking our jobs, but it's enabling us to do something that we wouldn't have been able to do previously and improve the service that we're providing. MILES FLETCHERNow, our ability collectively, whatever sort of organisation we're involved in, our ability to make the most of AI depends on of course having the right skills, and Osama I guess this is where the Data Science Campus comes in as the government's Centre of Excellence for data science, principally, but I guess also in this context, artificial intelligence as well. What work have you been involved in to make sure that the supply of those skills and knowledge is on tap for government? OSAMA RAHMANSo firstly, I would say we are a (one) centre of excellence within government. I think you know, what's been brilliant to see since the campus was set up has been that actually more and more government departments have excellent data science, AI teams. Sam leads one at DfT. There is, of course, 10DS (or 10 Data Science) at number 10 [Downing Street]. There's a Cabinet Office team. So, there's lots of teams that now work in this area. Some of the stuff we've been doing is we have various training programmes that we have run. We have senior data masterclasses so that actually, senior leaders within government can understand better the power of data. 10DS, Sam's area, have all been running hackathons, which actually improve skills as well. So, it's no longer just us who are building capability. I think it's great to see that across government and across departments there are teams improving skills within their departments, bringing in others from outside to work with them. So, there's a lot going on there. SAM ROSEJust really quickly, it's important to think that skills are not just skills of data scientists, but skills of everybody's ability to use this kind of technology. There's a lot of work going on at the moment looking at what we need to do both internally to government, but also out there in all of our sectors to make sure that our workforce has the skills it needs to be able to more rapidly kind of adopt and be able to take advantage of all the benefits that this technology brings to us. I mean from a very personal point of view, and I don't really know all of the answers to this, but you know, I'm thinking about what actually, if large language models can help us to generate efficient code, then actually, what skills do I... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/31352782

Communicating Uncertainty: How to better understand an estimate. 03/25/2024

Communicating Uncertainty: How to better understand an estimate. The ONS podcast returns, this time looking at the importance of communicating uncertainty in statistics. Joining host Miles Fletcher to discuss is Sir Robert Chote, Chair of the UKSA; Dr Craig McLaren, of the ONS; and Professor Mairi Spowage, director of the Fraser of Allander Institute. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome back to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and to kick off this brand new season we're going to venture boldly into the world of uncertainty. Now, it is of course the case that nearly all important statistics are in fact estimates. They may be based on huge datasets calculated with the most robust methodologies, but at the end of the day they are statistical judgments subject to some degree of uncertainty. So, how should statisticians best communicate that uncertainty while still maintaining trust in the statistics themselves? It's a hot topic right now and to help us understand it, we have another cast of key players. I'm joined by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir Robert Chote, Dr. Craig McLaren, head of national accounts and GDP here at the ONS, and from Scotland by Professor Mairi Spowage, director of the renowned Fraser of Allander Institute at the University of Strathclyde. Welcome to you all. Well, Sir Robert, somebody once famously said that decimal points in GDP is an economist’s way of showing they've got a sense of humour. And well, that's quite amusing - particularly if you're not an economist - there's an important truth in there isn't there? When we say GDP has gone up by 0.6%. We really mean that's our best estimate. SIR ROBERT CHOTE It is. I mean, I've come at this having been a consumer of economic statistics for 30 years in different ways. I started out as a journalist on the Independent and the Financial Times writing about the new numbers as they were published each day, and then I had 10 years using them as an economic and fiscal forecaster. So I come at this very much from the spirit of a consumer and am now obviously delighted to be working with producers as well. And you're always I think, conscious in those roles of the uncertainty that lies around particular economic estimates. Now, there are some numbers that are published, they are published once, and you are conscious that that's the number that stays there. But there is uncertainty about how accurately that is reflecting the real world position and that's naturally the case. You then have the world of in particular, the national accounts, which are numbers, where you have initial estimates that the producer returns to and updates as the information sets that you have available to draw your conclusions develops over time. And it's very important to remember on the national accounts that that's not a bug, that's a feature of the system. And what you're trying to do is to measure a very complicated set of transactions you're trying to do in three ways, measuring what the economy produces, measuring incomes, measuring expenditure. You do that in different ways with information that flows in at different times. So it's a complex task and necessarily the picture evolves. So I think from the perspective of a user, it's important to be aware of the uncertainty and it's important when you're presenting and publishing statistics to help people engage with that, because if you are making decisions based on statistics, if you're simply trying to gain an understanding of what's going on in the economy or society, generally speaking you shouldn't be betting the farm on the assumption that any particular number is, as you say, going to be right to decimal places. And the more that producers can do to help people engage with that in an informed and intelligent way, and therefore mean that decisions that people take on the basis of this more informed the better. MF So it needs to be near enough to be reliable, but at the same time we need to know about the uncertainty. So how near is the system at the moment as far as these important indicators are concerned to getting that right? SRC Well, I think there's an awful lot of effort that goes into ensuring that you are presenting on the basis of the information set that you have the best available estimates that you can, and I think there's an awful lot of effort that goes into thinking about quality, that thinks about quality assurance when these are put together, that thinks about the communication how they mesh in with the rest of the, for example, the economic picture that you have, so you can reasonably assure yourself that you're providing people with the best possible estimate that you can at any given moment. But at the same time, you want to try to guide people by saying, well, this is an estimate, there's no guarantee that this is going to exactly reflect the real world, the more that you can do to put some sort of numerical context around that the more the reliable basis you have for people who are using those numbers, and thinking about as I say, particularly in the case of those statistics that may be revised in future as you get more information. You can learn things, obviously from the direction, the size of revisions to numbers that have happened in the past, in order to give people a sense of how much confidence they should place in any given number produced at any given point in that cycle of evolution as the numbers get firmer over time. MF If you're looking to use the statistics to make some decision with your business or personal life, where do you look for the small print? Where do you look for the guidance on how reliable this number is going to be? SRC Well, there's plenty of guidance published in different ways. It depends, obviously on the specific statistics in question, but I think it's very important for producers to ensure that when people come for example to websites or to releases that have the headline numbers that are going to be reported, that it's reasonably straightforward to get to a discussion of where do these numbers come from? How are they calculated? What's the degree of uncertainty that lies around that arising from these things? And so not everybody is obviously going to have an appetite for the technical discussion there. But providing that in a reasonably accessible, reasonably findable way, is important and I think a key principle is that if you're upfront about explaining how numbers are generated, explaining about the uncertainty that lies around them in as quantified way as you can, that actually increases and enhances trust in the underlying production and communication process and in the numbers rather than undermining it. I think you have to give the consumers of these numbers by and large the credit for understanding that these things are only estimates and that if you're upfront about that, and you talk as intelligently and clearly as you can about the uncertainties - potential for revision, for example - then that enhances people's confidence. It doesn't undermine it. MF You mentioned there about enhancing trust and that's the crux of all this. At a time we're told of growing public mistrust in national institutions and so forth, isn't there a risk that the downside of talking more about uncertainty in statistics is the more aware people will become of it and the less those statistics are going to be trusted? SRC I think in general, if you are clear with people about how a number is calculated, the uncertainty that lies around it, the potential for revision, how things have evolved in the past - that’s not for everybody, but for most people - is likely to enhance their trust and crucially, their understanding of the numbers that you're presenting and the context that you're putting around those. So making that available - as I say, you have to recognise that different people will have different appetites for the technical detail around this - then there are different ways of presenting the uncertainty not only about, you know, outturn statistics, but in my old gig around forecasts of where things are going in the future and doing that and testing it out with your users as to what they find helpful and what they don't is a valuable thing to be doing. MF You've been the stats regulator for a little while now. Do you think policymakers, perhaps under pressure to achieve certain outcomes, put too much reliance on statistics when it suits them, in order to show progress against some policy objective? I mean, do the limitations of statistics sometimes go out of the window when it's convenient. What's your view of how well certainty is being treated by those in government and elsewhere? SRC Well, I think certainly in my time as a forecaster, you were constantly reminding users of forecasters and consumers of that, that again, they're based on the best available information set that you have at the time. You explain where the judgements have come from but in particular, if you're trying to set policy in order to achieve a target for a particular statistic at some point in the future, for example, a measure of the budget deficit, then having an understanding of the uncertainty, the nature of it, the potential size of it in that context, helps you avoid making promises that it's not really in your power to keep with the best will in the world, given those uncertainties. And sometimes that message is taken closer to heart than at other times. MF Time I think to bring in Craig now at this point, as head of national accounts and the team that produces GDP at the ONS to talk about uncertainty in the real world of statistical production. With this specific example, Craig, you're trying to produce a single number, one single number that sums up progress or lack of it in the economy as a whole. What do you do to make the users of the statistics and the wider public aware of the fact that you're producing in GDP one very broad estimate with a lot of uncertainty built in? CRAIG MCLAREN Thanks, Miles. I mean, firstly, the UK economy - incredibly complex isn't it? The last set of numbers, we've got 2.7 trillion pounds worth of value. So if you think about how we bring all of those numbers together, then absolutely what we're doing is providing the best estimate at the time and then we start to think about this trade off between timeliness and accuracy. So even when we bring all of those data sources together, we often balance between what can we understand at the point of time, and then equally as we get more information from our businesses and our data suppliers, we evolve our estimates to understand more about the complex nature of the UK economy. So where we do that and how we do that it's looking quite closely at our data sources. So for example, we do a lot of surveys about businesses, and that uses data provided by businesses and that can come with a little bit of a what we call a time lag. So clearly when we run our monthly business surveys that's quite timely. We get that information quite quickly. But actually when we want to understand more detail about the UK economy, we have what we call structural surveys, and they're like our annual surveys. So over time, it can take us a couple of years actually to get a more complete picture of the UK economy. So in that time, absolutely. We may revise the estimate. Some businesses might say, well, we forgot about this. We're going to send you a revised number. We look at quite closely about the interplay between all the dynamics of the different parts of the economy, and then we confront the data set. So I think by bringing all this information together, both on the timeliness but also as we get a more complete picture, we start to refine our estimates. So in practice, what we do find is as we evolve our estimates, we can monitor that. We do look quite closely at the revisions of GDP, then we can produce analysis that helps our users understand those revisions and then we quite heavily focus on the need for rapid information that helps policymakers. So how can policymakers take this in a short period of time, but then we provide this information to understand the revision properties of what we would call that about how our estimates can change and evolve over time as we get additional information going forwards. MF So let's just look at the specifics, just to help people understand the process and how you put what you've just explained so well into action. Craig, the last quarterly estimate of GDP showed the economy contracted slightly. CM That's exactly right Miles and I think where we do produce our estimates in a timely basis, absolutely they will be subject to revision or more information as we get them. So this is why it's important, perhaps not to just focus on a single estimate. And I know in our most recent year in the economy, when that's all pretty flat, for example, or there's sort of a small fall, we do have a challenge in our communication. And that becomes a little bit back to the user understanding about how these numbers are compiled. And also perhaps how can you use additional information as part of that? So as I mentioned the UK economy is very complex, GDP is a part of that, but we also have other broader indicators as well. So when we do talk about small movements in the economy, we do need to think about the wider picture alongside that. MF Okay, so the last quarterly estimate, what was the potential for revision there? Just how big could that have been? CM We don't formally produce what we call range estimates at the moment. We are working quite closely with colleagues about how we might do that. So if you think about all the information that comes together to produce GDP, some of that is survey base which will have a degree of perhaps error around it, but we also use administrative data sources as well. So we have access to VAT records anonymized of course, which we bring in to our estimates. So the complex nature around the 300 different data sources that we bring in to make GDP means that having a range can be quite a statistical challenge. So what we do is we can actually look at our historical record of GDP revisions, and by doing that, in perhaps normal times, are quite unbiased. And by that, I mean we don't expect to see that to be significant either way. So we may revise up by perhaps 0.1 or down by 0.1, but overall, it's quite a sort of considered picture and we don't see radical revisions to our first estimates over time. MF You're saying that when revisions happen they are as likely to be up as they are to be down and there's no historical bias in there either way, because presumably, if there was that bias detectable, you would have acted some time ago, to make sure it was removed from the methodology. CM Exactly. Exactly. MF Just staying with this whole business of trying to make a very fast estimate because it is by international standards, a fast estimate of a very, very big subject. How much data in percentage terms would you say you’ve got at the point of that first estimate as a proportion of all the data you're eventually going to get when you produce your final number? CM It does depend on the indicator Miles. So the UK is one of the few countries in the world that produces monthly GDP. So we are quite rapid in producing monthly GDP. Robert did mention in the introduction of this session that with monthly GDP we do an output measure. So this is information we have quite quickly from businesses. So our monthly GDP estimate is based on one of the measures of the economy. So that uses the output measure. We get that from very rapid surveys, and that has quite a good coverage around 60 or 70% that we can get quite quickly. But then as we confront with our different measures of GDP, that's when the other sources come in. So we have our expenditure measure which takes a bit longer and then we have our income measure as well. So we have this process in the UK working for a monthly GDP which is quite rapid. We then bring in additional data sources and each of these measures have their own strengths and weaknesses until we can finally confront them fully in what we call an annual framework. And then often that takes us a couple of years to fully bring together all those different data sources so we can see the evolution of our GDP estimates as additional data comes in. MF Now looking back to what happened during the pandemic, of course, we saw this incredible downturn in the economy as the effects of lockdown took effect on international travel that shuddered to a halt for a while and everyone was staying at home for long periods. The ONS said at that point, it was the most significant downturn it had ever recorded. But then that was closely followed of course when those restrictions were eased by the most dramatic recovery ever recorded. Just how difficult was it to precisely manage the sheer scale of that change, delivered over quite a short period, relatively speaking, just how good a job did the system do under those very testing circumstances? CM It was incredibly challenging and I think not just for official statistics of course but for a range of outputs as well. Viewing it in context now, I think when the economy is going relatively stable, perhaps a 0.1 or 0.2 change, we might start to be a bit nervous if we saw some revisions to that but if you think about I believe at the time was around 20% drop in activity and actually the challenge of ensuring that our surveys were capturing what was happening in the economy in the UK, and in the ONS we stood up some additional surveys to provide us with additional information so we could understand what was happening. We still have that survey that's a fortnightly survey. So the challenge that we had was to try and get the information in near real time to provide us with the confidence and also obtaining information from businesses that are not at their place of work, so they weren't responding to our surveys. So we had to pivot to using perhaps telephone, collecting information in a different way really to understand the impact the economy. So when we look back now, in retrospect, perhaps a 20% drop should that have been 21 or 22%. It's all relative to the size of the drop is my main point I would make. So in the context of providing the information at the time, we were quite fortunate in the survey on the data collection front to really have a world leading survey for businesses that provided that information in near real time, which we could then use to understand the impacts on different parts of the UK economy. And I think now when we get new information in an annual basis, we can go back and just confront that data set and understand how reliable those estimates were, of course. MF Of course the UK was not alone in making some quite significant revisions subsequently to its initial estimates, what was done, though, at the time to let the users of the statistics know that because of those circumstances, which were so unusual, because the pace of change you were seeing was so dramatic, that perhaps there was a need for special caution around what the data was seeming to say about the state of the economy? CM Exactly, and it was unprecedented of course as well. So in our communication and coming back to how we communicate statistics, and also the... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/30494318

ONS: Year in Review 2023 12/21/2023

ONS: Year in Review 2023 In this episode Miles is joined by the National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, to reflect on what has been a busy and transformative year at the Office for National Statistics. Transcript MILES FLETCHER This is “Statistically Speaking”, the official podcast of the UK Office for National Statistics, I’m Miles Fletcher. This is our 20th episode, in fact, a milestone of sorts, though not a statistically significant one. What is significant is that we're joined, once again, to look back at the highlights from another 12 months here at the ONS by none other than the National Statistician himself, Professor Sir Ian Diamond. Ian, thanks for joining us again. The year started for you with being reappointed as the national statistician. As 2023 developed, how glad did you feel to be back? SIR IAN DIAMOND Of course, you know, I was hugely privileged to be invited to continue. It's one of the most exciting things you could ever do and I will continue to do everything in my power to bring great statistics to the service of our nation. MF To business then, and this time last year, we sat in this very room talking about the results of Census 2021, which were coming in quite fresh then. And we've seen the fastest growth of the population, you told us, since the baby boom of the early 1960s. Over the course of the year much more data has become available from that census and this time, we've been able to make it available for people in much richer ways, including interactive maps, create your own data set tools. What does that say about the population data generally and the way that people can access and use it now? How significant is that there's that sort of development? SID Well I think we need to recognise that the sorts of things that we can do now, with the use of brilliant technology, brilliant data science and brilliant computing is enabling us to understand our population more, to be able to make our data more accessible. 50, 60, 70 years ago, 150 years ago, we would have just produced in about six or seven years after the census, a report with many, many tables and people would have just been able to look at those tables. Now, we're able to produce data which enables people to build their own tables, to ask questions of data. It’s too easy to say, tell me something interesting, you know, the population of Dorset is this. Okay, that's fine, but actually he wants to know much more about whether that's high or low. You want to know much more about the structure of the population, what its needs for services are, I could go on and on. And each individual will have different questions to ask of the data, and enabling each individual to ask those questions which are important to them, and therefore for the census to be more used, is I think, an incredibly beautiful thing. MF And you can go onto the website there and create a picture... SID Anyone can go onto the website, anyone can start to ask whatever questions they want of the data. And to get very clearly, properly statistically disclosed answers which enable them to use those data in whatever way they wish to. MF And it's a demonstration of obviously the richness of data that's available now from all kinds of sources, and behind that has been a discussion of, that's gone on here in the ONS and beyond this year, about what the future holds for population statistics and how we can develop those and bring those on. There's been a big consultation going on at the moment. What's the engagement with that consultation been like? SID Well the engagement's been great, we’ve had around 700 responses, and it addresses some fundamental questions. So the census is a really beautiful thing. But at the same time, the census, the last one done the 21st of March 2021, was out of date by the 22nd of March 2021, and more and more out of date as you go on and many of our users say to us, that they want more timely data. Also by its very nature a census is a pretty constrained data set. We in our country have never been prepared to ask for example, income on the census yet this is one of the most demanded questions. We don't ask it because it is believed that it is too sensitive. And so there are many, many, many questions that we simply can't ask because of space. There are many more questions that we simply cannot ask in the granularity that we want to. We've been doing some work recently to reconcile the differences between estimates in the number of Welsh speakers from surveys with estimates on the number of people in the census who report they speak Welsh. Frankly, it would be better if we were able to ask them to get information in a more granular way. And so while the census is an incredibly beautiful thing, we also need to recognise that as time goes on, the technology and the availability of data allowing us to link data becomes much more of a great opportunity that we have been undertaking a lot of research, a lot of research which was asked for by the government in 2013, following the report by Chris Skinner, the late Chris Skinner, Joe Hollis, and Mike Murphy, which is a brilliant report. We said at the moment we need to do another census in 2021. That's what we have done and I believe it to be one of the best coverages there has ever been. And yet we need to assess whether administrative data could be used in future to provide more timely, more flexible and more accessible data and that's what the consultation is about. I will be making a recommendation to the UKSA (UK Statistics Authority) board in the future. In the near future we have to say, and I think it is worth saying that what the consultation says to us is that people are very, very, very much in favour of the direction of travel but at the same time as yet accepting our prototype, unconvinced about the data flows and the sustainability of those data flows to enable us to do it and so, we are looking at how to respond to other very important analyses and we will do so in the near future. MF When can the people who contributed to that consultation, roughly when should they expect to hear from us? SID I think the expectation is we'll publish something by the end of quarter one in 2024. MF Surveys have continued to be a very important part of what the ONS does, these very large national surveys, and yet one of the biggest challenges of the has been maintaining coverage and particularly response rates and obviously, particularly with the Labour Force Survey recently that has been a particular issue for the ONS hasn’t it. Where do things stand now as we move into modernising the traditional Labour Force Survey and moving to a new model because it's an issue statistics bodies around the world have been dealing with, it's harder to get people to complete surveys like they used to. SID I think it's a fair point that response rates globally are a challenge and response rates globally, not only in national statistics issues, but in the private sector organisations that also collect data, are a challenge. So we need to recognise that. A part of that is that historically, one could find people at home, knock on doors, have that conversation with people, and perhaps post pandemic people are less willing to have a conversation at the house. Also, people are very busy. They work in multiple occupations. They are not always in, they live in housing accommodation which is more and more difficult to access. This there is no kind of single magic bullet here that we could press all we would have. The first thing to say Miles is that we recognise that and that's why we worked with our colleagues at His Majesty's Treasury to provide a project to go to what we call a transformed Labour Force Survey. And I think that that's a hugely exciting project for a number of reasons. One, the labour force survey which has been around for a long time, the questionnaire had become a little bit unwieldy. And also we wanted to enable people to have much more flexibility at the time of which they answered the question. We are in the field with the pilots for that service. We've been pretty good. There are good response rates. There are also some challenges around getting the questions right. These aren’t challenges that stress me, that's why you do a pilot, but at the end of the day we're hoping to be able to transform into that new Labour Force Survey early in 2024, in the first half of 2024. We're working very closely in doing that with our major stakeholders and the Bank of England, His Majesty's Treasury and the Office for Budgetry Responsibility (OBR), is you take a joint decision on when people feel comfortable that we have had enough dual running to enable us to move forward. The other question that I'd have to raise around surveys more generally, is on inflation, which we have all been subjected to in many, many areas in the last couple of years, inflation in survey collection has increased massively and so in the last year we've had to make real judgments about how we maintain quality. And in the next few years, we will really be needing to think through exactly how we conduct our surveys and the cost of doing so. MF Yes. Of all the people who should be aware of inflation are the people who report it, and certainly the impacts of those relatively high rates of inflation have impacted us as much as anybody else. The challenges not withstanding of running surveys, the interest of government bodies in getting that information directly from people does continue to underline the unique value of surveys. Some people say Oh, well, they surely they can get this information from other sources I've even seen it suggested that social media could provide the answers, but there is a unique value isn't there and actually getting a statistically representative sample of people and speaking to them directly. SID It depends Miles, I think it absolutely depends on what the question is you're trying to answer. If you're trying to get some answers to a question where the answer can be obtained through administrative data sources, then you don't need a survey. Surveys are difficult to conduct and difficult to pilot and plan and extremely expensive to undertake. So you should only do a survey if you can't get the information from somewhere else. Therefore, you know, I do think that we need to be very, very careful in thinking through when we need to do surveys. Does that mean to say we don't need to do surveys? Absolutely not. There are reasons why you need to do surveys. It may be that you need to really spend some time identifying whether someone really is eligible for hte questions you're going to ask or you may want attitudes. I don't know how to get someone's attitude without asking them. And so there are reasons why you would want to do a survey, but I would argue that you should only do a survey when you cannot get the data from elsewhere. And you also mentioned social media. Social media is an incredibly interesting and important source of data. Now, I wouldn't necessarily say it was statistically representative, but we absolutely have to be flexible in what we call data. We have to be sure of the quality of those data and we have to be sure that we are really aware of what the population is that are represented by those data. So we are using many, many, many types of data now that we would not have used 50 years ago, we simply couldn't have used things like telephony data, things like card data, things like data from satellites to address questions which those data are the best way of providing answers. MF And there are some fantastic examples of that around the ONS. If you look at how we've changed prices over the last couple of years, again, the measurement of inflation, bringing in new data sources most recently from the US car industry, from the rail industry as well and it all means that the estimates of inflation are now based on many hundreds of thousands of price points, where it used to be just a few things. SID It doesn't matter what the numbers are, frankly, it matters that you've got a good coverage it matters that you have the most appropriate method and that your data are as accurate as possible. And I do think it is incredibly important. We use a wider range of data sources. I think it's incredibly exciting what those data sources are, but we should only do so being unbelievably careful about what the metadata are that go with them, what the coverage is, why we are using them and whether or not they represent an improvement over what we could do before. MF Okay, so we've seen in the area of prices, the measurement of inflation, there's new innovative data sources coming from outside, coming from industry. What sort of an improvement does that represent in how we measure inflation, when it's such an important time for cost of living? SID Well, I think it helps because we have more accurate data. We have more timely data, we have data that are real. So on rail prices, we know what people pay as opposed to what the price as advertised necessarily is and I think that is important. And so being able to properly understand what the consumer is doing, therefore, what inflation is, is to me, incredibly important. I would say that all this effort that we're putting in would not necessarily just be about prices. Here it is about do we understand more about what is going on in the economy, and there are many more questions that we can ask from those data when you've got them, and simply from some of the fixed price point data that we have previously. MF Now one massive change we've seen lately, and this is another area we've managed to improve coverage, is of course the private rental sector. It’s become much more important as we've seen house prices coming under pressure and mortgages under pressure by high interest rates and so forth. It's revealed a very interesting picture of long-term change, and also in more contemporary terms, what's actually going on with the economy right now. SID Oh 100% MF Talking about areas where we've been able to form a new view of what's really been going on. An area that attracts a particular commentary during the course of the year is expenditure on research and development. Regarded as a very important area of activity if you're talking about productivity, future economic growth...we substantially upgraded our estimates of R&D. What was the story behind that? Why was that necessary? SID Well it was incredibly important because we looked very carefully at our data, we look very carefully at our samples, we looked at our coverage and we decided that we needed properly to to bring in a much wider range of business. And we were reflecting very much those businesses from a very wide range of areas who were able and available to claim R&D tax credits, and therefore to be able to get a decent sample, and the critical thing here is not only were we making good estimates, but we were able to understand much more about what, particularly for smaller tech and creative industry companies, was R&D. And I think that is something that we need to recognise particularly in those smaller companies where there's a much greater flexibility about what people would call R&D. MF It’s a reflection perhaps that startups are the sort of firms that do R&D these days, and less so the sort of industrial behemoths with huge R&D departments. But there was an interesting change nonetheless, and obviously considerable improvement in measuring that very important area. This all I guess comes under the umbrella of future proofing practices and systems and this all came under a refreshed data strategy that we launched during the course of the year. One of the fundamental principles underlying that, where is it taking us? SID I think, I mean, just where I've been coming from, are to do a much more holistic view of what data are and how we really use data which are most appropriate to answer the questions that we have, and we recognise that the economy and indeed society are changing very quickly, and therefore we need appropriate data to be able to answer those questions. For example, if you look at employment, there are many, many people in our society who have three, four, even five jobs, we need data which enable us to find out what the distribution of the number of jobs people have is, what they're spending their time doing, and how that impacts on our understanding of the labour force. MF Worth perhaps recognising some of the particular areas where new data has also been able to shed new light and particularly think of the payments industry which obviously digital payments happen very quickly. They provide almost a daily update on the state of consumer spending. With it obviously the state of the of the of the wider economy. We've managed to strike up partnerships with a huge cross section of the payments sector. What is the particular value of that? And what do we say to perhaps other data providers who might wish to enter into similar arrangements? SID Well I think we’d say we do everything ethically, and with complete privacy, but at the same time in the public good. And that is, to me, incredibly important. And so understanding what the consumer is spending money on understanding what the consumer is not spending money on, and the transitions, is incredibly important to enable policy which impacts very positively on all of our fellow citizens. So we are very proud of those partnerships. We value them greatly. We don't take them for granted. And those data, entirely ethically provided, with great security but at the same time enabling us to understand what is going on at an early stage in the economy is incredibly important. MF And of course it’s worth restating, as mentioned already, that of course all of these data are anonymized and aggregated, and no individual would ever be able to identify themselves or be identified from that fast payments data which of course is helping to inform economics policy. MF Providing data to the people who do make policy and around government and to make sure that policies are really informed by evidence of course that is the major purpose behind the new Integrated Data Service, which was accredited this year under the Digital Economy Act. And that's enabling data to be shared around government in a way that simply wasn't possible before. SID 80 datasets available now and indeed, that number going up more or less by the day. And one of the most important things here is that there are very few challenges which government face which simply can be addressed by data from one department. Therefore, what we need to be able to do is to link data from different sources to enable us in a very granular way to be able to answer questions about topics for which the answer requires data from many sources. And the Integrated Data Service allows us to do that. It allows us to do at a pace and allows us to do it in a way which brings a wide variety of analysts to the party. And I think that, you know, this year major milestone in getting Digital Economy Act accreditation. And we will be looking to streamline the process of using it over the next year, as well as seeing more and more and more projects on it having successful results. ... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/29164198

Health: Preparing for the next global pandemic 11/20/2023

Health: Preparing for the next global pandemic The ONS led the way informing the UK response to the Coronavirus pandemic. But what lessons can be learned and how can we best prepare not only ourselves, but the rest of the world, for the next pandemic? Transcript MILES FLETCHER This is Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher, and as we approach the darkest months of winter, we're revisiting COVID-19. Now the ONS doesn't do predictions, and we're certainly not forecasting a resurgence of the virus, either here in the UK or anywhere else. But pandemic preparedness has been the driving force behind two important pieces of work that we're going to be talking about this time. Looking beyond our shores, how well equipped now is the world in general to spot and monitor emerging infections? We'll hear from Josie Golding of the Wellcome Trust on that, including how even weather events like El Nino could affect the spread of viruses. We'll also talk to my ONS colleague, Joy Preece about the pandemic preparedness toolkit, a five-year project backed by Wellcome to create and develop resources that will help countries with health surveillance in the event of future pandemics. But first, and closer to home, a new UK winter surveillance study to gather vital data on COVID-19 is now well underway. Jo Evans is its head of operations. Jo, this is a brand new COVID-19 survey the ONS is running in partnership with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). What is the new survey and what's it going to be monitoring over the winter? JO EVANS So this is now the winter COVID infection study. And we're going to be going out to, I think we've got 145,000 people signed up, and we're going to ask them to take a lateral flow test to see if they are testing positive for COVID-19. Then we'll ask them to tell us a little bit about how they're feeling, what symptoms they have and some other household information - what work do they do? Do they have caring responsibilities? And so on. MF So we're gonna be getting people to take a test and everyone's familiar of course now with administering their own lateral flow test, that wasn't the case back in the early days of the pandemic, when it was a new thing for the vast majority of us. So they'll take a test that'll tell us whether they are positive or negative for COVID-19. And on top of that, we're going to be gathering data in the form of a questionnaire. JE That's right. And then this is a collaboration this time, so we'll be working with the UKHSA. I mean, we've worked with them on the COVID infection study before, but this time what we'll be doing is looking at those responses of how many people are telling us that they have COVID-19 And we'll be trying to understand that by where people live or their age group and so on, but we'll be sharing that information with UKHSA and they will then be looking at what the impact is on hospitals. So what they call the infection hospitalisation rate, how many people are going into hospital because they have COVID, so it'll really help us understand what pressures there are on the NHS over this winter period. MF And that will give us some inkling, once again, about how many people are infected but not actually displaying any symptoms? JE Absolutely. And we do ask people about their symptoms and if they tell us they test positive, we'll then be sending them a second questionnaire, a follow up, asking them to keep testing until they get two consecutive negative tests so that we can see how long they are testing positive, but we'll also ask them how long did their symptoms last and did they need to go and see a doctor, did they take any medication, so really trying to understand how they're experiencing that period of illness. MF So during those critical winter months, that'll give us some insight into what's really going on on-the- ground and in communities. JE That's right and we're running this study from November right through to March so that we can understand that, because COVID, unlike flu, it's not a seasonal virus, but we know that the NHS really suffers through the winter with those increased pressures, with more people needing their services. And this is about understanding what's happening out there. In the community, and what impact that is having on our healthcare services. MF Another very important aspect of that is we're going to be monitoring for people who say they're suffering the symptoms of what is popularly known as long-COVID, ongoing impacts of the virus, and that will fill a very important evidence gap won’t it. JE Absolutely. We will in a follow up questionnaire be asking people how long they've had COVID for and whether they have long-COVID. And interestingly, in some research we did when we were designing the questionnaire, long-COVID sufferers told us that they know precisely what date their symptoms started and how long they've had it because of the impact it's been having on their lives. So we are hopeful that this study will provide some really useful information. MF So 145,000 people taking part. Has it been difficult to get as many people as that involved? JE Do you know what, we got halfway there within the first 48 hours, people were so keen to take part in this study. We've really been surprised about that. MF It's probably a reflection of the success of the profile that the original study had. JE I think so, people are really keen to do their bit here and get involved in this study. And we've had a lot of participants, particularly in the older age groups, who have signed up so we will have to do something that we call ‘weighting of the data’ across the different age groups, but we do this all the time and we are also going out to those under 16s, right up to the over 70s. MF And as well as taking part in a very important public study, people get a COVID test for free and can see for themselves whether they've been affected. JE Yeah, think that's one of the things people are keen to do, particularly over the winter periods when we're going to be mingling and visiting family, that reassurance really that you're going to test every month and find out whether or not you have COVID, I think we all want to make sure that we are virus free before we go and see our loved ones over Christmas, for example. MF Well, we're meeting to discuss this in mid-November. The first results are still a few weeks away but how are things going, we've got enough people? Are the tests out in the field yet? JE The tests are out in the field. I think we're looking to get two publications in before Christmas, so testing windows start next week. We're expecting around 25,000 people a week to take their tests and answer their questionnaire. MF And over the course of a month then, all 145 we hope will have been covered? JE Yes, I mean 145 is a fantastic number, and if we get all of them taking their test kits each month, then yes, that number will be higher. But even if we were looking at a 50 or 60% response rate, that is excellent for a social survey. MF Yes, and all the time, what we've heard in other contexts, is that it is difficult to get people to take part in surveys, but certainly in this case people can see the need for it and have come forward in their thousands. It's possibly worth pointing out though that you do have to be selected to take part, that's very important isn’t it, that we've never looked for volunteers. We've selected households randomly and that approach, that's very important to make this a really, really reliable survey isn't it? JE Yes, and as soon as there was information about the study in the newspapers earlier this year, we had people ringing up and asking to take part and we've had to explain to them that we want a nice random sample so that we can have a fully representative study. MF So ONS will be producing the figures then it's over to our colleagues in the UK Health Security Agency to interpret what that means from a public health point of view, and what response might be necessary. Absolutely. JE Absolutely. And they'll be producing some statistics as well. Looking particularly, as I said, at that infection hospitalisation rate. MF So are we expecting the virus to take off again, or is it just a just a precaution to be monitoring things in this way? JE When we started this, it was more about understanding if there would be that impact on the NHS over the winter. But then we did see back in September, a new variant, particularly in the US, and as you know, from looking at COVID over the past few years, when you see a new variant coming, sort of appearing in one country, you know that it will come here eventually. So, it's about keeping track of that really, although because we are doing lateral flow tests, we won't actually have information about what kind of variant people have, but it will just be to look to see whether we're seeing an increase in positivity in the community. MF Okay, so all eyes on the first result, and we wish you, and the team getting the survey together once again, every success on what is a highly valuable and important exercise. So we've heard how the new winter surveillance study is helping us track ongoing COVID infection here at home. But we're also using the experience the ONS gained during the last pandemic to prepare not only ourselves, but other countries around the world for another one, Josie, with that global perspective in mind, my first question to you just to get us started is what have been the biggest learnings, the biggest take homes if you like, for Wellcome from the pandemic. And what's your priority now as an organisation considering how best to respond to others? JOSIE GOLDING Thank you for having me today, I think this is good to be reflecting on COVID in the future. So the biggest take home message is, probably I can look at the positives and the negatives, so I'll go on the negatives first. So I think we had a lot of the tools for responding to outbreaks and bigger events but I think we weren't prepared to deal with such a massive pandemic that we saw at SARS-CoV-2, we had expected to prepare for something like influenza and of course we probably didn't use our imagination of how the impact would be so great, affecting people in so many different ways. I think we need to really use that imagination going forward, it’s about thinking through the variety of different impacts we could see across different populations. I think we've learned a lot on how we communicate with the public, with the key people who are involved, and take those lessons because I think we did struggle. I think globally, not just Wellcome as one of the actors on communicating the importance, and the push to be better prepared to respond to these pandemics. One of the successes, and I'll put this up from a Wellcome point of view, really was the true integration of research into the response. And you know, this has been building up for many years from the Ebola West Africa outbreak in 2014. And tested again, and tested and tested and refined, on how we do this across the small research community who are engaged in those relatively smaller outbreaks to now a complete game change on how people expect research to be integrated into outbreak responses through pandemics. So I think that's now set the new status quo, and before I had to convince people of the importance, I think the importance now speaks for itself. MF Yes, it was notable in the early stages of the pandemic, those countries, notably in East Asia that have had experience of major respiratory viruses, and dealing with those on a public health point of view, didn't seem to be much better prepared than us in the West, who perhaps have underestimated the risks? JG It is absolutely true. You know, it is testing the system over and over and over again. So you know who your stakeholders were, you knew how to get things done quickly and at speed. And I think that's the one piece we have to keep remembering that we can keep preparing, but you still need to keep testing the system to ensure that it works in practice. But through it all I would say, you know, one of the things that Wellcome is taken away from SARS-CoV-2 is really the belief that we can't predict exactly what's going to come next when it comes to emerging infectious diseases. We have to keep that in mind, but actually the way to test the system time and time again, is dealing with the health priorities right now. So things like antimicrobial resistance. We know this has been a growing threat for many years. It's had some setbacks through SARS-CoV-2 and the pandemic, you know, we need to really re-energise the community to really take this seriously and to finance and to conduct the research that's required. But there are other threats that are, you know, common health issues, common infectious diseases that countries are dealing with, and we should be integrating the readiness, haemorrhagic fevers, viral fevers, other viruses, whatever it may be, into how we deal with those everyday infectious diseases. MF And what's the legacy been from an analytical point of view of the first few years for the period that is now known as peak COVID? Have we got that to draw on now because we're seeing the virus continuing to emerge? We're seeing potential threats from new variants and possibly other viruses. JG I don't think it's evenly applied across the globe on taking advantage of the systems. The approaches that were built up during SARS-CoV-2, some countries are able to maintain some of the resources that have been built or pivot into other health priorities. But that is a bit of a gap that we are seeing. I'll give an example of what I think is a great statistic, you know, for pathogen genomic sequencing and how that was used to track variants and making that as close to real time as you could find through the accelerator and diagnostics working group that mapped out the capacity in countries to be able to conduct pathogen genetic sequencing. And I think at the time, this is going back to 2022, that 77% of the world's countries were able to conduct sequencing when that's a massive game change for a tool that really wasn't a, partly an add on, into how you would do some of the epidemiological research at the beginning of outbreaks. So I think being able to pivot that tool and make sure that these types of facilities and the training and the expertise that people have built up over time can be sustained, working with those communities to be able to identify what are the real use cases for pathogens. And so I think, yes, some of it has probably not been evenly distributed, but we could always be doing more to be able to ensure we can better understand the variants as they come about, but also, what does it mean for a variant you know, how, what changes will that make, what impact will that have on our health? MF Hearing the UK with our partners, the UK health security agency, we are preparing, as you well know I'm sure, to run a further study going into the winter. What is the role of studies all like that? Are they uniform now across the world or this is not as similar surveillance programmes going on? Or do we remain a bit of a one off in doing this in the UK? JG I don't believe that this is evenly spread around the world. We ourselves at Wellcome had made a decision to continue funding our SARS-CoV-2 work on the genomics as well as the characterization of these variants as they come out. And what difference does it make in people who've been vaccinated or with other health conditions? We know when we've engaged with the research community across a variety of countries around the world, it ends up being very novel that this research has continued to happen. So I do think there is a gap, and it is becoming more challenging for public health institutes, WHO and others, to gather this information to understand are the vaccines still effective when we have these new variants, are they more transmissible, and other impacts that we would assess for those new variants. So I do think it's becoming more limited, and so of course, we need to make sure that the data we do generate is of high quality. MF The focus has been very much on COVID, but of course as we've seen historically and in other countries, other viruses have emerged and have serious public health consequences in those countries globally. What other emerging diseases do we need to have our eye on at the moment? JG Since SARS-CoV-2 really picked up we've had a global impacts event that affected you know, very select communities around the world, and is still ongoing, but not to the same level. We have the ongoing threat of avian influenza, we have El Nino upon us, which is likely to further impact the rates of cholera that we're going to see as well as impacting temperatures, so mosquito borne viruses and other types of arboviruses, potentially broader than that, so it is happening right now. I don't think we even need to sit back and think what it could be. And there are many events that we need to be preparing for. And particularly with something like El Nino as a particular weather event but thinking about the climate crisis. This is only going to grow we need to really collect the evidence now to understand what difference will it make what risks will it pose by experience, and geographical distribution further afield. MF Yes, can you unpack that a bit for us, because most people will be aware of El Nino as a meteorological phenomenon. How does that translate into public health impacts? JG The whole background and where we've been watching and waiting for more certainty and whether this was actually going to happen this year, but it's a very high, I think it's now greater than 90% certainty it's going to happen from this part of the year onwards, and and it will vary depending on where in the region it will impact you for droughts or flooding. And of course we need to better understand well, what impact would that have on cholera? Cholera is a prime example. While it's not directly linked to El Nino as it stands right now, we have seen such a change in the cholera distribution in Malawi being a great example where it's seeing rises in cases outside of the expected weather event. So you'd expect it in flooding season but you're seeing it more in dry seasons. So El Nino will make this worse potentially. It's being able to track it and understand the issue we have with events like El Nino is that we don't have enough information on it. We need to be better from a researcher's perspective, we need to just understand the researchers in those countries that are likely to be affected, their opportunity to gather as much evidence about the impact of El Nino so that when it comes around again, we'll be better able to apply what we've learned now. MF Without wishing to sensationalise, what do you think the risks are of another big global pandemic of the sought we saw with COVID-19? JG I’m a virologist by training so I'm always thinking that viruses hold the opportunity for some of the greatest opportunity for change.... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/28686813

Communicating Statistics: Crossing the minefields of misinformation. 10/05/2023

Communicating Statistics: Crossing the minefields of misinformation. In this episode we talk about the growth of data use in the media and the potential impact of misinformation on the public’s trust in official statistics. Navigating podcast host Miles Fletcher through this minefield is Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge; Ed Humpherson, Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation; and award-winning data journalist Simon Rogers. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics, I'm Miles Fletcher. Now we've talked many times before in these podcasts about the rise of data and its impact on our everyday lives. It's all around us of course, and not least in the media we consume every day. But ‘what’ or ‘who’ to trust: mainstream media, public figures and national institutions like the ONS, or those random strangers bearing gifts of facts and figures in our social media feeds? To help us step carefully through the minefields of misinformation and on, we hope, to the terra firma of reliable statistical communication, we have three interesting and distinguished voices, each with a different perspective. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a well-known voice to UK listeners. He's chair of the Winton Centre for Risk Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and was a very prominent voice on the interpretation of public health data here during the COVID pandemic. Also, we have Ed Humpherson, Director General of regulation and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the official stats watchdog if you like, and later in this podcast, I'll be joined by award winning data journalist and writer Simon Rogers, who now works as data editor at Google. Professor, you've been one of the most prominent voices these last few years – a fascinating few years, obviously, for statistics in which we were told quite frankly, this was a golden age for statistics and data. I mean, reflecting on your personal experience as a prominent public voice in that debate, when it comes to statistics and data, to be very general, how well informed are we now as a public, or indeed, how ill-informed on statistics? DAVID SPIEGELHALTER I think things have improved after COVID. You know, for a couple of years we saw nothing but numbers and graphs on the news and in the newspapers and everywhere, and that went down very well. People didn't object to that. In fact, they wanted more. And I think that has led to an increased profile for data journalism, and there's some brilliant ones out there. I'm just thinking of John Burn-Murdoch on the FT but lots of others as well, who do really good work. Of course, in the mainstream media there is still the problem of non-specialists getting hold of data and getting it wrong, and dreadful clickbait headlines. It is the sub editors that wreck it all just by sticking some headline on what might be a decent story to get the attention and which is quite often misleading. So that's a standard problem. In social media, yeah, during COVID and afterwards, there are people I follow who you might consider as - I wouldn't say amateurs at all, but they're not professional pundits or media people - who just do brilliant stuff, and who I've learned so much from. There are also some terrible people out there, widespread misinformation claims which are based on data and sound convincing because they have got numbers in them. And that, I mean, it's not a new problem, but now it is widespread, and it's really tricky to counter and deal with, but very important indeed. MF So the issue aside from - those of us who deal with the media have heard this a hundred times - “I don't write the headlines”, reporters will tell you when you challenge that misleading kind of headline. But would you say it’s the mainstream media then, because they can be called out on what they report, who broadly get things right? And that the challenge is everything else - it's out there in the Wild West of social media? DS Yeah, mainstream media is not too bad, partly because, you know, we've got the BBC in this country, we’ve got regulations, and so it's not too bad. And social media, it's the Wild West. You know, there are people who really revel in using numbers and data to make inappropriate and misleading claims. MF Is there anything that can be done? Is it the government, or even those of us like the ONS who produce statistics, who should we be wading in more than we do? Should we be getting out there onto the social media platforms and putting people right? DS It's difficult I mean, I don't believe in sort of censorship. I don't think you can stop this at source at all. But just because people can say this, it doesn't give them a right for it to be broadcast wide, in a way and to be dumped into people's feeds. And so my main problem is with the recommendation algorithms of social media, where people will see things because it's getting clicks, and the right algorithm thinks persona will like it. And so we just get fed all this stuff. That is my real problem and the obscurity and the lack of accountability of recommendation algorithms right across social media is I think, a really shocking state of affairs. Of course, you know, we come on to this later, but we should be doing something about education, and actually sort of pre-empting some of the misunderstandings is something I feel very strongly about with my colleagues. You’ve got to get in there quick, and rather than being on the backfoot and just reacting to false claims that have been made, you've got to sort of realise how to take the initiative and to realise what misunderstandings, misinterpretations can be made, and get in there quickly to try to pre-empt them. But that of course comes down to the whole business of how ONS and others communicate their data. MF Because when you ask the public whether they trust them - and the UK statistics authority does this every two years - you ask the public if they trust ONS statistics, and a large proportion of them say they do. But of course, if they're not being presented with those statistics, then they're still going to end up being misled. DS Yeah, I mean, it's nice to get those responses back. But, you know...that's in terms of respondents and just asking a simple question, do you trust something or not? I think it's good to hear but we can't be complacent about that at all. I’m massively influenced by the approach of the philosopher, Baroness Onora O’Neill, who really makes a sharp distinction between organisations wanting to be trusted and revelling in being trusted, and she says that shouldn't be your objective to be trusted. Your objective should be to be trustworthy, to deserve trust, and then it might be offered up to you. And so the crucial thing is trustworthiness of the statistics system and in the communications, and that's what I love talking about, because I think it's absolutely important and it puts the responsibility really firmly back to the communicator to demonstrate trustworthiness. MF So doing more as stats producers to actually actively promote data and get people to come perhaps away from the social platforms, and to have their own websites that present data in an accessible way, in an understandable way, where people can get it for nothing without requiring an expensive subscription or something, as some of the best of the media outlets would require. DS The other thing I'd say is there's no point of being trustworthy if you’re dull, as no one's going to look at it or take any notice, and other media aren't going to use it. So I think it's really worthwhile to invest, make a lot of effort to make what you're putting out there as attractive, as vivid and as grabbing as possible. The problem is that in trying to do that, I mean, that's what a lot of communicators and media people want to do, because of course they want people to read their stuff. But what that tends to do largely is make their stuff kind of opinionated and have a very strong line, essentially to persuade you to either do something or think something or buy something or vote something. So much communication has to do with persuading that I think it's just completely inappropriate. In this context, what we should be doing is informing people. In a way we want to persuade them to take notice, so that's why you want to have really good quality communications, vivid, get good people out there. But in the end, they’re just trying to inform people, and that's why I love working with ONS. I just think this is a really decent organisation whose job is just trying to raise the...to obviously provide official statistics...but in their communications, it's to try to raise the level of awareness raise the level of discussion, and by being part of a non -ministerial department, they're not there, the comms department, to make the minister look good, or to make anyone look good. It’s just there to tell people how it is. MF Exactly. To put that data into context. Is this a big number or is this is a small number, right? Adjectives can sometimes be very unhelpful, but often the numbers don't speak for themselves, do they. DS Numbers never speak for themselves, we imbue them with meaning, which is a great quote as well from Nate Silver. MF And in doing that, of course, you have to walk the same line that the media do, in making them relevant and putting them into context, but not at the same time distorting them. There's been a big debate going on recently, of course, about revisions. And if you've listened to this podcast, which we'd always advise and consume other articles that the ONS has published, we've said a lot about the whole process of revising GDP, and the uncertainty that's built into those initial estimates, which although helpful, are going to be pretty broad. And then of course, when the picture changes dramatically, people are kind of entitled to say, oh hang on, you told us this was something different and the narrative has changed. The story has changed because of that uncertainty with the numbers, shouldn't you have done more to tell us about that uncertainty. That message can sometimes get lost, can’t it? DS Yeah, it's terribly important. You’ve got to be upfront. We develop these five points on trustworthy communication and the first one was inform, not persuade. And the second is to be balanced and not to have a one-sided message to tell both sides of the story, winners and losers, positives and negatives. And then to admit uncertainty, to just say what you don't know. And in particular, in this case, “provisionality”, the fact that things may change in the future, is incredibly important to emphasise, and I think not part of a lot of discussion. Politicians find it kind of impossible to say I think, that things are provisional and to talk about quality of the evidence and limitations in the evidence, which you know, if you're only basing GDP on a limited returns to start with, on the monthly figures, then you need to be clear about that. And the other one is to pre-empt the misunderstandings, and again, that means sort of getting in there first to tell you this point, this may change. This is a provisional judgement, and you know, I think that that could be emphasised yet more times, yet more. MF And yet there's a risk in that though, of course the message gets lost and diluted and the... DS Oh no, it always gets trotted out - oh, we can't admit uncertainty. We can't tell both sides of story. We have to tell a message that is simple because people are too stupid to understand it otherwise, it's so insulting to the audience. I really feel a lot of media people do not respect their audience. They treat them as children - oh we've got to keep it simple, we mustn't give the nuances or the complexity. All right, if you're going to be boring and just put long paragraphs of caveats on everything, no one is going to read that or take any notice of them. But there are ways to communicate balance and uncertainty and limitations without being dull. And that's what actually media people should focus on. Instead of saying, oh, we can't do that. You should be able to do it. Good media, good storytelling should be able to have that nuance in. You know, that's the skill. MF You’re absolutely right, you can't disagree with any of that, and yet, in communicating with the public, even as a statistics producer, you are limited somewhat by the public's ability to get used to certain content. I mean, for example, the Met Office recently, a couple of years back, started putting in ‘percentage of chance of rainfall’, which is something that it hadn't done before. And some work on that revealed just how few people actually understood what they were saying in that, and what the chances were actually going to be of it raining when they went out for the afternoon’s work. DS Absolute nonsense. That sorry, that's completely I mean, I completely rely on those percentages. My 90-year-old father used to understand those percentages. Because it’s a novelty if you are going to ask people what they understand, they might say something wrong, such as, oh, that's the percentage of the area that it's going to rain in or something like that. No, it's the percentage of times it makes that claim that it's right. And those percentages have been used in America for years, they're completely part of routine forecast and I wouldn't say the American public is enormously better educated than the British public. So this is just reluctance and conservatism. It's like saying oh well people don't understand graphs. We can't put up line graphs on the news, people don't understand that. This is contempt for the public. And it just shows I think, a reluctance to make an effort to explain things. And people get used to stuff, once they've learned what a graph looks like, when they see it again, then they'll understand it. So you need to educate the public and not, you know, in a patronising way, it's just that, you know, otherwise you're just being misleading. If you just say, oh, you know, it'll rain or not rain you're just misleading them. If you just say it might rain, that's misleading. What does that mean? It can mean different things. I want a percentage and people do understand them, when they've got some experience of them. MF And what about certainty in estimates? Here is a reaction we add to the migration figures that ONS published earlier in the summer. Somebody tweeted back to say, well estimates, that’s all very good but I want the actual figures. I want to know how many people have migrated. DS Yeah, I think actually, it's quite a reasonable question. Because, you know, you kind of think well can’t you count them, we actually know who comes in and out of the country. In that case it’s really quite a reasonable question to ask. I want to know why you can't count them. And in fact, of course ONS is moving towards counting them. It's moving away from the survey towards using administrative data to count them. So I think in that case, that's quite a good question to ask. Now in other situations, it's a stupid question. If you want to know if someone says, oh, I don't want an estimate of how many people you know, go and vote one way or do something or other, I want to know how many, well then you think don’t be daft. We can't go and ask everybody this all the time. So that's a stupid question. So the point is that in certain contexts, asking whether something is an estimate or not, is reasonable. Sometimes it's not and that can be explained, I think, quite reasonably to people. MF And yet, we will still want to be entertained. We also want to have numbers to confirm our own prejudices. DS Yeah, people will always do that. But that's not what the ONS is for, to confirm people's prejudices. People are hopeless at estimating. How many, you know, migrants there are, how many people, what size ethnic minorities and things, we know if you ask people these numbers, they’re pretty bad at it. But people are bad at estimating all numbers. So no, it's ONS’s job to try to explain things and in a vivid way that people will be interested in, particularly when there's an argument about a topic going on, to present the evidence, not one side or the other, but that each side can use, and that's why I really feel that the ONS’s migration team, you know, I have a lot of respect for them, when they're changing their format or consulting on it, they go to organization's on both sides. They go to Migration Watch and the Migration Observatory and talk to them about you know, can they understand what's going on, is this data helping them in their deliberations. MF Now, you mentioned earlier in the conversation, education, do we have a younger generation coming up who are more stats literate or does an awful lot more need to be done? DS A lot more needs to be done in terms of data education in schools. I'm actually part of a group at the Royal Society that is proposing a whole new programme called mathematics and data education, for that to be put together within a single framework, because a lot of this isn't particularly maths, and maths is not the right way or place to teach it. But it still should be an essential part of education, understanding numbers, understanding data, their limitations and their strengths and it uses some numeracy, uses some math but it's not part of maths. The problem has always been where does that fit in the syllabus because it doesn't, particularly at the moment. So that's something that every country is struggling with. We're not unique in that and, and I think it's actually essential that that happens. And when you know, the Prime Minister, I think quite reasonably says people should study mathematics until 18. I mean, I hope he doesn't mean mathematics in the sense of the algebra and the geometry that kids do, get forced to do essentially, for GCSE, and some of whom absolutely loathe it. And so, but that's not really the sort of mathematics that everyone needs. Everyone needs data literacy. Everyone needs that. MF Lies, damned lies and statistics is an old cliche, it's still robustly wheeled out in the media every time, offering some perceived reason to doubt what the statisticians have said. I mean looking ahead, how optimistic are you, do you think that one day we might finally see the end of all that? DS Well my eyes always go to heaven, and I just say for goodness sake. So I like it when it's used, because I say, do you really believe that? You know, do you really believe that, because if you do you're just rejecting evidence out of hand. And this is utter stupidity. And nobody could live like that. And it emphasises this idea somehow, among the more non-data-literate, it encourages them to think that numbers they hear either have to be sort of accepted as God given truths or... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/28223225

International Development: Growing a Global Statistical System 08/29/2023

International Development: Growing a Global Statistical System In this episode, we explore ONS’s work with other countries to raise the world's statistical capabilities. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’, the Office for National Statistics’ Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode we're going international. Now it hardly needs saying that global issues, climate change, population growth, inflation, to name a few are best understood and addressed with the benefit of good global statistics. So, to that end, the ONS works in partnership with a number of countries worldwide with the ultimate aim of raising the world's statistical capabilities. At the one end of Africa, for example, a continent where it’s deeply involved, that includes embedding state of the art inflation indices and other economic data in Ghana. On the other side of the continent, it's meant using AI and machine learning to track the movement of displaced populations in Somalia. How do you run a census in places where nobody has a permanent address? It's all fascinating work and here to tell us about it, Emily Poskett, Head of International Development at the ONS; Tim Harris of the ONS Data Science Campus’s international development team; and joining us from Accra, our special guest, Government Statistician of the Republic of Ghana and head of the Ghanaian Statistical Service Professor Samuel Annim. Emily then, to start give us the big overview if you would, set out for us the scale and the purpose of this international development work that the ONS is doing. EMILY POSKETT We work with countries around the developing world to support strong modern statistical systems wherever we see a suitable opportunity to do so. MF What form does that work take? Does it mean statisticians going out to these countries? EP Yes, it does, when that's the right way to go about things. So our work is usually through the form of medium-term partnerships with a small group of national statistical offices, or NSOs, from the developing world, and those partnerships are medium term over a number of years in order to build up a real understanding of the context in that country, that national statistical office’s vision for modernization and how the ONS can be of most help to achieve their own goals under their own strategy. That relationship will normally be led by a particular individual who spends time getting to know the context and getting to know the people, getting to know what ONS can do to help. A partnership might cover a range of topic areas from census to data science to leadership training to economic statistics, and the lead point of contact, the strategic advisor in many cases, will bring in the relevant experts from across ONS, and they'll work through virtual collaboration but also through on-site visits, and they will work out the best timing for those and the best delivery modality in order to ensure that the gains are sustained. Our primary focus really is to make sure that changes that we support in the partner organisation are sustainable, and the work that ONS does using the UK’s aid budget is really impactful and leads to long term change. We don't always work through direct partnerships, for example where we see opportunities to work alongside other organisations, so international institutions like the World Bank or other national statistics offices like Statistics Canada or Statistics Sweden, they might choose to bring us in to deliver small pieces of focussed technical assistance alongside their own programmes. One of our medium-term partnerships is with the United Nations Economic Commission For Africa (UNECA), and they work with all 54 countries of Africa, and they can choose to bring in our expertise alongside their own to target particular needs in particular countries. But I would say that 70% of our effort is through these medium-term partnerships. MF So the ONS is providing one part of a large patchwork of work, going on right across the developing world, but what is the ultimate purpose of that? What are all these countries trying to achieve together? EP Well, strong statistical systems are essential in all countries to aid effective planning and informed decision making. And this is even more important in developing countries where resources are often scarce and you're trying to use scarce resources to target a wide range of needs across the population. And that resource might include UK aid for example, and aid from other countries. The UK has been statistical capacity building for many, many years through different modalities, working with partners, and the ONS is just one implementing partner who can be called upon to provide that technical expertise. We're really proud to be a partner of choice for a number of developing countries and the ONS is seen worldwide as being a leader. We're really proud that countries like Ghana would choose to work with us, and that we want to do our bit to help them to achieve their own strategy and their own goals. MF Well, this seems like an excellent moment to bring in Professor Samuel Annim. Our great pleasure, great honour, to have you with us professor. From your perspective, and what you're looking to achieve in the Ghana Statistical Service, how important how useful is the work with ONS been for you? PROFESSOR SAMUEL ANNIM From the perspective of how it has been important for us, I mean, I look at it from several aspects. I got into office in 2019, a year after the ONS and GSS collaboration had been established. And when I joined obviously, I had a sense of what I wanted to contribute to the office. Partnership that we've seen between National Statistical Offices over the years have always taken the dimension of statistical production partnerships, and what I simply mean by that is that they’re going in to help the service deliver on its core mandate. So for example, if price statistics are the priority, then that is the area you want to focus on, but our partnership with ONS took a different dimension. In addition to focusing on the traditional mandate of the Institute, which is the production of statistics, we really have over the period achieved some milestones from the perspective of transformation, which is of high priority to me, and secondly, from the perspective of injecting technology or contemporary ways of dispensing our duty as a National Statistical Office. So from an individual point of view, it has it has been beneficial to the mission that I have, and since then we have kept on working in the area of transformation. MF Listening to what you have to say there, it does sound as though some of the big challenges you face at the moment are not too dissimilar from the ones faced by ONS, all about modernising statistics, particularly using big data and new technology. SA Indeed, and I must say that it is a wave across all national statistical offices, because we are now trying to complement traditional surveys and censuses with non-traditional data sources i.e. Big Data, administrative data, citizens generated data and other geospatial resources. So collaborating is the key thing here, because this is new to the statistical community. So it's important we collaborate to learn how you are dealing with issues that are not consistent with the production of official statistics. Now as a global community, we are all thinking about how to use citizens generated science, I mean, getting citizens to provide us with data. And this is an area in which there isn't any National Statistical Office that can claim authority, because the approach and the processes are pretty not consistent with the guidelines for production of official statistics. So it's important to learn how countries are doing it and see how we can collaborate to get this done. MF Yes, in the last episode of our podcast, interestingly, we talked about the challenges of getting our citizens here in the UK to take part in surveys. Are Ghanaians friendly to what you're trying to achieve? Or are they perhaps sceptical as well and difficult to engage? SA I wouldn't say they're sceptical, I think they really feel part of it. And that is one of the strengths of citizen generated data, because if you package it in a way that it is more demand driven, rather than supply, you don't just go and tell them ‘do this because I know how it's supposed to be done’, but instead give them the platform to tell the National Statistical Office what their experiences are, provide them with platforms that they can easily engage so that they can feel part of the process and they really own the product. In our case, it is not a product that is owned by the statistical service but it is a product that is owned by the sub national agencies, and that is, as I said earlier, the beauty of citizen generated data. It is co-creation and co-ownership of the statistical product. So they are not sceptical, they are very receptive to it, and they are getting a better understanding of what we do as a National Statistical Office. MF Thinking internationally, thinking globally, what sort of shape do you think the world's statistical system is in now, as a result of partnerships like this or other developments, generally looking across Africa and looking beyond Africa, when we think about key issues, particularly climate change - how good is the statistical system now in tracking these very important changes, and the impacts they're having? SA We have as national statistical offices been very content with the traditional statistics - labour statistics, price statistics, GDP - and you do that either monthly, quarterly, or in some instances annually, and even the social indicators, I mean, it's only a few countries like the UK that has been able to do social indicators annually, for those of us in the Global South, a lot of the social indicators are being collected every five years, or every seven to eight years. So this was the way national statistical offices, up until about 2017 or 2018, were shaped. But with the data revolution that we saw around 2014, and since the World Development Report, the data for better lives document, that came out in 2021, clearly, we now have to approach statistics from a different point of view. And this is simply asking the question, how do I contextualise the statistics beyond what international communities would be expecting national statistical offices to do? I mean, now we are doing everything possible to ensure that we have a monthly GDP, and this is something that we are also learning from the partnership with ONS, because we are aware that they are developing models to ensure that beyond GDP they have some indicators that would readily give us insight on economic performance. And related to the issue of climate change that you are you talking about Miles, it's one of the areas that you cannot simply dispense your statistics in that one area as a standalone National Statistical Office, because this is something that has a continental dimension, something that has a global dimension. And at the moment we have data sitting in different silos, and the only thing that we can do is through partnership, see how we can bring these datasets together to help us get a better understanding of issues around climate change. So going forward, in my point of view, if we really want to sustain the transformation that we are seeing as a global Statistical Office, the only way out is through partnership, is through collaboration. And one of the things that I'm putting on the table is that we better begin to measure partnerships. Because we've treated partnerships as a qualitative engagement. And really, nobody knows which partnerships are working and which are not working. So if we're able to measure it, we can more clearly see the benefits of partnerships, although we all hold the view that it is the way to go. MF Interesting what you said about how we've traditionally concentrated on those classical measures of economic progress, and notably GDP. You might be interested to hear that the charity Oxfam, the big NGO, was in the news here in the UK recently when they said that GDP was ‘colonialist’, and it was ‘anti-feminist’, because it ignored the huge economic value of unpaid work, which they said is largely undertaken by women. Well, whether you agree with that or not, it does perhaps highlight the need for going beyond GDP and producing these alternative, and perhaps richer, wider measures of economic progress and economic value. SA I mean, I clearly associate with that submission, and we currently doing some work with the United Nations Development Programme on the National Human Development Report. And the focus of this report is exactly what you are talking about, Miles. We are looking at the current value of work, and we are looking at the future value of work. And we are going beyond the definition of who is employed, which strictly looks at whether the work that you are doing comes with remuneration or not, because once you broaden it and look at the value of work, you definitely have the opportunity to look at people who are doing unpaid work, and indeed their contribution to the progress that we are seeing as a human society, and the National Human Development Report has a sharp focus on this gender issue. They're going to look at that closely. And again, this is coming on the backdrop of an ongoing annual household income and expenditure survey that we are doing. So traditionally, government and international organisations would ask what is your employment and what is your unemployment rate? And then in this report, we tell them that we need to begin to look at those who are working, but we see they're not employed, simply because they are not working for pay or profit, and the proportion of people who are in there, and then once you disaggregate based on sex, age and geography, it's so revealing that we are losing a number of insights from the perspective of unpaid work. And so I fully subscribe to that view. MF That's interesting. Professor, for now thank you very much, and I hope you'll join the conversation again later, but we're going to broaden out to talk about, well, it’s actually a related development, Emily, talking about women and unpaid work, that's been another theme of ONS’s work with the UN Economic Commission for Africa. EMILY POSKETT There was a request put forward by national statistic offices around Africa to undertake leadership training, and this was part of the country's modernization vision. Countries recognise that in order to achieve modernisation, they need to have strong leadership. So they asked the UNECA to deliver leadership training and ONS partnered with UNECA to design and pilot this leadership training programme in a range of countries. As part of delivering that we noticed and recognised a lack of female leaders in a number of National Statistics Offices around the continent, and thought with partners about what we can do to help support that, so now as well as running a leadership training for the top tier of leadership in in each organisation, we also run a women into leadership training for potential future female leaders from within the staff. And it's been really, really successful. Some of the feedback that we've had from leaders in those organisations is that they've seen their female staff becoming more confident, more outspoken, more ambitious, putting themselves forward for positions, putting their ideas forwards as well, and generally feeling more confident to contribute in the workplace. We're really proud of that success and hope to roll it out in many more countries around the continent. MF A country that's the other side of Africa in a number of important senses, and that is Somalia, which of course if you've followed the news to any extent over the last few decades, you'll know the serious turmoil that's affected that part of Africa, Tim Harris, bringing you in, what's been going on in Somalia that the ONS has been involved in, particularly when it comes to measuring population and population movement. Tell us about that. TIM HARRIS Well, as you say, Somalia is a very fragile context. It's been affected by conflict and climate change and environmental issues for many years. And that's made it very challenging to collect information, statistical information, on a range of things. But particularly on population, which is a key underpinning piece of statistics which any country needs, and in fact, there hasn't been a census in Somalia since the 1970s, almost 50 years now, but there are plans to do a census next year, with support from the UN Population Fund, UNFPA, and other various institutions in Somalia and development partners, as well as the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. And Emily's international development team are also trying to form a partnership, or are forming a new partnership, with the Somalia National Bureau of Statistics. So there are plans to do a census next year, and we're really in the preparatory phase for that at the moment. And we're looking to see in our team how we can use data science, new techniques, new data sources, to try and help prepare to run that census. One of the particular issues in Somalia is that there are significant numbers of people who are displaced from where they usually live, by the conflict, by climate change. There's also been a drought for the last few years, and so there are hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, of people who are displaced from where they usually live. They tend to congregate in what we call Internally Displaced People Camps, or IDP camps. So they're not refugees, they haven't crossed an international boundary, but they are displaced from where they usually live. And these IDP camps tend to be quite fluid and dynamic. They're often in areas that are difficult to get to, so information on them is very difficult to obtain. They change very quickly, they grow, they contract, and a lot of them are on private land. So we're looking to see whether we can use new data techniques, and new data sources, to give us information about the broad scale of population in that area. MF And those new data sources are necessary presumably because it's very difficult to actually get out and physically see these people in those areas and count them physically. TH That's right, and they change very quickly. So if you're running a census, you want to know where your people are, so you can send the right number of enumerators to the right places, you can draw boundaries of enumeration areas and so on. MF You need an address register essentially, but these are people effectively without addresses. TH That's right. That's the way that you do it in the UK. It's not possible in many of these IDP camps in Somalia. So we're looking to see whether we can use high resolution satellite imagery, which we can task for a particular period of time, say in the next week or the next month. And we use that satellite imagery to see whether we can... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/27849315

In The Field: Surveying the nation 07/31/2023

In The Field: Surveying the nation In this episode we chat to members of the ONS Social Survey Collection Division about the importance, and challenges, of getting the general public to take part in crucial surveys that help paint a picture of what life is like across Britain. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I’m Miles Fletcher. Now I don’t know about you - but it seems hardly a moment passes these days when we are not being asked to feed back. How was our service today? Are you satisfied with this product? Please fill in this short survey. Your responses matter. Well, forgive the natural bias, but today we’re talking about surveys that really do matter. ONS surveys – some of which are the very largest conducted regularly in the UK – don’t just inform economic and social policy, though they are hugely important to it. The data they gathered also represent a public resource of immense and unique value. But persuading people – some unaware, some sceptical and even hostile, others just very busy – to take part in them is a growing challenge for statistical institutions worldwide. In this episode then we’ll be discussing how the ONS gathers often personal data from members of the public right up and down the country. Taking time out of their day to answer my questions, and to explain why it’s absolutely crucial that you participate in our surveys if you get the opportunity to do so, are Emma Pendre and Beth Ferguson, who head up the ONS’s face-to-face Field Operations; and sharing their own personal experiences of life on other people’s doorsteps we have two of the ONS’s top Field Interviewers, Tammy Fullelove and Benjamin Land. Welcome to you all. Emma, if I come to you first – give us an idea of what exactly the field community in ONS is. Who are you and what do you do? EMMA PENDRE The Social Survey Collection Division is the largest division in ONS. We primarily collect data from households either online, face to face or by telephone using computer assisted interviewing, and also work at air, sea and rail ports collecting data from passengers. All the data collected is used to produce quite a number of our key ONS publications which help to paint a picture of what life is like in the UK. And these can include things like estimates of employment and unemployment, how we measure inflation, how we measure migration, and a key topic of interest at the moment is the cost of living. So while most of ONS relies on the data that we collect for our outputs and statistical bulletins, the statistics that we particularly generate also support research, policy development and decision making across government and other private sector businesses as well. MF Now Beth, bringing you in here, when it comes to household surveys, presumably someone's deciding which households are going to be approached to take part. Who makes those decisions and how is it done? BETH FERGUSON So I'm not going to pretend to understand the clever people in the statistics team who work out how we get the right people to cover a broad spectrum of society. But yes, that's done by the sampling team and they choose a random sample for the surveys. MF And that's generated presumably from using the electoral roll. BF It's generated from something called PAF which is the Post Office Address Finder. I'll have to confirm exactly what that stands for. Yes, but essentially, it's a list of addresses across England, Scotland and Wales. MF And when it comes to the passenger survey, it's a question of stopping what we hope will be a representative random sample of people as they pass through those ports. BF Yes, it is. Yeah. But at the moment we're currently working on departures and arrivals. So yes, it's a random sample of individuals stopped and asked questions. MF But to make the data really representative and really valid, of course, we've got to be covering the whole of the country. The country in this case being Great Britain. How do we ensure that that coverage is working day in day out? BF That's our role as the kind of management of the face-to-face field interviewers. Different surveys are done over different frequencies. So we've got the Labour Force Survey and the transformed Labour Force Survey which addresses are issued for on a weekly basis and those surveys are delivered on a weekly basis. And then we've also got our other longer, more detailed financial surveys that we’re issued with a quota for on a monthly basis. So our job is to make sure we've got the right people, in the right places, to knock on the right doors, to get hold of those members of the public and, you know, encourage them to agree to complete surveys for us. MF And luckily for us we’re joined by two of those “right people” here today. Tammy and Benjamin, welcome to our humble podcast. Now you are both at the sharp end of our survey data collection, working as field interviewers. I'm obviously really interested in what you do day to day, but first off tell us how you got into this line of work. What was the attraction for you Tammy, how did you become a field interviewer? TAMMY FULLELOVE So prior to working for the ONS - I've never worked in public sector before, I've always worked in the private sector - and I've actually got a finance background. But then after being on maternity leave, having a young family, seeing the job advertised and the flexibility working with people in a very, varied job sort of pulled me to it to apply to be honest. And that was seven years ago, and I can honestly say I enjoy every single day I'm out in the field. It's great. MF And Benjamin how about you, what was your background? BENJAMIN LAND Well, I've done a variety of hospitality jobs in the past. I then applied to work on the Census at the start of 2021. And my manager at the time she had worked previously for the ONS on the basket of goods figures, and she recommended it as a really great place to work. It's funny how timing happened I saw a vacancy for a field interviewer, which I applied. And then I started in May 2021. So almost two and a half years ago now. MF Okay, so you've both got quite a bit of experience already under your belt. I was wondering of both of you, is there such a thing as a typical day for a field interviewer? TF I can honestly say no, every day is completely different. Depending on the area where you go into, where you may be working, streets apart, houses apart. You never know what door you knock on who can be behind that door, which makes every day completely varied, especially with the studies that you may be interviewing for, that they can be very different with the content. So yeah, two days are never the same. BL I totally agree with Tammy. It varies. My week has a sort of flow to it. So I tend to get out quite a lot at the start of the week to visit various addresses. If it’s LFS they change every week. On the financial surveys it's monthly so you've got longer to familiarise yourself with the area. We tend to have a team meeting most Tuesday mornings just to check in and see how we're doing. And then obviously interviews are scheduled around respondents’ timetable so that can be any time up to sort of eight, nine o'clock at night and sometimes Saturdays, if that's when they're available. MF Going out to people's houses on a daily basis, you no doubt encounter a wide variety of people. That must have led to one or two amusing episodes. TF I've had occasion where people will answer the door in not the most suitable attire, shall we say, for public viewing. I don't know how much further to go into this, but yeah, definitely opening the door in towels which have fallen off and dressing gowns which haven't been completely covered. It definitely happened a couple of times over the past few years. MF Perhaps that's what they mean by “raw data”. Beth, if I can come back to you, are there particular surveys which are considered to be especially important for us to be speaking to people in their homes in the way we’ve just been talking about? Ones that perhaps can’t be carried out in other ways. BETH FERGUSON It’s the more detailed financial surveys. So we've got the Family Resources Survey, the Living Costs and Food Survey, the Survey of Living Conditions, and the Household and Assets survey. They are quite long, more detailed surveys. The living costs and food survey, that requires the respondent to complete an interview, but then they also have to get hold of all their receipts of any expenditure for a two week period and annotate them and hand those over to the interviewer. So it's quite a detailed, involved survey. The Household and Assets survey, again it’s dependent on how many people in the household can, you know, take up to two hours to complete and ask lots of detailed financial questions around savings and pensions and other things. If you're in the home, you can ask them to get the documents, support them to review the documents, make sure that they're actually giving the right information which, if they were to go online and do it themselves, there's no guarantee that they would get the right detail that we're actually looking for. MF So it's quite an intensive experience really, isn't it compared with simply asking someone to tick the boxes on a webpage? And I guess it very much depends on building a personal rapport with the survey participants? BF Absolutely. And that's the key. That's the key to a really successful interviewer is that ability to build rapport in a snapshot on the doorstep. You know, before they've had the opportunity to give a polite no, no thank you or sorry, not today. They reckon it is approximately 10 seconds on the doorstep to get that engagement and build that rapport, and then maintain that through what can sometimes be quite a lengthy interview. Keep that friendliness, that rapport going so that the person being interviewed remains engaged and keen to do it. MF Now Tammy, you’ve already told us about your previous financial background. Do you find that helps you when you're collecting data on economics or topics around money? TAMMY FULLELOVE Yes, I do. Like Beth’s already mentioned, a couple of our financial studies go into people's income and expenditure. So having that sort of background I feel does help me, especially when they're speaking about what benefits they receive, what sort of things they pay out. It definitely does sort of give me the edge I do feel. MF That’s great, because it’s no secret is it Beth that the ONS, like other statistical organisations around the world, are finding it increasingly challenging to get people to take part in surveys. BETH FERGUSON Yeah, absolutely. I think it's got more and more challenging. Pre-pandemic it was getting more challenging, but the shift during and post-pandemic has been quite significant in terms of the number of willing people to do surveys for us. MF A shift in what direction? BF Fewer members of the public are willing to actually do surveys for us. Now whether that's because there's less trust in the government or actually, because of the pandemic, everybody's working from home and time is more limited. But no, it's definitely harder to get a response now. MF What techniques do we use then to try and change people's minds to get them to take part? BF At the moment we're doing a lot of work, certainly with the face-to-face field community - we're calling it a Respondent Engagement Programme. So looking out for clues and signs from, you know, when you approach the doorstep in the area, identifying the kind of things that may be key to them. Our statistics on things like CPI and RPI and, you know, the change in cost of food - that being constantly in the news gives us, kind of like, a lever to start an open conversation on the doorstep, particularly when we're looking at the financial surveys. EMMA PENDRE And also Miles. It's worth noting that all the surveys are voluntary, so the offer of incentives such as vouchers in exchange for the time taken to complete a survey will also continue to be significantly influential in maintaining our response rates. MF Absolutely Emma - offering people a small incentive has actually been proven to work hasn’t it, and I guess in cost terms, it's better to spend some money on that rather than wasting it on chasing people who are never going to take part. EP Yes, that's right. The vouchers are very significant. They do help maintain our response rates. And again, being in a cost of living crisis at the moment. Our respondents see them as very helpful. MF But even with incentives, and as Beth has suggested, there’s still a reluctance by some people to be involved in our surveys. Coming to you Tammy and Benjamin, as our people on the front line every day - upon your shoulders falls the responsibility for persuading people in many cases to actually take part. Do you have a standard approach, or do you tailor what you do according to particular circumstances? TAMMY FULLELOVE We definitely have a doorstep introduction, which has to cover a few different points to obviously make sure respondents are aware of the confidentialness of obviously the answers that that will be providing. But I do believe having a smile as soon as they open the door is the biggest thing - you're obviously trying to get them on board and trying to get them to either go online to complete the study or to make an appointment if they can't do it there and then to do the interview. It definitely has to be tailored I think, compared to who answers the door and obviously what reasoning they would like to help complete the study. Whereas some people as soon as you knock on the door, they've had the letters, they're waiting for you. They really want to help. So yeah, it definitely does depend on who's behind that door and obviously why they would like to help the Office for National Statistics. MF We live in a suspicious age and some people might think that there's something fishy afoot. BENJAMIN LAND That's the challenge Miles is people often initially they think it's a scam. I turn up with my badge and they're like, “Oh, you are real”. And taking the time to explain to people once we've done the doorstep introduction that it’s not a scam and it is legitimate, valuable research that we're carrying out and it certainly impacts everyone. MF I can imagine how tricky it must be to convince people sometimes, but you strike me as someone who isn’t likely to be put off by that. BL Yes, yeah, I love a challenge. There was one lady last summer and every time she was like, “Oh, I'm busy. I've just come back from holiday, can you pop round the next week?” And it got to the point where she's like “I'm decorating my house.” I said, Ma'am, that's fine. I'll come and help you decorate your house if you complete this survey. And she's like, “Oh, you're so persistent.” I managed to get an interview and I was really pleased about that. So there's a little, you know, a little win in the bag. MF Well done, though I should point out that painting and decorating is not officially one of the ONS’s services for getting people to take part in surveys. Tammy have you got experiences like that? TF Yeah, I've never got into painting and decorating, I'm gonna admit that. But it is a great feeling when the first time you knock on the door people don't want to help they're too busy, especially now post-COVID, with the amount of people working at home. So like Benjamin said, you're interrupting a Teams call. You're interrupting them doing some work. So you have to get over that first hurdle. But, you know, making that appointment, and sometimes they will make the appointment but then they either won't answer the phone, or they won't be in when you turn up, which can be frustrating. But yeah, when you actually do complete that study and they do feel like, you know, they have helped and you've gone above and beyond to secure that interview, it is definitely a great feeling. So maybe I should be offering painting and decorating services, maybe that would help. BL Don’t take my tricks. No, the sense of achievement or, like Tammy says, you do get people that break appointments, you know, due to personal circumstances, and you somehow have to chase people and encourage them, but when you do secure the interview, and you get the data. There's something about when something’s hard won you value it more. MF Yes, indeed. But how many people have heard of the ONS would you say? BL A lot of people now, because we were quoted a lot during the COVID statistics, regularly on the news and is quoted... I read the newspaper I appreciate not everyone does. But a lot of the data in newspapers it will state that it's been sourced from ONS. MF That recognition factor has helped help you on the doorstep. Do people get that the ONS is an impartial organisation operating at arm's length, certainly from ministerial government? BL No, no, I think we’re often tarnished with the same brush as the TV licencing people that come round, especially in certain areas where I knock on doors. You know that they were met sometimes with hostility, to put it politely. MF Clearly some persuading to be done in a wider sense there as well. But is that your experience too Tammy? TF Yeah, they do believe that we are a government body and that we are influenced by a particular minister, or by the government that's in power at the time. If people are very anti-government on the doorstep it does create that hostility as the first sort of part of your introduction. MF Do you try to talk them around on that? TF Yeah, exactly like Benjamin said that really, you know, we don't have a minister in control of us. We are separate to the government. Everything is private, confidential. We don't share the information. You know, there's different a few things that you have to try on the doorsteps to try and get that buy-in from the respondents. MF Those of us who live and breathe statistics, of course, we wouldn't need to be persuaded to the value of taking part, but the challenge is to convince the whole population, or at least a representative sample of the whole population. It seems well removed from everyday life for a lot of people, but how many people do you think “get it” in terms of the value of statistics, you know, particularly economic indicators and high-level population data? TF I think it's great if you can get to an area. And you know, that statistics, whether it's been from some sort of government funding, have helped in... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/27591762

New Data: Transforming how we count the population 06/21/2023

New Data: Transforming how we count the population In this episode we discuss how the ONS has been working to transform the way we count the population, using new datasets to give more accurate, timely, and detailed measurements. On 29 June 2023, the ONS will be launching a public consultation on its proposals for a transformed population and migration statistics system. Understanding user needs will be essential evidence in making its recommendations to Government on the future of population statistics. More detail available at: To explain more about the public consultation, and answer your questions, the ONS is holding a series of free events in July 2023: (Online attendance also available) (Online attendance also available) (Online only) You can also which is also available with , and in , with . TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’, the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I’m Miles Fletcher and this time we're looking at the future of our population statistics. How best to count all of the people, all of the time, and provide the most valuable information on changing characteristics that can drive excellent research and sound public policy. All of that is the subject of a major consultation exercise that's running during the summer of 2023. It's all about the Office for National Statistics proposals to create what's described as a sustainable and future proof system for producing essential statistics on the population. Joining me to unpack all that and explain how you can get involved in the consultation process is Jen Woolford, Director of population statistics here at the ONS. And we're joined once again by Pete Benton, Deputy National Statistician. Pete in a previous episode, you described how the once in a decade census has been the bedrock of our population statistics for a very long time, but now it looks like some pretty fundamental change could be on the way? PETE BENTON Well, that's the question. What's the future hold? We've been doing a census for over 200 years now once a decade, and it paints a beautiful, rich picture of our population that's fundamental to planning all of our services that we use: health care, education, transport, they all depend on the number and type of people living in a given area. But the question is, can we get more detail from other data sources every year, and might that mean that we don't need a census in 2031? Because we've got enough and that's the question that we are now talking about. MF Okay, so before we go into the detail of how we might achieve that, then paint a picture for our listeners. When we talk about population statistics, what are they exactly? And why are they so important and to whom? PB Well in between a census, we estimate the total population, by age and by sex and we do it nationally and we do it for local authorities. We estimate migration, how many people have moved into the country and how many people have moved out and also how people move around the country because that affects the population at any given area. And of course, we also do surveys that give us top level national level statistics about all kinds of things whether it's the labour market, or our health, things that the census asks and gives us detailed information for small areas, surveys, kind of paint a top level picture in between times. MF So to date, how have we gone about getting those numbers, and how good has that information been? PB So the census gives us the baseline once every 10 years. And we take that and we add births, we subtract deaths, we make an estimate of international migration. And we use that to adjust the data and we make an estimate of migration around the country, and that gives us those population estimates and those migration statistics. MF So to do that you need, or you’d have had to have drawn on something like the census, that universal survey of the whole population. PB That's right. The census is the benchmark by which we reset the system once a decade. But of course, after nine years, that information is getting more out of date and we do a census again, 10 years on to reset those statistics. And again, give us that rich picture. The question we're looking at now is how much can we get in between times? And how much do we then still need all the detail that a census would give us once a decade? MF So Jen, the world has moved on in those decades since the census in its present form has been going. You would think there's an opportunity out there to transform how we go about counting the nation. Give us the background to that. JEN WOOLFORD So we've been looking over decades to bring more and more data together to improve our population statistics. So Pete talked about how we look at the movement of people between censuses both in and out of the country and between different areas. And for some time now, we've been using what we call administrative data to understand those movements in the population. But now we have access to lots more data than we have in the past, and it gives us lots of opportunities to change how we're producing population statistics. So back in 2014, government first set out its ambition for us to build a population and migration Statistics System with administrative data at its heart. In 2018, we published a white paper, which set out our plans for a digital first census in 2021. But also that we should be making a recommendation to government about what the future of Population Statistics looks like, and that that recommendation should be based on a public consultation. And that's the consultation that we are going to be launching at the end of June. MF The challenge therefore, is to come up with something as least as good if not, preferably better, but without using a census. JW Absolutely. And people's needs are changing. So whatever we do has to respond to whatever the user needs are of the day. So in the past, where maybe populations didn't change so much at a local level so quickly, then having a census once a decade that gave you that detail, that detail would still be quite relevant 10 years later. But the population is changing so rapidly now that that decade old data can quite quickly become out of date. And an example of where this could be a problem for us and for policymakers is if we look at the COVID pandemic. During the pandemic, we saw really localised outbreaks of COVID infections, and we really wanted to understand what was going on in those areas and what the characteristics of people in those areas was to try and understand what might be leading to those outbreaks. But we didn't have census data, the 2021 census data then, we were having to go back to what those areas look like in 2011. So by transforming what we do, and having more up to date information about those local populations, it would have given us a much better idea of what might have been driving those local outbreaks. MF And there was another example perhaps during the pandemic when the government was trying to work out what proportion of the population had been vaccinated at local level relying on population statistics that because they were backed up by the census was subject to quite significant margins of error. JW That's right. So if you want to know what proportion of people in an area have been vaccinated, you need to know how many people are in that area in the first place. And if you're looking at a vaccination rate that's really high say kind of 90% that 10% is what's important, the 10% that aren't vaccinated. Now, you might only have a 5% error in your population estimates. But that could mean that you're thinking you've got 15% of the population to look at rather than the 10%. MF Pete, we've heard this term admin data (administrative data) already. And in that we're talking about all the information that gets collected whenever someone engages with public services, tax bills, benefits, going to the dentist, that kind of thing. Now, presumably that information has been collected for quite some time. So why is it only in the last few years that we're really starting to see and begin to use the potential of that data? PETE BENTON It takes time to develop the methods for doing it. So we've put a lot of effort into understanding the data sources and understanding the quality of the statistics that result so that we can be clear what we can and can't do, and that we can show that to the people that use the data to make decisions in order to understand the quality of what they're getting and give us their views of that. MF Can you think of some examples of administrative data as already being used effectively in official statistics, the sort of things that the ONS produces. PB Well we've always used them actually, when we produce our population statistics. We estimate the local population using the number of people registered with a GP and how that changes over time. So it’s not new, it's just that we're expanding what we might be able to do here to try and get so much greater benefit every year, to improve decision making every year for all of our public service planning. MF And the opportunity, as Jen has already suggested, to link that data to understand how different groups, down to really quite small groups and local level and by different characteristics, are being affected by certain issues. PB That's right. Different datasets tell us different things. So there are datasets that tell us about educational achievement and there are datasets that tell us about household income, for example. And by bringing those together, we can understand the implications of education per outcomes of household earnings so we can really start to tie together the kind of public services that we get and the outcomes that we get as households. MF Now the possibilities of all this, of course, of being able to bring all this data into one place is a very exciting one from an analytical point of view, but from the point of view of the public and individual citizens at the same time, you could see why some people might be concerned about this, both from an ethical and a secure point of view. PB Well, when you think about it, this is nothing new for ONS. We've been doing a census for over 200 years and we keep those data safe we always have done, and we also do surveys every year of households on very sensitive topics. Some of them are people's experiences of crime or their health for example, and we do surveys of businesses to understand the economy and produce our statistics about GDP and inflation. Those data are all sensitive, and we keep them all very securely. So in one sense, there's nothing new here. We are good at this. We know how to keep data secure. It's all anonymized. So there is never anything published that identifies an individual and even within ONS, the analysts only get to see anonymous data. MF And very important to state, is it not, that it's not a question of building up pictures of individuals. It's always from a statistical point of view. It's the numbers we're interested in and not the people. PB Absolutely! We don't care about Peter Benton or Miles Fletcher, we care about the picture it paints of the nation. It's the statistics that come from it. And we are absolutely strict about confidentiality. MF Jen, other countries of course are wrestling with this as well and adopting and trying new kinds of systems. What's been the experience internationally? JEN WOOLFORD So you're right, lots of countries are looking at new and innovative ways to create the population statistics bringing lots of different sources together. We all operate in slightly different contexts. So in Scandinavia, for example, they've been producing population statistics like this for a long time. But those are countries that have population registers, which means their context is very different from ours. And to be absolutely clear here, we're not looking at building a Population Register. We're looking at creating statistics from bringing together different data sources. And there are a number of countries who are in the same position as us. So for example, Australia and New Zealand, and they are looking to try and develop similar systems for producing population statistics as we are and we're working very closely with those countries to share our learning and to share the methods as we're developing them so that we're all learning from each other. MF So talking about the potential of these new data sources, including all the administrative data, can you give us some examples of what we're not doing that we might be able to do much better in future? JW There are a number of advantages and improvements we can make for greater use of data. Firstly, in the existing system, we use the census to benchmark our population estimates. So in between censuses, we estimate population change with births and deaths and migration, but we tend to get a bit of a drift in those population estimates. So we use the census then to benchmark it and bring those estimates back in line. With this new system, we're looking at not just estimating the change but also estimating the number of people at a point in time, so that hopefully will reduce that drift that we get in population estimates and mean that over the 10 year period, our estimates are more accurate. The other thing that can happen between censuses is you can get quite a lot of change in local areas and the data we have doesn't reflect that change, because it's based on the previous census. So an example here could be that the conflict in Ukraine has led to a number of Ukrainian refugees moving to England and Wales since we conducted the census. So in some areas, the makeup of the population there will have changed significantly since we conducted the census. And in our existing system, we wouldn't be able to pick that up. With our new system, we'd be able to pick up that localised population change much more quickly than we can at the moment. MF And presumably that would be of enormous benefit for local authorities, where everyone would be trying to provide services down to local level, because you've got a much more up to date picture of how many people are there, and we saw recently when the census results were published, some local authority areas have experienced big changes in population. JW Absolutely. The other thing to be aware of with the census is that it was conducted during the pandemic and it was conducted during a period of lockdown. What we saw was that people moved out of some of the metropolitan areas during that period of lockdown, back to whether that's the kind of parental homes for students or for young members of the workforce. So the populations in those metropolitan areas will have changed quite rapidly as the country opens back up and as people move back into those metropolitan centres. The approach that we're taking now should be able to pick up that change much more quickly, not just the numbers of people, but also the characteristics of people who are moving within the UK. MF And how does this benefit individual citizens? What's this going to mean for the public generally? JW So better data means better decisions. It means that better planning can be made for things like school places, better planning for public transport, where to put hospitals, where to put sports centres. All of these decisions are based on our data about the population and by having better data, you'll have better decisions. MF And you’ll be able to target services and be able to target spending as well on a much more short term basis, rather than having to make decisions coming along into the future when circumstances could be changing. JW Absolutely. Or the decisions might still be long term, but you'll be able to monitor the impact that those decisions are having much more closely than you can at the moment. MF So Jen, is there anything we won't be able to get from such a system? And we've heard some people suggest, for example, that we wouldn't be able to get that very small level data, the street level data that's so useful from a census, and survey purists point, of the census as a great way of capturing social history. JW We're always faced with trade offs when we make decisions about things like our methods, or anything in life, and there are likely to be trade offs here. What we've done to date is we've done lots of research that shows that there's bags of potential here with what we can do with administrative data and the understanding of the population we can get from administrative data. There are still outstanding questions for us. So there are some characteristics, for example, people who provide unpaid care, that isn't available from administrative data and we still need to work out how we will provide that level of data. The census gives such a wealth of information about things like ethnicity where we get down to really granular classifications of ethnicity, it may not be possible to do that with administrative data. However, on the flip side, we can produce statistics that we didn't get from the census using administrative data. So on the 2021 census, we didn't collect information about income. But we've published research that shows that we can get down to small area estimates of household income using a combination of administrative data. We've also published research which shows that we can produce the kind of variables that we do get from the census. So we've published research on ethnic group and also on housing stock, types of housing, and we've also managed to get to linking different admin data together so that we can look at income by ethnic group, and housing type by ethnic group. So producing what we call multivariate statistics through linked administrative data. We still have a programme of research to really understand how far we can replicate what we get out of the census. But the consultation that we're about to launch is really about understanding whether what we can demonstrate and deliver with administrative data answers user needs. And if it doesn't answer some of our user needs, what are those needs, and so we can then plan our future research to make sure we're focused on the right things. MF And of course, it's genealogists - people who love to trace family trees - who find the census data so valuable. JW Absolutely. And in the existing system census data is archived for 100 years and then made available to genealogists and others to really explore their family history. In the new system we have a wealth of data that we could be using to understand the population and we need to work with genealogists to understand exactly what it is that would be useful for us to archive for future posterity. So although that's not the focus of the consultation, genealogists are very welcome to respond to the consultation and let us know more about their needs, or we'll have future conversations to make sure that we're clear on what the need is here and how we can best answer it. MF And that's what the consultation is, to a large extent, all... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/27203751

Local data: How new data sources are helping to calibrate communities 05/09/2023

Local data: How new data sources are helping to calibrate communities In this episode of Statistically Speaking we shine the spotlight on local data and look at how good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode we're talking about local data for local people - How good statistics for small areas make for better targeted policy interventions, and more effective use of valuable public resources. We're going to explore, for example, how new data sources are helping to precisely calibrate economic circumstances and local communities. How we may even be able to calculate the GDP of your street or village. Now many economic forces are of course global. Some of the solutions to issues like competitiveness, productivity and inequality might begin on our doorsteps. As ever, we have the cream of ONS expertise here on hand, this time in the shape of Emma Hickman, Deputy Director of the ONS sub national stats division, and Libby Richards, Deputy Director for UK wide coherence and head of an important new initiative called ONS Local, which we'll be hearing about in full. Also joining us is Stephen Jones, Director of Core Cities UK. Its aim is to promote the role of our great cities in creating a stronger fairer economy and society. So Emma, to set the scene for us first then please explain precisely if you would, the value of really good local stats. EMMA HICKMAN So the needs are multiple, really. I think the most important thing is that we are seeing a huge increase in locally targeted policymaking and that’s at a range of different levels across government. So in central government, we see near the department for levelling up Housing and Communities kind of really wanting to think about how do they target policies that are going to help to level up the country but equally what we're also seeing is an increase in devolution which is giving more power to local areas and local policymakers. And so it's really also important that they have the statistics and the data that they need and the evidence that they need to make really, really good decisions for their local areas. And they can do that in a really powerful way because they also have knowledge of their local areas. And then finally, you know, actually for citizen kind of uses of our data and statistics really one of the inclusive data principles that people are able to see themselves in the data and that they feel that the data and the statistics that we're producing as an office represent them. And so having statistics and data available at really geographies that are very meaningful to people is hugely helpful in making sure that as a country, right across the UK that we are kind of reflective of the experiences of really kind of a wide range of people and you know, local economies and end users and understand kind of how they're experiencing that as well. MF I guess one of the fundamental principles here is that it's it's local knowledge. It's all very well and everybody thinks they know that local area, but to understand all local areas, we need comparable statistics and data produced to consistent standards. EH Yes, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that's one of the key challenges. I think we'll probably kind of come to talk about a little bit later, but you know, absolutely. And that's really about understanding you know, where are the where are the inequalities within regions, as well as between regions? I think we have a lot of information available about, you know, kind of regions, but actually, we also know that some of the inequalities that people really feel are much greater actually within regions and between them and kind of being able to draw that out of data and statistics in a comparable way I think is really important for helping sort of policymakers and decision makers to understand where best to target resources. MF Stephen, from a policy perspective, describe the demand for local data at the moment, what sorts of policy solutions are policy makers coming up with and how are those best informed by really good data? STEPHEN JONES I think it covers all branches really of policymaking. I think as Emma was saying, the kind of need for really understanding and having a kind of quantitative basis for what's happening in a place is, is actually absolutely crucial for designing policy, whether that's policy about trying to make the economy grow, whether that's policies aimed at trying to reduce disadvantage and challenge facing individuals, whether that's policy about delivering the most effective and efficient public services in the right places at the right times, all of those things, whether that's done in public or private sector need to be built on a good evidence base, good understanding. I think the other thing I would add to the richness of local data can do you can kind of contextualise and understand, you know, a number on its own doesn't mean a huge amount, but if you know that you are 10% higher or 20% lower than your neighbouring place. Or the city of the same size. It's those kinds of contextual dimensions that really help nuance and finesse your policymaking. MF And it does come back to that question of trust in data than to make those comparisons in a really reliable and meaningful way. Which I guess is where the ONS, the Office for National Statistics, where we come in. Now Libby tell us about ONS Local. This is an initiative which is all about making sure that that really high quality data is available for the policy makers LIBBY RICHARDS ONS Local is our advisory service that is staffed by ONS analysts who are based in every nation of the UK and every region of England. And the idea is that we are here to help local policy makers, regional observatories, and lots and lots of different users of sub national data to really understand the enormous offer from ONS in terms of local data. Having said that, it's also very much about those working relationships as well. Stephen’s talked a lot about context and understanding the nuances and so understanding the situations and challenges that are happening locally is absolutely key to ONS Local helping local areas understand that context better. MF The big ONS surveys of course have long carried, many of them are typically think about the Labour Force Survey over a very long period of time, carried a great wealth and local data that obviously gets lost in the national headlines that these data releases generate. But is it a question of getting better value out of what the ONS is already creating or actually about sourcing new data from different sources? LR It's a bit of both, very much, in being able to take people through what we already have when understanding their questions, particularly when multiple local areas are asking the same question that's really maximising what ONS already do. However, Emma's side of the house in particular, less so in the regionally and nationally distributed ONS Local is really about developing those new statistics getting into how do we get down to hyper localised sort of 400 to 1200 household building block data that then allow people to build those areas that means something to them. Emma, I don't know if you want to chip in? EH Yeah, very happy to. There's two strands I think to that Miles. I think there's one which is about, you know, how do we make the most of survey data and kind of new administrative data sources together to enable that level of granularity? And then the second part is actually when we talk about administrative data probably, that might not really mean things to lots of people. That's data that is collected for a different purpose, but collected on a on a very, very routine basis. And there are actually a fair number of new sources of that kind of data that we're able to get into the ONS. MF That's interesting. Can you give us an example of that? EH So, I say relatively new. I mean, I think ONS have had this data for quite some time now. But in order to get the level of granularity that we need on Gross Value Added statistics, for example, which is a measure of productivity, we use HMRC’s VAT data for businesses and then we can link that to kind of our survey data and think about how can we then apportion estimates down to the level of geography that we need, knowing that the survey is the place where we've been able to ask the question that we really want to know the answer to and then we can use the other data to model sort of some of the other granularity that we need. The other thing is we've been really successful and using card payments data throughout the pandemic to inform the government's response. And we've recently successfully acquired a really exciting new data source from Visa, it's aggregated, so there's absolutely no way of identifying people in the data, but they've aggregated it at a really granular level of geography for us. So again, it would be in the region of probably hundreds of households, but actually that's granular enough for us to get some really, really good insights into kind of how you know, consumer spending is kind of playing out in the local economy. And there are all sorts of applications for that, that we're really excited to be to be able to start taking forwards now that we've got that data in the office. MF So just with those three very important data sources, suddenly we're creating right down to that very micro level, as you say, 400 to 1200 households really quite a full picture of local economic activity. EH And the really exciting thing about that is that people can then build their own geographies as well from that. So you know, traditionally in statistics, we tend to produce data at the level of an authoritative boundary like a local authority, but actually you might really want to know about, I don't know, West Midlands Metro, for example, they extended the line a few years ago, you might really want to know about local economic activity around that and actually, that's not going to be captured in the sort of administrative boundaries and so having the data at that level of granularity really allows people to build a geography that sort of area of interest or importance to them in some way. MF Creating a GDP of your street or village. EH Indeed. MF Okay, that's the project for now, but it comes across with some pretty significant challenges. It comes back to this problem of comparability doesn't it, and particularly if you're looking across the UK contexts there. We've got different government structures, we've got some devolved areas, we've got areas and we've got big metropolitan authorities as well. How difficult is it to be able to standardise and to make uniform the data right across that rather complex government picture? EH Incredibly so. To the point where we don't necessarily aim for uniformity. It's very much about how do we make sure that we're able to tell stories that are coherent and consider that UK wide angle when thinking about the nations but also thinking about how do you enable that comparability that's very tricky. And the more and more devolution happens, the more and more difficult that actually can become, particularly when you're looking, for example, at health data where it is a devolved policy area across the four nations. But actually, if you live on the border, let's say between Wales and England, actually, you may well be getting your health care on the opposite side of the border from which you live and therefore you've got to be able to have an opportunity to consider that. MF There's the issue then of course of samples as well. And the more local you go, of course the less representative your sample is going to be. EH Absolutely. And that gets particularly tricky. Even at a nation level where we're thinking about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, for example, the opinions and lifestyle survey, actually, it's quite difficult to find out what that looks like for Northern Ireland. And ideally, we'd want to be able to get more granular than the nation level, but sample sizes make that really tricky to still be representative. And so either we'd need to expand the survey to get that level of granularity or we have to actually say the best we can do is this. MF Yes, because there is only one holy universal survey of course and that is the census and that only happens once every 10 years. I recall when we were running the big COVID infection survey at the height of the pandemic, even a massive data gathering operation like that. We could still only end up getting it down to sub regional level which is what units are for half a million people. So it does show doesn't it how important it is to make the most of that admin data which can be extremely comprehensive sometimes EH I, you know, completely agree with you there Miles on administrative data and how important it is to be able to kind of think about innovative ways to combine that data with our survey data to get a more granular level of information. I talked a bit earlier about kind of estimates of gross value added and I can say that's just that's a measure of productivity and it feeds into the largest component of GDP and in local areas. What we were able to do there as I mentioned kind of earlier, we took HMRC’s VAT tax data which is collected for all businesses that pay VAT, we were able to link that to a data set that ONS hold called the interdepartmental business register and the information that's held on that is all of the information about business structure, so has a VAT reference in there so we can link it to HMRC data. But the most important information on there for us was actually that where the local units are, so for example, Tescos will have a headquarters somewhere but you probably have a Tesco Express quite close to where you live. And that's one of the local units so tells us where the local units are and their postcodes and it also tells us how many employees work in those local units. And so we can make an assumption like productivity for all employees in the organisation is the same, and then we can look at actually what the productivity for that firm is top level and then divide that by the number of employees to kind of say, well, actually, if all employees are equally productive, this local unit has a productivity sort of measure of this much, and then we can aggregate that back up again to the sort of area so you know, really kind of key to be able to understand those methods, but there are some other challenges as well, but I can probably come back to those. MF That's fascinating stuff. I mean, you could point to a certain, perhaps a certain enterprise, a certain employer, that is considered to be, you know, fundamental to a local economy. But this way, you can actually really press precisely quantify what that importance is. EH And I think that's one of the challenges because actually as a as an office, we don't want to be disclosing the productivity of any single firm or any single business because that is personal information. So one of the things that we've had to do in very local areas where there are what we call dominant businesses or dominant organisations who have like most of the productivity for that area, is we've actually, you know, I'm gonna be honest, we've we've sort of masked it a bit. And so we've kind of averaged a few local areas together so that you still have a building block level of data, you still have a building block so you can build a bigger area, but you don't actually have any businesses that are considered dominant within the statistics that we produce. That's taken quite a complex algorithm to be able to achieve that. I won't go into too many details just to say that it is a consideration and the challenge that we've had to really innovate to be able to be able to publish that information. MF It's important to stress Isn't it that all the usual principles of non-identification and confidentiality apply in this work as much as they do anywhere else across the ONS. EH Yeah, absolutely. MF Give me a couple of examples of some specific bits of work that you've been doing then. There's been an analysis of towns and out of town locations particularly and how local employment growth is happening outside of town and city centres. EH My team kind of over the last sort of couple of years have been doing a whole series of analysis of towns in particular, like I say, that's a geography that people can really relate to, you know, lots of people kind of live in a town or a city. And that's something that's a bit more understandable than maybe a local authority and is a bit closer to them than the region for example. Our recent analysis on towns and out of town locations when we looked at employment growth, I think has some quite important findings actually for transport planning. For example, what we found is that actually employment growth is not happening the most in town centres, it's happening more and faster within two kilometres of the edges of a town of the town boundaries. And so what we think it might be happening is that kind of employment growth is actually happening in industrial parks are situated on that cusp between town and kind of rural areas. And when you're thinking about, you know, how people might travel to work, for example, I think it's really, really important to have those insights so that we're not just planning transport routes, for example, that go into town centres MF And what other insights have we been generating? EH So another recent piece was a new piece of analysis on the nighttime economy. So I think lots of people will think about the nighttime economy as being predominantly about bars and restaurants and obviously, you know, they will have a really, really big impact on those sort of industries during the pandemic. But in fact, what we find is that actually the nighttime economy in rural areas are surprisingly busy and that's because we also have a nighttime economy that is around health and health care. Nurses, for example, kind of working night shifts and that sort of thing. And then the other kind of aspect to it is sort of warehousing and transport as well. There's often kind of an overnight element to that, too. And again, having that understanding of like how that kind of plays out in different parts of the country is kind of a really, really useful. We originally did it just for London, interestingly, and then we've done this kind of new analysis looking at the whole country, which was really interesting. Other things produced quite recently as well are an expansion of job quality indicators of work across the UK, which is important because if you just look at kind of employment numbers, you're not really getting a sense of, you know, you get a sense of who's employed and who's unemployed in terms of characteristics of people, but what you don't get is like how good is the job quality for those people and actually, job quality is probably quite important for a lot of individuals and in terms of how good they feel about kind of going into work and how productive they are? And all of those those kinds of... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/26785980

Disability: When the numbers alone are simply not enough. 03/31/2023

Disability: When the numbers alone are simply not enough. In this episode, we focus on a powerful example of when the numbers alone are simply not enough. The most recent Census has told us how many people have some form of disability but to really understand the nature of those disabilities and the needs of people reporting them we need to do a lot more work. Guiding us through this work, is Helen Colvin, joint lead for Census and Disability Analysis at the ONS; Shona Horter, Head of Qualitative Research at the ONS Centre for Equalities and Inclusion; David Ainslie, Principal Analyst in the Analytical Hub of ONS and Matt Mayhew, Senior Statistical Officer in the Policy Evidence and Analysis Team. Transcript MILES FLETCHER Hello and welcome again to another edition of Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. In this series, we've spent a lot of time explaining how statistics can brilliantly illuminate important issues, and this time we're focusing on a powerful example of when the numbers alone are simply not enough. The most recent census has told us how many people have some form of disability and where they live. It's a good place to start of course, but to really understand the nature of those disabilities, and the needs of the people reporting them, we need to do a lot more work and that work is the subject of today's discussion. Here to guide us through it we have Helen Colvin, joint lead for Census disability analysis at the ONS; Shona Horter, head of qualitative research at the ONS Centre for equalities and inclusion; David Ainslie, Principal Analyst at the analytical hub of ONS; and Matt Mayhew, senior statistical officer in the policy evidence and analysis team. Helen to start with you, I mentioned the census there and those numbers showing us the scale of disability as defined by Census. Is it fair to say that census remains the sort of statistical bedrock of our understanding of disability - the single most important source? HELEN COLVIN Yes that’s right. I'd agree with that. So it's the main source that covers the whole of our population. So it's the best truth that you have, if you like, of what our population is like, and the proportion of disabled people within our population. MF And these were people, responding in their households, to the question which said what precisely? HC It said: Do you have any physical or mental health conditions or illnesses lasting or expected to last 12 months or more? And if people answered yes to that, they were asked: Do any of your conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out day to day activities? A lot, a little, or not at all. MF What did you have to answer to that to be classified as disabled? HC To be classified as disabled - If you answered that you had a long term condition which affects your day to day activities a lot or a little then we regarded that as somebody as disabled. And the reason for that is that at ONS we measure disability against the Equality Act definition of disability and that really identifies somebody as disabled if they have a long term condition, and if it limits their day to day activities. And we do that so that we're able to report against the progress on the Equality Act in the UK. MF And the key element it would seem that - obviously we're talking about disability - is your ability to do day to day tasks and a sustained limitation. HC That's right, that needs to be... to be disabled under the Equality Act there needs to be a long term thing which affects you for up to 12 months or more. And it needs to be something which does impact you on your ability to carry out day to day activities. And that's really something that is arguably focusing on the medical model of disability, so focuses on how you can't do things because of your impairment because of the environment around you. MF Now that question is slightly different from the one asked in 2011. Why was that changed? HC So in 2011, we asked a very similar question, but we did remove a prompt which asked people to include problems specifically related to old age and this really was about bringing it more in line with the Equality Act, which doesn't have that emphasis. Problems related to older ages still classified as disability, but it wasn't making it the same kind of focus of the question, and another part that we changed was to remove the word disability because of course, disabled means different things to different people. And we tried to measure it slightly more objectively by using our own definition rather than asking about people's own opinions if they were disabled. And this time we also included mental health within the question, and we think that that could have influenced the raises that we saw among younger people. MF But how big an influence do we think that? HC So in census 2021, we did see an increase among younger people being classified as disabled compared to 2011. And this did stand out particularly for females slightly more than males. We think there was also possibly a real change in population at that time down to the pandemic, with more people showing signs around depression and mental health problems, particularly at the period that the census was conducted. MF And there remains of course, underlying all this. This is census data. This is people's own assessment of their ability. How is that benchmarked perhaps against other sources? HC So it's obviously a different measure from other sources. Other data might be more medically based, so GP records, that kind of thing, which is more based on actual conditions as opposed to disability. MF And do we think that some people perhaps consider themselves disabled who might not be defined as disabled under other circumstances? HC Absolutely. I think disability means different things to different people and some people who might be regarded as disabled under the Equality Act specifically wouldn't want themselves to be looked at that way. And conversely, some people which may not be captured by that definition, may want themselves to be, so there are many different ways you can conceptualise and define disability. So this is one way to try and do that and to measure disability in a slightly more objective way. MF And being defined as disabled within that census definition that you've set out for us, how does that match against other criteria of disability, perhaps when it comes to gaining access to benefits or services? HC So it has a different definition and a different way of being assessed. So for instance, if somebody wanted to access benefits, then there's a completely different threshold and set of criteria that they would need to meet through Work and Pensions. MF There's a tension there isn’t there, perhaps between people who answered in the affirmative on this on the Census but then wouldn't qualify as a disabled in the eyes of officialdom for want of a better word. HC Possibly, but we don't have that data within the ONS or around the DWP benefits data for this kind of use, to look at the match between our definition and the DWP assessment criteria. MF So you’ve shown us a complex picture there, tell us about the harmonisation work that's been going on across ONS to really develop and refine our understanding of disability as a concept. HC Yeah, so there's an ongoing programme of work, taking place to review the current harmonised standards and update them so that they can be more aligned with current conceptualization of disability impairments and conditions and try and ensure that they really relate to and reflect people's experiences. There's been a programme of research and engagement to find out the ways in which the standards are not currently performing, and what some of the key issues and gaps are, and that's due to be published in the end of March. And then the next step will be to outline in detail the plan over the coming year. So so far, the engagement activities have included speaking to data users, a variety of different organisations, government departments, charities, really including everyone across the spectrum, who are people who would use and engage with those harmonised standards to understand a bit more about the needs. And like I said, the kind of priorities and gaps and then the next step will be undertaking research to think about how best can we change and update those standards so that they, like I said, are really reflective and current. And one thing in particular that needs to be looked at being included is adding neurodiversity as a potential category. So at the moment that's not currently listed within the impairment categories. And so feedback has been that many people who are neurodiverse don't identify with the current kind of categorization and wording that's used. So that will be really important going forward. MF And that’s also an important reflection of the constantly changing perception of what disability is in society. And from that the challenge of assessing and measuring it, Helen on the Census we've recently published our results as we've already mentioned in this discussion, but would you like to unpack those for us? We know that the number of disabled people went up since 2011. HC Yes, that's right. So the number of disabled people went up, but the actual overall proportion of disabled people fell in the population. And it's important to state that we standardise this data. And that's a statistical method which enables us to, to kind of compare like with like, so it accounts for the different population age structure between 2011 and 2021. So in 2021, we saw a slight fall in the proportion of disabled people in the population. So it's currently 18% in England falling from 19% in 2011. And in Wales, it's now 21% falling from 23% in 2011. MF And what were the drivers of that? That's a fascinating find. HC That’s right. So some people might be slightly surprised by that, but it is a small decrease which we might expect to find in a population where people are living longer and healthier life expectancy is improving. And there may have been other influences such as the pandemic. So asking people how they feel about their health and disability during the pandemic may have affected how they responded as well. MF But how does the data break down by region, and by age and by gender? HC Say for gender, we saw that females were more likely to be disabled than males. And we had a particularly interesting finding around older people. So there was a big decrease among older people who've been disabled in 2021 Compared to 2011. And that was particularly true among those who were limited a lot by their disability. Obviously, we've talked about the question change where we removed a prompt, which then include problems related to old age, so that may have reduced the number of older people thinking of their conditions as a part of a disability. But we did see that that data was the same for the health question which preceded it as well. So we do think it's a real change in the population. And another aspect of that may have been due to Coronavirus. So we did very sadly see a lot of deaths among disabled people during COVID. But that wouldn't fully account for the changes that we've seen. So we think there's also an improvement in health of older people more generally as well. MF Oh, that's a reflection of the healthy life expectancy that we've discussed in other podcasts already, perhaps over and above the COVID factor that you mentioned. HC Yes, that's right. MF A greater prevalence of disability among younger people, and that was very much reflected, perhaps unsurprisingly, in deprived areas. HC Yes, that's right. So the change that we saw for younger people, again was stronger for females than for males. It was true for both genders, but females saw slightly higher proportions of disability than males. And that had increased particularly in the 20 to 24 age group, and the surrounding age groups to that, and that corresponds with some another analysis we've done where we found higher proportions of people with mental health problems, such as depression in those age groups. And we have the same outcome for health in general as well, where there is a correlation between that age group showing poorer health and more disability. MF So overall, is disability remaining fairly static from census to census? HC That's right. Well, we have seen the numbers of people have increased but the proportion as a population has stayed reasonably static. There are small falls, which does tally with the kind of improvements in health, but overall, it is showing the sorts of trends that we would expect, but we do see one in five people in the population as disabled, which is quite stark and does make us remember that we really need to think about how to improve the inequalities for this population. You mentioned just now about deprivation and deprivation among younger people, and that was an interesting finding we've had from the census data as well. It's not really a surprise to see that in deprived areas more people are likely to be disabled. But what we also found is that that occurs for younger age groups. So younger people in deprived areas are more likely to be disabled across all of the age groups than non-disabled people. MF That's the strength of the census of course, that you can get that really, really local picture of where disabled people are, as well as their overall numbers. HC Yes, and the index of Multiple Deprivation enables us to understand those areas that are more deprived or less deprived, so that we can look at those at a more aggregate level as well. MF Helen, thank you for taking us through the insight, fascinating insight, produced by the Census. But Shona, there is much more to the ONS’ work on understanding disability. Could you set out some of that for us? SHONA HORTER Yeah, of course. And I can start by just giving some brief background, there was an independent group of experts who were convened, following the request of the national Statistician in 2020, to look at the inclusivity of data and evidence across the UK more broadly, and to make recommendations as to how we can make a step-change to really ensure that everyone counts and is counted within data and evidence and that programme of work identified disability as one key area that we really need to ensure that questions and concepts are accurately reflecting the experiences of individuals. They also identified the need for more qualitative approaches as part of this. So, we need that alongside our quantitative data. We also need to be really speaking to people and understanding their lived experiences MF Because statistics and numbers, and to really understand people's experience of disability, we need to hear from them directly. SH Exactly, exactly. And the qualitative can also help us to understand the how and the why beyond the numbers, so we can understand more about the lived reality of people's experiences, the barriers that people face in daily life and people's views as to what could help to improve things going forward. But also, we can understand where we might see patterns in the data, we can actually look at what is the social context beyond what's happening on the ground that might be shaping those experiences. So it's a really, really important thing that we include alongside our statistics. MF So what sort of patterns have we been seeing from the data? Helen? HC Similar in ONS we collect quite a range of data that encapsulates different disabled people across some of the different data sources that we collect. So, one of the main surveys that we do is the annual population survey which captures people across the UK. Every year we collect data from about 320,000 people. And the picture that we're having from that data is, unfortunately that disabled people tend to fare less well across the things that we measure, say for instance, they're less likely to be happy, they're less likely to see their life as worthwhile, life satisfaction is poor and they're likely to be more anxious than non-disabled people. And we've also seen from other surveys, like the Community in Life Survey that shows that disabled people are more likely to feel lonely. So these are all not positive outcomes. But some of the more positive ones that we have seen around education data, for instance, is showing that the proportion of disabled people with a degree has been steadily climbing since 2014. And the proportion of those who have no education has been steadily falling. It's not as in-line with non-disabled people. So disabled people are still less likely to have degrees than their non-disabled counterparts, but it's still a positive trend that we do see, but that does unfortunately, then feed into things like employment data, which we'll talk about more shortly, but with disabled people less likely to be employed. They're also less likely to own their own homes and more likely to live in social housing. And when we look at the Crime Survey for England and Wales, we also see that disabled people are more likely to experience things like antisocial behaviour and problems with nuisance neighbours than non-disabled people. So it's unfortunately not a positive picture when we look at the data more generally for disabled people. MF Nonetheless, that statistical picture fleshes out quite considerably the understanding we get from the census. So far, we've discussed a variety of different insights on the outcomes for disabled people, but we haven't looked at their experience in the workforce and how being disabled can come with additional costs. David, what are our data telling us about that experience in the workplace and the restrictions as well as the opportunities? DAVID AINSLIE So data from the Labour Force Survey shows in the last three months of 2020 to the latest data, and considering just working age adults, about half of disabled adults are in employment, so that's around 5 million disabled adults. So, this compares with about 8 in 10 when you consider non-disabled adults, the gap and rate between these two groups has decreased slightly over the last decade. In 2013, the earliest comparison we can make is that 4 in 10 disabled adults are employed compared with around three quarters of non-disabled adults. Some analysis from the Department for Work and Pensions suggests there's a range of factors that contribute to why this gap has decreased only slightly in the last decade, the largest factor probably being the overall disability prevalence itself has increased over the last decade. This tends to suggest that more people in work are becoming disabled than necessarily disabled people becoming employed. And there are other factors too, like overall changes in the size of the working population and general employment trends over the period. MF So this is more a question really, of people being able to hang on to... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/26391945

The R Word: Decoding ‘recession’ and looking beyond GDP. 02/20/2023

The R Word: Decoding ‘recession’ and looking beyond GDP. With news headlines proclaiming the UK has ‘narrowly avoided a recession’, we decode the ‘r’ word and explain why this sometimes misleading term is one the ONS is often cautious to avoid. We get the lowdown on GDP (Gross Domestic Product); discuss whether its time as the yardstick for measuring the success or failure of the world’s economies is coming to an end; and hear how the ONS is already looking well ‘Beyond GDP’ and introducing broader measures of social wellbeing and the environment to provide us with a more holistic view of how society is faring. Joining Miles is ONS Director of Economic Statistics, Darren Morgan, Chief Economist, Grant Fitzner; and Director of Public Policy Analysis, Liz McKeown. Links Transcript MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the official podcast of the UK’s Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher, and this time, we're going to talk about a very famous and long running statistic that’s still regarded as the single most important economic indicator of them all. I'm talking of course about GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the expansion or contraction of which is the yardstick against which the success or failure of the world's economies is measured. It's been around a long time, since around the time of the Second World War, in fact, but is its pre-eminence now coming to an end? GDP misses some things out - that which matters, as was once memorably claimed. So we'll be talking about how the ONS has been updating GDP to keep it relevant and developing new complementary measures of economic and social wellbeing that could perhaps, in future, supplant GDP itself. And in the current economic climate, we cannot avoid the “R” word. What exactly is a recession? How much does it actually matter, if it's only a technical one? Is it the difference between economic disaster and salvation? Spoiler alert, it really isn't. Anyway, we have a panel of top ONS folk to explain it all: Darren Morgan is director of economic statistics production and analysis, Grant Fitzner is Chief Economist and director of macro-economic statistics and analysis, and also with us is Liz McKeown, Director of Public Policy Analysis, who is leading the drive towards these broader measures on social and economic welfare. Welcome, everyone. Darren to start with you. You are responsible for the production of the UK’s GDP estimates. So let's start by reminding ourselves what precisely it measures, it's basically seeking to put a value on all economic activity over a given period. DARREN MORGAN Yeah, so we look at GDP and we measure the economy in three different ways. First of all, we do it via what you call the output approach, and most simply, that's everything that's produced in the economy, and that can be cars rolling off the production line, that can be a lawyer providing advice as a service, and it can be public services as well. So surgeries, GP appointments and so on. So everything we produce in the economy. We also look at measuring the economy, everything that is spent, so that could be you and I in household, spending money in the shops or on leisure activities. It can be businesses spending money on goods and services. And it can also mean the government spending money, so everything we spend as well. And the third way we measure GDP is the income approach, which is basically everything that's earned in the economy. So for us in terms of households that's wages and salaries, for businesses it’s profit, for example. So we measure everything we produce, everything we spend and everything we earn, and in principle, they should all add up. MF And you're boiling it down then, a vast amount of data flowing into the ONS, boiling it all down to one single indicator. DM We do, and we do that by approaching thousands and thousands of businesses asking them about their performance. We speak to thousands of households about their behaviour. And we also use a lot of data already available withing government, so what we call administrative data - data that already exists. And we bring all those different data sources into the building, we look at it and we confront it, and we come up with ultimately, as you suggest, a single number on the growth of the economy. MF What's changed in the in the collection of data now? How timely a process is this? DM So in the UK, we've got one of the timeliest measures of the economy in the world. And we only have one of two countries who produce a monthly measure the economy, so we do it much more quickly, and obviously it is completely different to how we did it say, even 10 or 15 years ago. We collect most of our data now from businesses online. Whereas previously we used to send a questionnaire to them, used to write the questionnaire and they would send it back to us, and that could take a week or weeks to do that. Businesses can fill the form in now sat at their desk online, do it very quickly and it reaches us straightaway. MF And you mentioned administrative data as well. So that's coming from other parts of government. What are the main sources there? How is that gathered? DM So that's correct. So what we try to do is minimise the burden on businesses and households, so some businesses may have to complete a tax return to HMRC for example. So we are able to use that information and bring it in, so that's one example. Pay As You Earn, people who use pay as you earn systems, will be well aware that we use that in our labour market numbers. But we use lots of different sources that are already available across government, and we reuse them for statistical purposes, like I said, to provide better estimates, because that data tends to be very good, but also to minimise the burden, as I said on households and businesses at the same time. MF And what is the coverage, in terms of what's included, how has that evolved in recent years? DM So in a way, in terms of what we call the boundary, the economic boundary, that has actually stayed very similar over a long period of time. It is very traditional in terms of the boundary we measure. So, like I said, it's sort of business activities, household activity and government activity. But it is along those lines about how much is produced, how much is spent, how much is earned, but the boundary for the economy has been very similar for 50 years. MF Nevertheless, there are some things included in GDP which might surprise some people. For example, in the most recent GDP release we talked about the fall in the number of pupils in classrooms in the last quarter of 2022. DM The public services was actually a really key indicator for the number that we published for December, and we saw a fall in the number of GP appointments, a fall in the number of operations, less vaccinations being given because the autumn booster campaign tailed off. And we also saw lower attendance in schools, because in the lead up to Christmas not so many pupils will go into school as we normally see. And the reason why we measure that, as you can imagine we measure teacher salaries, doctor salaries, we measure how much is invested in the health service, how much is invested in schools, and obviously those schools and hospitals buy goods and services. So, it's a really important part of the economy. So of course we measure the goods and services that they produce as well. It's a really important part of the economic measurement for GDP. MF And I think I’m going to use it to motivate my children in the mornings as well. When they go off to school I’ll be reminding them of their contribution to our economic performance. DM They certainly are. So it's a really good way to get them through the school day, Miles. MF But there's a serious point underlying this, and there's a bit of a propaganda point for the ONS here as well, as it because we are actually taking real measurements of public sector activity, and it's been said that some countries just make broad assumptions about that activity. What do we do that other countries don't? DM You’re absolutely right, Miles. And that became most marked during the lockdowns during, the COVID pandemic. So we measured, if I can give schools and education as an example, we actually measured how much education was being provided to pupils during a lockdown, whether that was face-to-face in schools, or whether it was remote learning, or whether unfortunately, in some cases, there was no learning at all. We measured that directly, whereas perhaps some other countries basically measured the number of pupils. So as you can imagine, the number of pupils is the same whether they are getting taught or not. So in the pandemic we showed a sharp fall in education during some of the lock downs, but we've seen a faster recovery in the years that followed. Whereas if you look at other countries, their measurement of education has been far more stable over the most recent years because the numbers of pupils doesn't really change. MF They are pretending that the schools were open, when in fact, they weren’t. Anyway, that's just part of this enormous data gathering operation, bringing in all this data, and it takes around about six weeks to produce the preliminary estimate, which you say is among the quickest of the estimates, but of course that's only part of the story, isn't it? DM That's pretty quick, six weeks, but we do produce an estimate for all three measures, we produce a measurement how much is produced, how much is spent, and how much is earned at that point in time. So we do that, but obviously, we only have so much data at that point. You know, we have quite a lot of data to actually because those surveys are very timely, but not everything. MF As a percentage, it's about 40% isn’t it? DM That's correct. But obviously our data collection doesn't stop at that point. We continue to bring new data in. And that's why we publish the latest estimate, which covers more detail, more granularity, different parts of the economy. And that additional data that's brought in allows us to do that at a later stage. MF You have a couple more months to produce that one, and that's based on pretty much all of the data we're going to get. DM Yeah, it's over 90% of that stage, it’s about 90%. So yes, we have between the first estimate and the second estimate, we do get a lot more data in. MF And therein lies, what some people might say is one of the weaknesses of GDP, and particularly when making quick assumptions about the economy. There's a trade-off here isn't there, about wanting to know broadly where the economy is going, and making really, really hard and fast assumptions about what's happening. And therein lies the whole issue of revisions, revising GDP. Now, it's important for everyone to understand that when the ONS revises GDP, it's not correcting its mistakes is it. DM What you’re describing there Miles is a classic tension in statistical production. So we could say to everybody, our users, no, we're not going to publish anything until we get all that data, all that 90% of data. But to do that, you're going to have to wait about 80 days. Or what we could do is drag an earlier estimate based on less data, but still not a really good estimate, but you could have that 40 days quicker, 50 days quicker. So you know, there's that tension between timeliness and quality. And I think the way we do it, I think it's brilliant. We published two estimates initially, and that’s for the quarter. The one that's a bit quicker based on less data, and the one later based on more data content. But what we do to help our users is we have a really detailed revisions analysis between those estimates, so people can look and judge typically, how often and how much is that data revised when we publish. So they have the full information in front of them to make judgments if they have to. And I think we strike the right balance taking that approach. MF What is the ONS’ track record in doing this? Because have there been occasions perhaps, as has been suggested, sometimes that the early data can be misleading, and in fact, the economy might be heading in the opposite direction. DM So if you're looking at revisions analysis, it's pretty good, you know, within the first estimate, and that second estimate, and so revisions are typically very small, and importantly, unbiased, they're equally likely to be a revision up or a revision down, and that's really, really important. I think when a real spotlight is shone on revisions, that’s when the economy is around zero, you know if you have a 0.1 revision, which is a small revision if your economy is going along at 0.8, 0.7%. You know, whether it’s 0.7, 0.6 and so on, people go ‘Ah, so what?’. But if the economy is going around zero, or 0.1 or –0.1, that 0.1 revision can change the sign, and people get very excited about that. But actually, it's a 0.1 revision, and that's when the spotlight is really, like I said, is shone on the revisions performance MF As it was in our most recent estimate of quarterly GDP, the final quarter of 2022 when there was a big fat zero in terms of growth. Now, that led to headlines in some very respectable media organisations that went “UK narrowly avoided recession”. Well, did we? DM So we did technically yes, we did. Absolutely. Because it wasn't negative. That was our Q3 estimate of the economy was for a four, so if Q4 fell for economic growth, a technical recession, which is widely recognised as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Yes, we would have been in a technical recession. But I think you've just highlighted how it makes sense to look more broadly at the economy because whether it was 0, or –0.1, 0.1, how different really was the economy at that point in time? I would say the economy was broadly flat. MF Because if you're beholden to this idea of a technical recession, a couple of months down the line we might say hang on, our better estimate based on 95% of the data says actually it was just slightly down, and therefore the headline writers say, “Oh, we were in recession after all.” DM Exactly. I think that just highlights, again, being sensible in terms of how you look at the economy overall, because really the economy, if it's a 0.1 revision ,if that's what happens in it in a few weeks time, is the economy fundamentally different to what it is at that moment? I would suggest not, but you're right, I would imagine that it would get splashed that the UK is now in recession, and coverage will be significant because of that. MF And it's fair to say that in the past these technical recessions, there was a double-dip recession wasn't there about 10 years ago, that made a lot of headlines at the time. It's not in the figures anymore. DM No, it's not. It's been revised and that period of our economic history when we were around that flat period for the economy. So the revisions have been relatively small in that period, but you're right, we were in recession and because we had revisions from later data, we no longer were. And as you suggested people got very excited about that. But really, Miles, the economy was in exactly the same position as it was in our first estimate. MF So a strong message there listeners, when you hear people talk about a technical recession, bear in mind, that may not be what it sounds like. In fact, it probably almost certainly isn't. DM Good advice, Miles. MF Grant, to bring you in on this then, from an economist's perspective, it's fair to say then that in fact, there's no definition of a recession that's really official or formally accepted anywhere. It's certainly not something that the ONS talks about. GRANT FITZNER No, I mean, ultimately, it's a matter of judgement. And of course, economists spend a lot of time arguing about these things. In fact, it was so bad in the US that academic economists, as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research set up a committee to discuss and agree on when business cycles were, well when recessions started and when they ended, so that when they were comparing their research they were all working off a common framework. Now, that sounds great, but the problem of course is with this being academics, they looked at a wide range of data, and they typically took several years after a recession had occurred before they would put definitive data out of it. Now, that's fine if you're publishing economic history, but if you're a journalist or indeed if you're working at the Office for National Statistics and you want to have an idea of what's going on now, you need something that's a bit closer to real time, and that does, as Darren said, involve a degree of judgement. But I think it's fair to say that the common sense understanding of a recession is a prolonged and significant downturn in economic activity. So not just one or two quarters, and not just a 0.1, but actually something a bit more substantial, as indeed we've seen in the 70s and the 80s, and of course, in the global financial crisis that kicked off in 2008. So they typically last for a while, and they do have quite a significant impact on the economy, households and business. MF In fact, that’s a lot more serious isn't it, than the definition that's used as a sort of working rule of thumb, which is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. In fact the origins of that are very murky, really, nobody actually seems to know precisely where it came from. One of President Nixon’s speech writers seems to be the main suspect. GF Well, possibly, but it has been more widely used. I think journalists need something quick and simple to understand, and I guess this meets the bill. But imagine if you had a –0.1 in one quarter and then a –0.1 in the next, and then they were subsequently revised away, I don't think anyone would seriously call that a recession. And just the point about the length as well, if you look at the 70s, 80s, or 90s, recessions typically last about three years. That's how long it took for the level of economic activity to get back to the pre-recession levels, and indeed for the global financial crisis that kicked off in 2008, it took four and a half years before growth was back at pre-recession levels, so an incredibly long time. And I think just looking at the pandemic and the impact that that had in 2020, it's a very different set of events. We had two negative quarters and then the economy started to recover after of course, a very large fall. Now that's unusual. And of course that was because of this shock of the pandemic and lockdowns. Whereas typically, these things take quite a bit longer to kind of work their way through the system. MF And if you look at the path of GDP on the time-series graphic on... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/25961697

Integrating Data: Boosting the capabilities of researchers to inform policymaking. 01/31/2023

Integrating Data: Boosting the capabilities of researchers to inform policymaking. Miles explores how data linking can help tackle cross-cutting issues in an increasingly uncertain world, and how the ONS’ new Integrated Data Service will provide a step-change transformation in how researchers will be able to access public data. Joining him are ONS colleagues Bill South, Deputy Director of Research Services and Data Access; Jason Yaxley, Director of the Integrated Data Programme; and award-winning researcher Dr Becky Arnold, from the University of Keele. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking - the Office for National Statistics Podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to step back from the big news making numbers and take a detailed look at an aspect of the ONS which is, less well known, but arguably just as important. The ONS gather an awful lot of data of course, and much of it remains valuable long after it's been turned into published statistics. It is used by analysts and government, universities and the wider research community. So we're going to explain how that's done and look at some really interesting and valuable examples of how successful that has been to date. And we're also going to hear about a step-change transformation that's now underway in how public data is made available to researchers, and the future potential of that really important, exciting process. Our guides through this subject are Jason Yaxley, Director of the ONS’s integrated data programme, Bill South who is Deputy Director of the Research Services and Data Access Division here at the ONS, and later in the podcast we’ll hear from Dr. Becky Arnold who is an award-winning researcher from Keele University. Right Bill, set the scene for us to start with then, we are talking here about the ONS Secure Research Service, take it from the top please. What is it? What's it all about? What does it do? What do we get from it? BILL SOUTH Hi Miles, thank you. Yes, the Secure Research Service, or the SRS, is the ONS’ trusted research environment. We've been running now for about 15 years, and we provide secure access to unpublished de-identified micro data for research that's in the public good. So in terms of numbers, we hold over 130 datasets, we've got about 5000 Researchers accredited to use the service and about 1500 of those would be working in the system at any given time on about 600 live projects. MF So what sort of data, what is stored and what's made available? Is this survey responses? BS Traditionally the SRS has held most of our ONS surveys. So that's the labour market, business...all of our surveys really. In the last four years, thanks to funding we've received from Administrative Data Research UK (ADRUK), we've been able to grow the amount of data we hold, so now we've increasingly got data coming from other government departments. And we've got more linked datasets that enable us to offer new insights into the data. MF And so these are people's responses to survey questions and people's records, as well as data that are held by other departments? BS Indeed, yes, the data coming from other departments is often administrative data, so not from surveys but more admin data. MF And a lot of the value in that is in being able to compare and to link this data to achieve different research insights? BS Absolutely. I mean, a good example of that is a dataset that's been added in the last year or so where our ONS census data from 2011 was linked to educational attainment data from the Department for Education into a research dataset called Growing up in England (GUiE). And it's hugely important because we have a lot of rich information from the census but you know, linking that with the educational attainment data offers new insights about how kids do at school, and how they're linked to the characteristics of their background. MF So you use the underpinning of census to provide a really universal picture of what's going on across that particular population, and therefore gain some insight into how people have achieved educationally in a way that we wouldn't have done before. Of course, all this and the power of it is clear in that example, but a lot of people might think, oh my gosh, they must know an awful lot about me that in that case, tell us about how privacy and anonymity are protected in those circumstances. BS Yeah, absolutely. It's a central part of their operation, and clearly the word secure in the name is key there. So we follow a five safes principle which underpins everything we do. The five safes are safe people, so that anyone who uses the SRS has to be trained and go through an assessment to be accredited by us to use the environment. Once they're accredited, they then have to apply to have a project that's running in the system, and that gets independently assessed. There are a number of checks around whether it's ethically sound, whether the use of data is appropriate, but the key thing really is around the public good. So all research projects that happen in the SRS have to be in the public good and there's a commitment to be transparent. So every project that happens in the SRS, there's a record which is published on the UK Statistics Authority website. The third safe is around the settings, so it's a very controlled environment where people access the data. The fourth stage is around the data, so although we've said it's record level data it's already identified. Names and addresses, any identifiers are stripped out of the data before researchers can access it. And the final stage, the final part of the of the researcher journey if you like, is around outputs. What that means is we do checks to ensure that when any analysis leaves the environment that no individual or business can be identified for the published results. MF So in essence, you must convince the ONS that you are a Bonafide researcher, and you also have to convince them that what you're doing is definitely for the public benefit. BS That's right. And the other thing that's worth noting is that the SRS, like a number of other trusted research environments across the country, has been accredited under the Digital Economy Act to be a data processor, which means we go through a rigorous assessment process around the security, the environment, but also our capability to run it. So that's our processes, our procedures, whether our staff are adequately trained to run the service. That's a key part of that accreditation under the Digital Economy Act. MF So, on that point then about anonymity, you can drill right down to individual level, but you'll never know who those individuals actually are or be able to identify them? BS That's right. Researchers typically will run their code against the record level data, but when they've got the results of the analysis, there are clear rules that say you won't be allowed to take out very low counts. So that means like our published outputs, there's no way of identifying anyone once the research is published. MF And the SRS has built up over the years a good reputation for actually doing this effectively and efficiently. BS Yes, I think that's fair to say. We have a good reputation, and the service is growing in terms of the number of datasets and the number of projects and the number of people using it. So, I think that speaks for itself. MF Okay, let's pull out another I think powerful example of why this facility is so important and that comes from the recent COVID pandemic. Many listeners will be aware that the ONS ran a very, very large survey involving upwards of 100,000 people providing samples, taking COVID tests, and they were sent off to be analysed creating an awful lot of community level data about COVID infections, and we in the ONS then publish our estimates and continue to do so as we record estimates every week of fluctuating infection levels. But behind all that work, there were expert researchers in institutions around the country who were doing far more with that data. And the SRS was fundamental to delivering the data to them. Tell us about how that operated Bill, and some of the results that we got out of it. BS Yeah, sure. I mean, the COVID infection survey that you refer to there, that dataset is available for accredited researchers to apply to use, and they have done, but we've also brought in a number of others, about 20 COVID related datasets are in the SRS, so things around vaccination or the schools infection survey, mortality, etc. So since the start of the pandemic we've had over 50 projects that have either taken place and completed, or are currently underway, in the environment. Some of those are directly using the COVID related dataset. So looking, if you like, at the health impact, but there's also projects that are are looking at, if you like, non COVID data, economic data or education data, that are projects dedicated to understanding the impact of COVID. MF What sort of insights have we seen from those? BS In terms of those using the COVID related data there's been analysis to highlight the disproportionate impact of the virus on ethnic minorities, that went on to implement a number of government interventions. Another project assessed the role of schools in the in the Coronavirus transmission. We had another project that was run specifically on behalf of local authorities to inform their response to the pandemic that offered insights into the risks between occupation. Also research into footfall in retail centres and how business sectors were affected by the pandemic. So a really huge range of things. There were other research projects looking at the impact and you know, an example there was a project that looked at learning loss. So, kids not being in school for that sort of 20 to 21 academic year. Similarly, the Bank of England ran a project looking at the financial stability of the UK during the pandemic period. So hopefully those examples give you this sense of the range. MF An incredibly impressive array of projects, all underpinned by that big survey, the likes of which the ONS has a unique ability to run, that big survey taking part run across the United Kingdom of people providing and answering questionnaires as well as providing survey samples. And don't take our word for it, I mean, it was reported in the Daily Mirror no less. A researcher who benefited from that data described the COVID Infection Survey as, when it came to the pandemic, one of the most valuable resources on the planet. So that's a powerful example of the research value that can be extracted through the secondary uses of data gathered by the ONS. Anyway, enough of blowing our own trumpet, the service has been running a very successful award scheme that recognises the achievements of external researchers Bill. Tell us about some of the projects that have been recognised in that. BS It’s worth mentioning I think also that we've got case studies on our website, the Secure Research Service website and the ADRUK website, which show in a little bit more detail the impact some of these research projects have had, but like you say, we also hold an annual Research Excellence Awards, which is great. We have different categories of awards where people can submit their project and explain where their research has been published and had an impact. And like I said, we get a lot of nominations and reviewing the applications, which I did last year, it really emphasises the breadth and quality of the research taking place in the SRS. MF Check those out then if you're interested in learning more about those projects, some of the examples that Bill mentions and winners of the Research Excellence Awards, of course, one of whom I'm very pleased to say joins us now and that's Dr. Becky Arnold from the University of Keele, who took home the cross-government analysis award for her team's work on controlling the spread of COVID-19 in vulnerable settings in a project undertaken at the UK health security agency. Becky I guess that's but another example of the kind of secondary uses of the COVID infection data. Welcome to the podcast. Please tell us all about that. Dr. Becky Arnold Yeah, very, very glad to. So first thing I want to talk about essentially is what a vulnerable setting is. And that was really key to the sort of cross governmental aspects of this because vulnerable settings are settings like care homes, hospitals, prisons, schools, where you have a lot of quite often vulnerable people in a really dense environment where COVID can sort of spread and get out of control really quickly. And if we want to define a testing policy for that, so our testing policy being perhaps everybody takes like three LFT tests a week, or maybe one monthly PCR test, but also other factors, like what's your isolation policy? So, if somebody is infected with COVID, how many days do they have to be isolated for? Do they need a negative test to be released? What is your outbreak policy in these institutions, if you know that there's an outbreak going on? It's this really, really complicated thing. And you know, for government policy, you need a testing regime to try and keep COVID under control in these settings. But there's a few difficulties with that. The first thing is that the settings are all really different. So, when I just mentioned about the cross governmental thing, it meant interacting with lots of different departments, lots of different data sources to try and understand these particular settings and their particular characteristics. The really, really critical point I want to make is that the whole project was about trying to understand what that testing policy should be. And the best testing policy in one setting may not be the best testing policy in another setting, because when we're trying to give advice to policymakers and policy departments about what testing strategy you should use in an institution, you don't want to just pull that out of the hat. You don't want to just go oh, I think this many LFT tests a week. We want to give data-driven, informed, evidence-based advice. So essentially, what this project was looking at was all of these different settings in a lot of detail, looking at the demographics within them and their particular vulnerabilities. So, care home residents are particularly vulnerable, as are people in prison. They're more clinically vulnerable than people of the same age that are not in prison and a bunch of different aspects, how people interact in these different settings, how infection spreads in these different settings. And from that, essentially, we created a model where you can simulate the spread of COVID in these different settings under different testing strategies. So, you can answer questions like if we use ‘x’ testing strategy versus ‘y’ testing strategy, what is the likely impact going to be on the number of people that died, the number of people that need hospitalisation, how many of those people that go to hospital are going to need intensive care, which often comes with long recovery and sometimes permanent impacts on people's lives. So, there are huge things to consider. And it's actually the point of this project was to study these environments and try and make something which can provide that evidence to inform decision making. MF This was data being gathered, presumably then in institutional settings up and down the country and then being collected centrally and made available to you at a single point of contact? BA It would have been very nice if that was the case. Because we're looking at so many different settings we were kind of scrambling around quite a lot just to try and identify what datasets were available and to sort of gather them together. And also there were so many different types of data that we needed to drive this. So firstly, like you say, the health outcomes data, in some cases, there were specific datasets available for certain institution types, but we weren't always able to get access to those for various reasons. But there were also considerations like the sort of data that was published every day, there's sort of a nationwide aspect, when we're also looking at another data type is how people interact within these different settings. For that we used an awful lot of literature review. We spoke to people that work in the settings. We spoke to people that work in care homes, we spoke to care homes franchise owners to understand their staffing policies and things related to that. We also spoke to government departments like the Department of Justice. So, it was a lot of different data sources all sort of gathered together for the various aspects of this project. MF This model you’ve created, what's its future? Perhaps in different scenarios that might arise in the future. BA The model was very, very carefully constructed to be as flexible as possible at the time for potential future COVID variants in mind, but because of that, it means it's very adaptable to different infectious diseases. So if you change just a few input parameters, like the mortality rates, you know, the infection rate, a few factors like that, it's quite easy to transform this model to simulate the spread of other infectious diseases. So, things like flu, which has a big impact on care homes every year and has the potential to be used to better understand how to combat that. But another thing that I think is very useful about this model is it has the ability to help us in game plan for potential future pandemics, because I think it's fair to say that governments around the world when COVID came along, were kind of caught by surprise, or wrong-footed, sort of without a game plan of how to respond. And as we know, the early stages, whether it's a single pandemic or an individual outbreak, it's those early stages which are really, really critical. With this sort of model, we can gameplan you know, what response should we give if we have a future pandemic with these properties? Say we've got this transmissibility, it's got this mortality rate, we have tests that cost this much and they give you this accuracy. In that scenario, what should we do? And to be able to do that research upfront and to have some sort of game plan in mind so that if and when future pandemics come along, we are better prepared and can respond efficiently and quickly to try and have the best outcomes possible. So that's something I think is really exciting for the for the future of this model. MF Okay, that's beautifully explained, thank you very much indeed. Bill, so we've heard from Becky about how the data that she had to access had to come from many different places, but I guess that might have been an impediment to actually producing a model as rapidly in the pressing circumstances of the pandemic as it could potentially have been achieved. Does that suggest then that while the SRS has achieved on its own terms, a great deal, nevertheless, there have been limitations, and perhaps it's time to be doing... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/25772052

ONS: The Year in Review 12/20/2022

ONS: The Year in Review National Statistician, Sir Ian Diamond, joins Miles in a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking, to look back on some of the highlights and challenges for the ONS in 2022 while gazing positively, but objectively, towards 2023. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Hello, and as another statistical year draws to an end you join us for a slightly festive episode of Statistically Speaking. I'm Miles Fletcher and with me this time is the national statistician himself, Sir Ian Diamond. We're going to pick out some of the key stats from another momentous year. Talk about some of its highlights and the challenges faced by the Office for National Statistics. We’ll gaze positively, but objectively, into 2023 and Sir Ian will be answering some of the questions that you our listeners wanted us to ask. Ian, welcome once again to statistically speaking. IAN DIAMOND First, thanks very much for that introduction. And can I offer festive greetings to all of your listeners? MILES Yes, it's come around again quickly, hasn't it? So much to talk about from the past year, but let's kick off with a very big number in every sense, and that's 59,597,542 IAN ...is the population of England and Wales according to the census, and one, which I have to say is one of the greatest censuses that has ever been undertaken. And it's just an absolute thrill to commend my colleagues who have worked so hard to deliver it but also to every citizen of England and Wales who filled in those forms in 2021, and of course, those in Northern Ireland as well. MILES Now, you had to press the button, both on the decision to have that field operation go out in March 2021, against the backdrop of the pandemic, and then of course, to sign off on the results. How difficult were those decisions? IAN Well, I'm not going to say it was difficult Miles, I mean, it was a difficult decision, but if you surround yourself with all the information, so before we took the decision to go with a 2021 census, we looked at all the upsides, all the downsides. We measured the risks. We looked at the cost of delaying and we looked at the chance that we would get a decent count, and whether people were looking like they were now prepared to fill in forms, which have a whole set of risks. Was there an algorithm that told us what to do? I'm afraid there isn't an algorithm at the end of the day, I had to make a decision. I made that decision in collaboration with my colleagues. It was a decision we took together, and I think in every way it was the right decision. And it was a real privilege for me to work with the team in March and April, as we looked at the numbers, and for the first time, and I think it's a really important milestone, that for the very first time we shared our results with the local authorities. I have always believed that you need to involve the people on the ground to sense check the numbers and so for the first time ever, we invited local authorities to be part of the quality assurance process. So we contacted them under a nondisclosure agreement. You have access to the numbers, let's have a conversation and then we can co-create the numbers so that we all feel comfortable and local authorities to their great credit, really embraced this opportunity to co-create what was a great piece of work. We believe that helped, that the numbers that we were able to produce, we felt we had much more traction. And so it really was a national effort to produce those numbers. And I'm very proud of them. MILES In hindsight, and of course, it's easy to look at things in hindsight, but did you think it helped that essentially there was a captive audience? IAN Not at all. I completely disagree. I think the reason for the high numbers wasn't a captive audience. Let's remember that a very high proportion of the population were not able to lock down, they had to go out to work. The reason I think that we got high numbers was because of three reasons. Number one, engagement. A massive programme of engagement with different communities, which really, really, really meant that people in different communities of our country understood why we were asking, what the reasons were, in a way that perhaps hadn't happened before, and critically to say to people, if you give us your data we're not going away. We'll be back. And there's now a programme of going back and sharing those data for particular communities with them. So that's the first reason. The second reason was, I've always said that censuses are nine tenths logistics and 1/10 statistics and I felt that the logistics here were absolutely right. And moving to an online first model was incredibly important, it made it very easy for people to respond. You could respond on your way to work on your mobile phone. That's an awful lot easier than having someone knock on your door with a big form. And so I think that worked. And then a final piece was after the day having really good management information, which really enabled us to understand where our coverage was higher and lower, and then to target our field workers in a way that we've never been able to before. Historically when I did censuses, for example the 1981 census, every enumerate had a small area, they walked around, they found people within that area. But we were able to say right, we need more people in a particular area, less people in another area, so we were moving them around, maximising the resources and maximising the count. MILES Okay, so what do you think are the biggest takeaways on the data we've released so far? IAN I think some of the work around the ageing of our country is really important, but not just the ageing of our country because let's be honest, ageing is associated with demand for services. And what we show very clearly is a changing geography of ageing. Now, that's an ongoing situation. So if you look at the proportion of over 65s, it's a very different proportion of over 85s and so there is clearly a new internal migration which gives in some areas, for example, mid Wales and Cambridgeshire, a new demographic to think about for services over time. So here's a really interesting point about the geography of ageing, while noting that some of it is pretty traditional, the south coast of England remains a place with high levels of older people. Seaton in Devon, with the highest proportion of people over 90 in the country is an area which already knows that it has a high demand for services. Other places will be coming along, and I think that’s the first thing to say. The second thing I would note Miles is the changing demographic of where people were born. And certainly we are able to reflect some of that in the work but also again to look at the geography of where different people are living. And that's important. And also, for the first time ever, we have asked questions on veterans, and I think that was a really, really interesting piece of information. I must admit that the age distribution initially looks a little surprising, because for men, almost everybody is a veteran over the age of 80 because of national service, and that goes down, but we now have the ability to identify both the geography and the age distribution of veterans and it was noticeable that the highest proportions of veterans tended to be in places with military bases, Richmond Shire, in Yorkshire, which is near to Catterick or Portsmouth near the Navy areas. That says to us that they are obviously, and I'm not saying it's surprising, but people who have been in the military tend to end up staying around the areas where perhaps they have been based, but actually being able to do that and then following that up with a survey, a survey of veterans to understand their circumstances and the services they need, and also their families, I think is really super important that I have to say that that survey which went out after the results of the census were published, and we were able to launch them on the same day with the Ministry of Veterans Affairs Johnny Mercer has been an incredibly successful survey. Great response. And we're just in the process now of analysing those data. And that's something to look out for in the new year. MILES And plenty more census data still to come. Of course, IAN Well, yes. And of course, the data will be available now for an analysis by anyone. And that's really exciting, MILES Well worth pointing out as well. Okay, here's another big number for you. 11.1% IAN Is inflation. MILES That was the figure in October, it's recently dropped down to 10.7. IAN You don't really understand inflation until you actually get down to what's driving it and what the components are. And so, we spend an enormous amount of time looking at the components to understand them. So this drop to temporary 7% In the most recent data is driven by a reduction in fuel costs, with fuel prices going down, I mean it's still too expensive don't get me wrong but they're going down a bit, and at the same time that has been offset by increases in alcohol prices at hotels, restaurants, and pubs. And so all put together, yes it’s a drop, but not an enormous drop, and still a significant rise compared with the same month last year. MILES Now there's been a fascinating and very public debate over the cost of living of course, and particularly over the relevance and validity of headline inflation measures, CPI or CPIH. A preferred measure on the one hand, and on the other hand, the actual experience of people seeing the cost of their weekly shopping shooting up much faster than the official rate, which is just an average of course, would suggest. IAN I think it's an important point. I had a very good conversation with a number of influencers in this area. And I think it is important to recognise that what one is asked to do, and we are statutorily responsible for producing an inflation statistic that is an average at the end of the day, and it's based on a basket of goods, and that basket gets changed every year to reflect buying patterns. So with a pandemic, we were more relaxed Miles and you would be sitting opposite me just wearing a jumper instead of a three-piece suit, it means that we took men's suits out of the basket this year, but that's an average. The point that people have asked is does that average reflect what's going up for all groups of society? What about those people who are at the poorer end of society and whose budget only allows them to buy the least priced goods and that's why we put together a least price index and one that's based on what might be called the value goods that Supermarkets sell. And if we look at those we found that the average price there was not unlike the overall inflation, but again, an enormous amount of heterogeneity on the various prices. The highest increase in the most recent products was for vegetable oil, of course, driven by the issues associated with Russia and Ukraine and the difficulties of the Ukrainian farms which drive so much of that area. On the other hand, beef mince and orange juice went down relatively. So there was heterogeneity, inflation was high, but let me be very clear, not unlike the overall inflation in the country as a whole on the average. MILES The important point here being that everyone's rate of inflation, of course is slightly different and we have a means now of allowing people to find out exactly what their personal rate is don’t we. IAN For those people who want to have a really close look at their budget, the personal inflation calculator which people can use and that personal inflation calculator has been massively used. We had a very good partnership with the media - BBC, The Guardian - for it to be widely available. And indeed, in the first 24 hours or so of it being available on the BBC website, over a million people used it - over a million people accessing ONS data. MILES And you can find that out of course by visiting ons.gov.uk and calculate your own personal rate of inflation there. Of course, when we think about money, we inevitably think about work and that brings us on to the figures around the labour market. And one rather sombre area of the Labour Force Survey that's been the focus of again, a lot of attention this year, is the increasing number of people deemed to be economically inactive, perhaps very often because of long term sickness. Now, what do you make of that? IAN Economically inactive is not just people who are on sick, I mean there has been a steady move initially from those over age 50 to inactivity, and that means that they are reporting that they are not in work, nor are they looking for work. We've called it a bit of a flourish, that flight from the labour force of the over 50s is a real trend and a real worry for the economy, given the skills that those people hold, and we've done two surveys of the over 50s to understand why they have left the labour force and what might tempt them back in. 500,000 over 50s leaving the labour force, though it's only a very rough indicator, if you don't replace them somehow, and with every 100,000 people being around 0.1 of GDP full time equivalents, and that's 0.5 on the GDP. It's as simple as that. The other point I would make that I think is important is another real concern for the labour force. Just in the last few weeks we have started to see just a hint of an increase in inactivity amongst the 16 to 24s. That is important because if it were to continue it is normally an indicator of challenges in the labour force and when 16 to 24s are saying I don't have a job and I'm looking for one it tends to be because there isn't one around. And so I do think that there is an issue again for us to keep a laser focus on these numbers as we go into 2023. MILES Okay, so we've mentioned GDP and of course, there's been a lot of focus again on the level of GDP and whether the economy is in so called recession or expanding or whatever. Let's not get into that in any great detail now, but it's worth pointing out that alongside GDP, the ONS has been trying for some time now to broaden its focus on what matters in terms of wellbeing, both socially and economically. And to produce a more comprehensive picture of what's going on, aside from that very raw, basic GDP estimate. Can you tell us a little bit about what's developed on that front this year? IAN I think that's a really interesting point. We, as other parts of the world’s national statistical institutes have been saying, well, actually, there is much more to our gross domestic product than just what comes strictly from the economy. And so we have been working on the environment and natural capital and building that into our overall estimates. And we're now also working on some things that I have been thinking about for a long time and I'm very excited that we are going to be able to work on that. And that is to look at in many ways at the human capital that we have, and how that is being effectively used. If you are spending six hours a day, shall we say, caring for your elderly parent and perhaps your grandchildren, then are you being productive or not? And of course, the answer is you're being incredibly productive. Or if you are, as a neighbour of mine is, working a couple of evenings or a couple of afternoons a week at a homeless shelter in Somerset, then are you being productive in that volunteering? 100% yes. And so I think it is important that we build these extra pieces in now. Is this point about human capital, is this new? Well, the great, famous Nobel Prize winner Richard Stone wrote in his Nobel lecture about this, I made some suggestions, but at that time I would submit that it was actually quite hard to build the models in the way that one would want to. One could do the algebra, but it would kind of drop out after a while. Whereas now with numerical estimation, we can really move forward in an effective way and I'm looking forward to 2023 being a year when we really push forward with those models, and really build the human capital. And most importantly, alongside that, the wellbeing. Wellbeing is a much more complex indicator, and we have a consultation out at the moment which I see coming into fruition in 2023 around the measurement of our wellbeing. We talk about the increasing proportion of elderly and I think it is also important to think about that in the context of how are people ageing. Now, let me just give you a statistic, Miles. If I looked in 1951 at the age at which 1% of men had a probability of dying, that'd be about 50. If I looked at it now, it’s 65. So 65 is the new 50. And you can look at things in all kinds of ways like that, but that original idea is that of the great demographer James Vaupel. And this 65 is the new 50 is absolutely brilliant, but, and this is the nub of this, it needs to be healthy ageing. It comes back to that point about inactivity, what are we doing to enable people to feel that they can age healthily and therefore be productive whether that is through traditional paid employment or through other issues such as volunteering, that's something we will be spending a lot of time over the next little while estimating. MILES You mentioned ageing and on the topic of health in 2022, the introduction of what some may view as the GDP of health and that is the Health Index for England. Another important piece of work that's been going on here. IAN What the Health Index allows us to do is to get down to the local levels and we've got a pilot with colleagues in Northumberland, Director of Public Health up there to go down to sub local areas. And I think the important thing to recognise is the geographical difference here in levels of health. It's interesting to look at the national level, we need to look at the geography, expectations of life at birth for men in Glasgow City are 14 or 15 is less than expectations of life for men in places like Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, you know, that's a real issue. When I worked in Scotland, the Director of Public Health for Grampian region put out some statistics which showed within Aberdeen the difference between the two wards, probably seven or eight miles apart was 16, a full 16 years. Those are the kinds of differentials that I think we need to understand more, we would all agree it is a priority to reduce those inequalities in health. And it seems to me there is a challenge for us to understand that and to reduce those inequalities. MILES Okay, so we've talked about health, personal wellbeing, economic wellbeing as well. Now there's an additional element of attention for the ONS now, and that's been the environment and particularly monitoring progress towards net zero emissions by 2050 and to help with that ONS has contributed to the official climate change portal, which you can view at climate-change.data.gov.uk. Here's a statistic from that, in 2021 84% of our energy still came from non-renewable sources. IAN And that's what we need to continue to measure. And clearly the focus on energy and energy supply has increased this year as a result of the conflict in Ukraine. And we over the next while need to make sure that we have very accurate data on... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/25384449

Health: The role of public data in taking the pulse of a nation. 11/28/2022

Health: The role of public data in taking the pulse of a nation. Miles is joined by colleagues from the Health and Life Events team to explore how data is good for our health. Within the diagnosis: the Health Index, dubbed “the GDP of health”; the impacts of Covid-19 as well as an ageing society; and the increasing importance of linking data from numerous sources to generate complex insights that inform decision-making. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the Office for National Statistics podcast. This time we're taking the pulse of the nation's health and exploring the role of public data in making it better. Of course, we would say that statistics are good for you. We recommend at least five a day, but more seriously, what do the ONS figures say about the state of our health now? And what are we doing to create new and better statistical insights to support a healthier population in future? With us to examine all are ONS colleagues, Julie Stanborough, Deputy Director of Health and Life Events, Neil Bannister, Assistant Deputy Director of Health Analysis and, later in the podcast, Jonny Tinsley, Head of Health and Life Events Data Transformation. Julie to start with you. The World Health Organisation defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Now, the ONS has begun a major project that seeks to capture the key elements of that in one place and to a certain extent in one single number. Can explain what that is, and what it's all about? JULIE STANBOROUGH Yes, so that will be the Health Index, and as you say, it is kind of regarded as the GDP of health. And at its simplest, it allows the health of England and local authorities to be tracked over time, which allows greater understanding of the relationships between the drivers of health and health outcomes. So the index starts in England in 2015. And we've got data up to 2019, which is available online, but we're going to be publishing 2020 figures very shortly. MF So tell us about the nuts and bolts, what are the data sources here and how have they been put together? JS We've got a huge number of different data sources that go into the Health Index. We've grouped them into three different themes, that we have healthy people, healthy lives and healthy places. And we use data sources from within ONS, but also from across government, and more broadly, to give that really in-depth breadth of all the data that goes into health. MF What sort of factors, what sort of elements are we looking at? People living without serious health conditions? JS Yeah, so it's a whole range of things. For example, looking at child poverty through to access to green spaces, life expectancy, a whole range of different factors which contribute to whether a particular area is deemed to have high health index or a low health index. MF Is there particular value - because you can understand wanting to understand disparities at local level and we'll talk about that a bit a bit later - but boiling it down to a single reading, a GDP. That's a very ambitious thing. How useful, how relevant, is that figure going to be? Is it something that the future will look to us regularly and take as seriously as a big number like GDP? JS I'd really hope so. And I think because the complexity of health is so complex, if we can boil it down to one number and be able to track that over time, at a national level, or at a local level, that really helps people understand what's going on and helps them to engage, but equally because it has all the different data sources in there, it allows those policy makers in local authorities to be able to go into that data and explore what really is happening in their particular area. MF More than simply measuring the outputs or successes of the health services, it's about understanding a much wider range of factors as well as the environment in which people live and their socio-economic position as well. JS That's right. I mean, there are so many different aspects to it. And that's why the Health Index has so many different data sources in there. But because of that complexity, it makes it really difficult for people to understand what they should be doing to improve the health in their areas. So you need that breadth, but then the ability to aggregate it up into a single number helps with the accessibility. MF So the index will provide this big reading of this multi factor estimate of health but perhaps it'll be the case that it isn't so much what the index says at any given time, but how it changes over time, that'll be its real value. JS That's right. And it's being able to track that at a national level. And at a local level. We're going to be publishing 2020 results, but we're going to have to be quite careful with those results because it'd be the first year with the pandemic and so we'd expect to be seeing some changes as a result of the pandemic. But equally, some of the data collections will have changed as a result of not being able to interview people in the same way because of lockdown. So we're going to have to monitor that data over 2020 / 2021 and further to really see the impact of the pandemic. MF And provide also perhaps some measure of people's changing economic circumstances at a time when there's so much concern obviously around the cost of living. In the meantime, because this project the Health Index is still in its relative infancy of course we have a wealth of other data already that the ONS generates and brings in from elsewhere and works with. Of course the number one indicator of a nation's health is our life expectancy - how long we might be expected to survive. Tell us what's been happening - the broad picture - as far as life expectancy is concerned. JS Life expectancy, if I just explain what that is, is a statistical measure which estimates the average number of years a person can expect to live. So male life expectancy at birth in the United Kingdom for the years 2018 to 2020 was 79 years, and that compared to 83 years for females. And during the past two decades life expectancy has grown, but much faster growth appeared in the naughties, and during the 2010s. We've seen that life expectancy pretty much slow right down and flatten. MF As well as this obviously the key measure of life expectancy. There's another important dimension here and this is particularly relevant if we're talking about health and that of course is healthy life expectancy because it's all very well to be alive, but if you have not got a great quality of life, well that brings all sorts of other issues and it brings problems for the health service as well of course. Tell us about healthy life expectancy. What is that as a statistic, how is that measured? What are the characteristics that inform healthy life expectancy? JS It's slightly different to life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy is a measure of the average number of years someone can expect to live in good health or free from limiting illness, and in 2018 to 2020 male healthy life expectancy at birth in the UK was 63 years, which meant that you had 16 years of life in not good health. In contrast for females, they had 64 years of healthy life expectancy, which meant that they had 19 years of life in not good health. MF That's fascinating and obviously begs the question, has that period of healthy life expectancy been going up in line with overall life expectancy, or have people simply been living longer in poor health? JS Yeah, so between 2011/13 and 2018/2020, both males and females, there was no improvement in health and life expectancy. MF That goes some way to explaining some of the current pressures on the National Health Service. JS That's right. I mean, if you've got more people that aren't in good health and have limiting conditions that's going to have increasing pressure on our health services and our GP services. MF And it does mean also that people are dying from different things, and they might have died younger from different conditions. They're living longer, but perhaps in poorer and poorer health in many cases, and in the end, actually dying from different causes. What are the data saying? JS So there's a range of different factors which are associated with a healthy life expectancy, and things that you'd probably think yourself. So when we looked at areas across the country with the lowest healthy life expectancy, 29% of males aged 30 to 49 smoked compared to just 17% of those that were in the highest healthy life expectancy areas. So smoking is clearly one of the drivers. We've also looked at whether people are overweight, and more than one in eight children in the lowest healthy life expectancy areas became overweight between entering primary school and starting secondary school. In contrast, those in the highest healthy life expectancy areas, it was just one in every 10. So there's a number of different factors there that we can see are driving it. MF If any justification was needed on why public health campaigns tend to concentrate on issues like obesity and smoking that's starkly revealed in the numbers. So that's the big picture. That's what's happening at a national level. But tell us about the differences from place to place because the local variations are quite significant too, aren’t they? JS That's right. So to commit those geographical variations, Ribble Valley in Lancashire is ranked the healthiest out of 307 local authority areas in England, and that's using the Health Index. MF And the least healthy? JS So we do have all those rankings, but we do try to not think about the scores in a sort of ranking capacity. The whole point of having this information put out there is for local authorities to be able to compare themselves with similar local authorities or their nearest neighbour and see how different aspects of health are given the different policy initiatives that they're implementing in their local areas. MF Because lo and behold, whenever these league tables – and I do emphasise that we don't claim them to be league tables, they're often seen as such - when they appear of course, people want to know where is top. Whereas, surprise surprise, normally it goes with socio-economic status doesn't it. To put it bluntly, the better off areas see the highest life expectancy and healthy life expectancy? JS Yes, that's right. And even for those areas, you'd want them to be perhaps comparing themselves to other similar areas with the same sort of socio demographics and then to think about where different aspects of, whether it's smoking prevalence or childhood obesity, how are those different areas responding, what are the policies that they're putting in place to try and improve those statistics. MF Because again, it's not a matter of stating the obvious, which is self-evident, isn't it? Health outcomes tend to be better in more prosperous areas. This has been well known for some time, although we opened a local paper the other day writing up some of these numbers and saying certain towns in the West Midlands have been named and shamed as having the worst health locally. This is emphatically not about naming and shaming areas, neither is it about stating the obvious. As you say it's about informing better health outcomes, so resources can be better targeted. JS That's right. I was actually looking at a Coventry Marmot city review, and they have been using a whole range of different public health measures to try and improve the outcomes in that area. And one of the key measures they use is healthy life expectancy. They're comparing the outcomes after a number of years in their area to what's been going on nationally. So it's helping them benchmark the initiatives that they've been putting in place MF As with the overall Health Index itself, it sets the standard doesn't it. Puts in numbers what is clearly self-evident, but useful numbers because they give you that sense of the scale of the issue at the local level. That's at least as far as England is concerned, but also we've been working with the devolved administrations around the United Kingdom as well, and what do we know about that picture? JS So on the Health Index, that's actually one of the areas that we were looking to expand. So the Health Index at the moment covers England – we would really like to develop them for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales and then create a UK wide one as well. So that's something that we're looking to develop in the future. MF That's a work in progress, and a ‘watch this space’ then for forthcoming publications, both of the Health Index and of data being compared across the UK as well. So Neil, people are living longer, but with that experiencing a whole range of health conditions. Tell us what we're picking up in the data and what's changing. NEIL BANNISTER That’s right Miles. So age is a very big important social determinant for health and an ageing society places a big burden on the health and social care systems in the country. Recent Census analysis from the 2021 Census showed that nearly one in five people in England and Wales was over 65 now, with the fastest increase happening in the 85 plus age group. So there really is a fundamental kind of growth in the ageing population, and that leads to increases in certain disease types. So for example, we know that being in an elderly age group you can experience being more disabled and having more multiple chronic and complex health conditions as well as there being an increase in dementia and Alzheimer's disease. So for example, with dementia, we know that around about 900,000 people in the UK have been diagnosed with dementia and by 2025 it is expected to reach around about 1 million people in the UK. In terms of how we look at it from our data within ONS, we know that 12.5% of all deaths that we record are caused by dementia and Alzheimer's, and it is the leading cause of death in age groups over 80 plus within England and Wales. MF That is a relatively recent development. NB That's right. So that's happened really over the last three to five years, we've seen this increase in the dementia and Alzheimer's as a leading cause of death in England and Wales. MF And is the rate of increase showing any sign of abating? NB Well, if you take away the COVID pandemic period, no, it doesn't. It looks like it's actually on track to continue to be the leading cause of death and with the new figures that we have in from Census showing there is an ageing population, and the age is increasing, we would expect there to be a continued increase in the number of deaths from dementia and Alzheimer's and, as I said, the number of diagnoses as well. MF Yes, that's a stark finding and something you'd suspect we're going to be hearing quite a lot more about. NB It's not just within the UK that this is occurring though. When you look across other economically developed countries. So looking at the data from the OECD, for example, we can see that Japan, Italy and Greece - these are countries with well-known elderly populations - they have a very high prevalence of dementia. The UK out of the 44 OECD countries UK is 15th highest in terms of the prevalence of dementia, which is equivalent to where Denmark is as well in terms of comparability. MF And that speaks loudly to some of the challenges the health system is going to face in future, and the social care sector as well, which is already under pressure in some respects. Tell us about the potential impacts there, what are we seeing? NB What we found during the pandemic is that there are big gaps in data around social care statistics and being able to understand that population within our society and that group in society. MF Is that because the sector is diverse, and it's sprawling and it's uncertain and in places it's quite informal? NB Absolutely. There are different types of social care. There's social care that happens within care residences, and there's also social care that happens within the home. There’s a big private industry there as well as the public sector being involved. And trying to pull together information across that diverse and complex landscape is very difficult. MF What are we doing to try and close some of those gaps? NB So we're working very closely with the Department of Health and Social Care. They have a large programme of work to try and collate data and improve data collections across the piece. What we've been doing, we've been looking at particular areas. So we're looking at trying to understand more about self-funders - individuals who fund their own social care, as opposed to those who have the state to fund it for them. And other areas of what we're doing is to look also at the workforce in social care, which is very hard to track over time and to understand the size and scale of that workforce. So that's another area of work that we're doing. MF And this is just part of a much wider body of work going on across the ONS to try and shed new light on health inequalities in particular. NB Yes, that's right. So we are going to be using the Census, the 2021 census data, to really look in more detail at social care once that data becomes available. But what we have been able to do though, during the COVID pandemic, is use the 2011 census data to link to other sources to really understand how, for example, the COVID pandemic had impacts across a number of different groups in society. We were able to produce statistics for the first time looking at the impact that COVID had on particular ethnic groups, on religious groups, and on the disabled groups in society. MF And what did we discover about the unequal impacts of COVID? NB Yeah, so when we're looking at ethnicity for example, since the start of the period where the Omicron variant was more prominent, we found that the Bangladeshi ethnic group of males had the highest rate of death of COVID-19, as opposed to the white British group. And we also found that for females, the Pakistani ethnic group had the highest rate of death involving COVID-19, which is 2.5 times higher than that of the white British group MF On the topic of ethnicity, was it factors such as the nature of the occupations undertaken by those groups, or perhaps socio-economic status, living conditions and so forth? Or was there something, by the very nature of their ethnicity, that was actually contributing towards higher mortality? Have we got to the bottom of that? NB It's very hard to know that, Miles. What we've done is some complicated modelling to understand, and we've taken into account certain social demographic groups and economic factors, but we still do find that certain ethnic groups have a higher rate of death, even when taking into account those factors. Things that it could be, but we don't know the detail yet, could maybe be how... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/25095972

Crime: Understanding its impact on society through data. 10/31/2022

Crime: Understanding its impact on society through data. In this episode of Statistically Speaking Miles is helped with his enquiries by Meghan Elkin and Billy Gazard from the Office for National Statistics, as he investigates how we use data to get valuable insights into the impact of crime on modern society. Along the way he debunks common misconceptions; learns how the nature of crime continues to evolve; and uncovers the work being done behind-the-scenes to make crime data more inclusive. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Hello, and welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking’ the Office for National Statistics podcast. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this episode, we're going to be investigating crime. What is the statistical evidence that despite the impression you might have got from the media, overall crime in England and Wales has actually been falling? Or is it the case that the nature of crime has simply changed and we're more likely these days to be targeted online than in the streets, and what in any case is the value of understanding the overall level of crime when that term captures such a wide and varied range of social ills and harms? Helping us with our enquiries today are Meghan Elkin, head of the ONS centre for crime and justice, and Billy Gazard head of acquisitive crime and stakeholder engagement. Meghan, so much to talk about in the many and varied crime figures that ONS produces, but let's focus first on where those numbers come from. In this case, there are two major data sets and the first and arguably the most significant of those, statistically at least, is a very large survey and it's not information gathered from the police or government. It's information that comes directly from people and their experience of crime. Tell us all about that. MEGHAN ELKIN That's correct. So the best source we have for measuring crime is the crime survey for England and Wales and this is a massive undertaking. We interview around 34,000 people aged 16 and over each year, and over 2000 children, and we really appreciate everyone who takes the time to respond to our survey as it helps us to produce these important figures. As you said, crime covers a wide range of offences and there's no perfect source, but the crime survey has had an established methodology over a long period of time, which really helps us to get a good idea of the trends and changes in society that people are experiencing. MF Give us a sense of the scale of this operation. Is it one of the biggest surveys the ONS runs? ME It is, I would say that we are consistently speaking to 34,000 people each year and what's probably different to most surveys is that we have children as part of the response as well. So when we go to a household, we'll interview an adult, so someone aged 16 and over, to ask about their experiences. If there are children aged 10 to 15 in their household. We'll also ask if one of them would be able to complete our children's survey so that we get a picture of the crime that they're experiencing as well. MF And what is the particular value of speaking people to people face to face in their homes like that? ME I mean, the real value of the crime survey for measuring the trends is that it doesn't matter if people have reported what they've experienced to the police or not, so unlike police recorded crime, it doesn't have that impact. And so we can ask people about their experiences in the last 12 months. We'll also ask them questions about their attitudes towards crime related issues such as the police and amount of security that they have, and for the most sensitive questions rather than being asked by the interviewer directly, we'll give someone a tablet so that they can complete those questions privately themselves to ensure that confidentiality and confidence in telling us such sensitive information. MF That’s taken the survey into some quite new areas, hasn't it in recent years, would you like to talk about some of those developments? You talk about actually, and this is highly unusual, of course a very sensitive area, it's about the ability to actually speak to children as well. Tell us to what end that work has been directed... ME So for children in particular, we've been working closely with a number of stakeholders to understand what's most useful for us to ask children. So we do collect their general experiences of crime in the last 12 months, but we also ask them about their experiences online and that's provided some really useful data about children's lived experiences about being bullied and whether that's happening at school or online, but also the behaviours and activities that sometimes could be quite risky that they're taking part in online. And that's given some new information into that sector that we had just not understood before, and has been really useful in shaping policy and understanding how children can be better protected online. MF So this is quite an intensive encounter with the ONS data gatherer as they're sitting down for about 40 to 45 minutes or so. But how are the people selected? And how do you go about ensuring that they're a good representative sample and that we're not missing out important sections of the population, which, on a subject like this, of course, it's very important to get a really accurate picture of how people are experiencing crime at that grassroots level. ME So we use a postcode address file, basically a list of addresses to sample from, so households are chosen at random to ensure that we've got a representative sample for England and Wales. That's why it's really important and we really appreciate people responding to the survey because that's how we ensure good quality data, by getting that good, rounded sample. MF So there's a lot of rich data coming out of the crime survey, but by its nature, it doesn't cover some of the more serious offences does it? ME No that's true, particularly the higher harm but lower volume crimes, for example knife crime, those don't appear in the survey very often. And so we look to other data sources for those. It also excludes crimes that are often termed “victimless”, such as possession of drugs, which again, we then measure through different sources. MF And that is where the other major data source starts to become more relevant. We're looking at very serious offences particularly, including murder and rape. Those offences are covered by the police and their recording of crime. Tell us about the value of that data, and how that contributes to the wider understanding of crime. ME So the police record all the crimes that are reported to them and those are fed into us via the Home Office as a record of police recorded crime. And it has lots of advantages as a data source in that for some crime types, it is a good measure. And unlike the crime survey for those crime types, it can be very good at looking at short term trends. So particularly through the pandemic it was helpful for some of those crime types where we know that it's a better measure. But we also know that there are a lot of crimes that people don't report to the police and that's where that source of data struggles the most, particularly for really hidden crimes. Rape would be one of those crimes, where relatively few people do report that to the police so it doesn't appear in the numbers as much. But the police figures are subject to changes in recording practices. So when new offences are introduced that obviously changes how the count is put together, but also it’s impacted by police activity and how they record and that also will change the numbers. When you see increases in police recorded crime, for example, it doesn't necessarily mean that crime has gone up. And that's part of our work at ONS to unpick and understand what's going on there. But it does have benefits as you say, for some of the higher harm but lower volume crimes that we see, homicide it records very well, and for knife crime it's our best measure. So there's definitely a place for it as a data source still. MF So two major data sources contributing to this bigger picture. And what has that bigger picture been showing us these last few years? ME Well when we look across trends in general, actually, over time, crime has been decreasing since the mid 90s, and has been more flat in recent years. So the crime survey estimated around 20 million offences in 1995. And we've seen that decreasing over time and our latest data shows that it's around 5 million offences. And that's when you're using a comparable estimate. So the overall picture is very much if that crime sits much lower than it used to in the mid 90s. And that's not just a pattern that we've seen in England and Wales. It's a pattern that's reflected across other countries, across Europe and America. And it's something that lots of people have tried to understand what's really driven that long term change. More recently we have seen some decreases, some of them very much linked to the pandemic. But now as we look and compare before the pandemic to our most recent data, we have still seen some decreases. I think it's always important to point out that while total crime is a useful measure and reflection, it's only when you really start digging into the individual crime types that you can start seeing some trends that just get averaged out when you look at the total. MF Yes, you need to understand what kind of offences we're talking about. And if we talk about that long term picture, isn't it the case that we saw, coming out of the 1980s into the 1990s, turn of the century, violent crime decreasing, damage to property and so forth and theft from cars. Was that the broad trend that we saw? ME Yeah, so we've seen decreases in that time period across a number of crime types. One of the most popular explanations of the overall pattern there is the “security hypothesis”, which is very much built on the widespread improvements we've seen in security devices which have prevented crimes from happening and caused that decrease. So you mentioned there of vehicles, vehicle theft has decreased, most likely due to some things like improvements in central deadlocking systems and electric immobilisers, those security measures that have improved so much. But we have also seen decreases in violence across that time as well. MF Threat to property is one thing of course, but yes, personal safety and and our well-being on the streets, is of course a major factor as well. Talk us through the trends on that because if you rely entirely on the news media for your understanding of violent crime, you probably think that things are in a pretty desperate situation. ME So when we look back over that long term picture again, the estimate that we have from the crime survey for violence shows that there were around 4.5 million offences in 1995 And that compares to 1.2 million in the most recent data. Obviously, we've talked about the limitations to the crime survey data for understanding violence, but the more serious crimes within this type that we don't see in the crime survey are at much lower levels. They are lower volume, thankfully, and so we have seen some patterns there of variation during the pandemic. MF Another important development these last few years, of course, has been getting a much better understanding of the nature and extent of child abuse, an area of huge sensitivity and massive public concern. Can you talk a little about the work that's been going on in that area? ME So we've been conducting a feasibility study over the last few years to look at whether a measure of prevalence of child abuse could be estimated. A few years ago we put together a compendium of statistics on child abuse to help people understand the levels of child abuse and the nature of child abuse being experienced in our society. But the major gap in that evidence base is a prevalence level for what's being experienced now by children. We do in the crime survey for England and Wales ask people about the experiences they had as children. So we asked that of adults and that gives us some insight but it's still not helping policymakers understand what's actually happening in society today. So we've been conducting lots of research to understand the challenges, and how we might be able to overcome those of asking children such sensitive questions. And that work has been going really well, we're now at the stage of looking at what questions could actually be asked and the safeguarding that would need to wrap around that survey to look after the children completing it. So we're working very closely with DFE and Ofsted and schools to understand how that might best work going forward. So that's the next stage of that project. MF What has that experience and that engagement brought to this highly sensitive topic? ME We work very closely with the NSPCC, who have been extremely supportive of the project and how it's developing and helping us understand the safeguarding procedures that we might be able to use with a survey, and the support that we can give children and the different ways of doing that. There's a careful balance of helping children feel they are able to open up and tell us about experiences while also then safeguarding them and managing that challenge of confidentiality. And the NSPCC and others like them, obviously have great experience of being in this place and supporting children that we can then take on board to make sure that we do the survey in the best way possible. MF That's going to remain an important piece of work for the future. If there's one really important use of all this data, it is to understand the risks that any of us face of becoming the victim of crime at any given time. Billy, what are the numbers saying about that? BILLY GAZARD So I think it's quite a complicated picture. When we're talking about all the crime that the crime survey measures, for example, just under one in five people would have experienced a crime in the last 12 months according to the latest data, but obviously that varies across different crime types. So for example, fraud, about one in 12 people would have experienced fraud in the last 12 months, whereas offences such as violence, only about 2% of the population would have experienced a violent offence in the last 12 months. MF That overall is kind of reassuring, I guess, but nevertheless, those are significant sections of the population. BG Yes, I agree. That still translates into a lot of people experiencing that crime. So obviously, it's really important that we continue to monitor levels of violence moving forward to see how that changes over time. MF And if you break it down by geography, I guess of course, in some areas, those risks, particularly of violence and crimes against property are going to be much higher? BG This is looking at the national picture, but there will be variations at geographical levels, as well as by lots of different characteristics. For example, we know that younger people are at more risk of experiencing violence than older sections of the population. MF So that's the overall picture, but Meghan the risks might be rather different if you happen to be female. MEGHAN ELKIN There are some crime types that disproportionately affect women and girls compared to men and boys. Say for example, we estimate 1.6 million women aged 16 to 74 suffered domestic abuse in the last year and that one in three women over the age of 16 were subjected to at least one form of harassment in the last year. So there again, there is that variation in crime types that people are experiencing. And when we look at measures around domestic abuse, again, the crime survey for England and Wales is our most trusted measure. And as I reflected earlier, those are the crime types where we actually give respondents a tablet so that they can complete those questions confidentially. And actually, that posed us a particular challenge during the pandemic where our face-to-face interviewing had to stop and we moved to telephone interviews, and we managed to make that switch very quickly to be able to keep getting the crime estimates that were needed to understand society. But we did think there was a risk of asking people on the telephone those really sensitive questions about experiences of domestic abuse and sexual assault, but the concerns around confidentiality and respondent safeguarding were just too great for us to be able to ask those questions. So for a period of time, we weren't collecting that information when the survey returned to the field, though, we went back as early as we could so that we could start collecting those important topics again. And we now have the first data from those for domestic abuse since before the pandemic started. Now that we've started to get the face-to-face survey back into publication, some caution needs to be taken for interpreting those results. Because of how the surveys come back there are some challenges to quality and so again, we need to be a bit cautious in interpreting them, but it's so important that we've got those figures back. And actually what we see from the crime survey is that there's been no change in the prevalence of domestic abuse in the most recent data when compared to before the pandemic. But this is an opportunity to show how we use multiple data sources to really understand what might be going on in society and what people are experiencing. Because while the crime survey has now shown no change in the prevalence of domestic abuse, we have seen increases throughout that time in police recorded crime data. And we've also seen increases in data that we collect from charities. We work closely with a range of charities in the domestic abuse space to understand the changes that are happening to their services and the demand they're seeing, but also to help us understand the nature of abuse. So during lockdowns for example, we saw a 22% increase in calls to the National Domestic Abuse helpline for the year ending March 21, so there was definitely that increase in demand. But now combining that with the crime survey evidence that we haven't seen an increase in prevalence, actually that helps us understand that maybe that increase in demand from charities primarily came from a lack of other coping mechanisms and people reaching out in different ways to get the support they needed during that difficult time. MF And that would be seem to be a very valuable example of using other data sources than police recorded crime to get an accurate picture of what's going on, because of the simple reluctance that so many people have in reporting these experiences when they happen to them. ME Yes, that's true. I mean, the evidence we have is that one in five victims of partner abuse in the last year would have told the police, and that just shows how hidden these crime types are. And that's true when you look into sexual assault as well, where one in six tell us that they would have told the police about what happened to them. And that's an area where we haven't used charity data before to help us understand sexual assault, but it's something we're working on at the moment to be included in... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/24820485

Trust in Data: The importance of ethics and privacy in producing statistics for the public good 08/22/2022

Trust in Data: The importance of ethics and privacy in producing statistics for the public good In this episode Miles is joined by Professor Luciano Floridi of Oxford University; Simon Whitworth of the UK Statistics Authority; and Pete Stokes from the ONS to talk about data ethics and public trust in official statistics. TRANSCRIPT MILES FLETCHER Hello, I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode of Statistically Speaking we're exploring data ethics and public trust in official statistics. In 2007, 15 years ago to the very day we are recording this, the UK Parliament gave the Office for National Statistics the objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. But what does, or should, the “public good” mean? How does the ONS seek to deliver it in practice? Why should the public trust us to act in their interests at a time of exponential growth in data of all kinds? Where are the lines to be drawn between individual privacy and anonymity on the one hand, the potential of data science to improve public services and government policies to achieve better health outcomes, even saving lives, on the other. Joining me to discuss these topics today are Simon Whitworth, Head of Data Ethics at the UK statistics authority, Pete Stokes, Director of the Integrated Data programme here at the ONS and Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and the ethics of information and director of the digital ethics lab at the Oxford Internet Institute. Professor let's start this big concept with you. What do you think Parliament meant when it said that the ONS should serve the public good in this context? LUCIANO FLORIDI It might have meant many things, and I suspect that a couple of them must have been in their minds. First of all, we know that data or information, depending on the vocabulary, has an enormous value if you know how to use it. And, collecting it and using it properly for the future of the country, to implement the right policies, to avoid potential mistakes and to see things in advance - knowledge is power, information is power. So, this might have been one of the things that they probably meant by “public good”. The other meaning, it might be a little bit more specific...It's when we use the data appropriately, ethically, to make sure that some sector or some part of the population is not left behind, to learn who needs more help, to know what help and when to deliver it, and to whom. So, it's not just a matter of the whole nation doing better, or at least avoiding problems, but also specific sectors of the population being helped, and to make sure that the burden and the advantages are equally distributed among everybody. That's normally what we mean by public good and certainly, that analysis is there to serve it. MF So there's that dilemma between using the power of data to actually achieve positive outcomes. And for government, on the other hand, being seen as overbearing, or Orwellian, and spying on people through the use of data. LF That would be the risk that sometimes comes under the term “paternalism”, that knowing a lot about your citizens might lead to the temptation of manipulating their lives, their choices, their preferences. I wouldn't over-emphasise this though. The kind of legislation that we have and the constraints, the rules, the double checking, make sure that the advantage is always in view and can more easily be squeezed out of the data that we accumulate, and sometimes the potential abuses and mistakes, the inevitable temptation to do the wrong thing, are kept in check. So yes, the State might use the government’s political power, might misuse data, and so we need to be careful, but I wouldn't list that as my primary worry. My primary worry perhaps, would be under-using the data that we have, or making mistakes inadvertently. MF Do you think then, perhaps as a country, the UK has been too cautious in this area in the past? LF I don't think it has been too cautious, either intellectually or strategically. There's been a lot of talking about doing the right thing. I think it's been slightly cautious, or insufficiently radical, in implementing policies that have been around for some time. But we now have seen several governments stating the importance of that analysis, statistical approaches to evidence, and so on. But I think that there is more ambition in words than in deeds, so I would like to see more implementations, more action and less statements. Then the ambition will be matched by the actions on the ground. MF One of the reasons perhaps there might have been caution in the past is of course concern about how the public would react to that use of data. What do we know of public attitudes now in 2022, to how government bodies utilise data? LF I think the impression is that, depending on whom you ask, whether it is the younger population or slightly older people my age, people who lived in the 50s versus my students, they have different attitudes. We're getting used to the fact that our data are going to be used. The question is no longer are they going to be used, but more like, how and who is using them? For what purposes? Am I in charge? Can I do something if something goes wrong? And I would add also, in terms of attitude, one particular feature which I don't see sufficiently stressed, is who is going to help me if something goes wrong? Because the whole discussion, or discourse, should look more at how we make people empowered, so that they can check, they have control, they can go do this, do that. Well, who has the time, the ability, the skills, and indeed the will, to do that? It's much easier to say, look, there will be someone, for example the government, who will protect your rights, who you can approach, and they will do the right thing for you. Now we're getting more used to that. And so, I believe that the attitude is slightly changing towards a more positive outlook, as long as everything is in place, we are seeing an increasingly positive attitude towards public use of public data. MF Pete, your role is to make this happen. In practice, to make sure that government bodies, including the ONS, are making ethical use of data and serving the public good. Just before we get into that though, explain if you would, what sort of data is being gathered now, and for what purposes? PETE STOKES So we've got a good track record of supporting research use of survey data, that we collect largely in ONS, but on other government departments as well. But over the last few years, there's been an acceleration and a real will to make use of data that have been collected for other purposes. We make a lot of use now of administrative data, these are data that are collected by government not for an analytical purpose but for an operational purpose. For example, data that are collected by HMRC from people when they're collecting tax, or from the Department of Work and Pensions when they're collecting benefits, or from local authorities when they're collecting council tax - all of those administrative data are collected and stored. There's an increasing case to make those data available for analysis which we're looking to support. And then the other new area is what's often called “faster data”, and these data that are typically readily available, usually in the public domain where you get a not so deep insight as you'd get from a survey of administrative data, but you could get a really quick answer. And a good example of that from within the ONS is that we calculate inflation. As a matter of routine, we collect prices from lots of organisations, but you can more quickly do some of that if you can pull some data that are readily available on the internet to give you those quicker indicators, faster information of where prices are rising quickly where they're dropping quickly. There's a place for all of these depending on the type of analysis that you want to do. MF This is another area where this ethical dilemma might arise though isn't it, because when you sit down with someone and they've agreed to take part in the survey, they know what they're going in for. But when it comes to other forms of information, perhaps tax information that you've mentioned already, some people might think, why do they want to know that? PS When people give their data to HMRC or to DWP as part of the process of receiving a service, like paying tax for example, I think people generally understand what they need to give that department for their specific purpose. When we then want to use this data for a different purpose, there is a larger onus on us to make sure that we are protecting those data, we're protecting the individual and that those data are only being used ethically and in areas of trust, specifically in the public interest. So, it's important that we absolutely protect the anonymity of the individuals, that we make sure where their data are used, and that we are not using the data of those data subjects as individuals, but instead as part of a large data-set to look for trends and patterns within those data. And finally, that the analysis that are then undertaken with them are explicitly and demonstrably in the public interest, that they serve the public good of all parts of society. MF And that's how you make the ethical side of this work in practice, by showing that it can be used to produce faster and more accurate statistics than we could possibly get from doing a sample survey? PS Yes, exactly, and sample surveys are very, very powerful when you want to know about a specific subject, but they're still relatively small. The largest sample survey that the ONS does is the Labour Force Survey, which collects data from around 90,000 people every quarter. Administrative datasets have got data from millions of people, which enables you to draw your insights not just at a national level and national patterns, but if you want to do some analysis on smaller geographic areas, administrative data gives you the power to do that when surveys simply don't. But, any and all use of data must go through a strict governance process to ensure that the confidentiality of the data subjects be preserved. And not only will the use be clearly and demonstrably in the public interest, but also, will be ethically sound and will stand up to scrutiny in that way as well. MF And who gets to see this stuff? PS The data are seen by the accredited researchers that apply to use it. So, a researcher applies to use the data, they're accredited, and they demonstrate their research competence and their trustworthiness. They can use those data in a secure lockdown environment, and they do their analysis. When they complete their analysis, those can then be published. Everybody in the country can see the results of those analyses. If you've taken part in a social survey, or you've contributed some data to one of the administrative sources that we make available, you can then see all the results of all the analysis that are done with those data. MF But when you say its data, this is where the whole process of anonymization is important, isn't it? Because if I'm an accredited researcher selling it to see names and addresses, or people's personal, sensitive personal information. PS No, absolutely not. And the researchers only get to see the data that they need for their analysis. And because we have this principle, that the data are being used as an aggregated dataset, you don't need to see people's names or people's addresses. You need to know where people live geographically, in a small or broad area, but not the specific address. You need to know someone's demographic characteristics, but you don't need to know their name, so you can't see their name in the data. And that principle of pseudonymisation, or the de-identification of data, before their used is really important. When the analyses are completed and the outputs are produced, those are then reviewed by an expert team at ONS, and so the data are managed by us to ensure that they are fully protected, wholly non-disclosive, and that it's impossible to identify a member of the public from the published outputs. MF Historically, government departments didn't have perhaps the best record in sharing data around other bodies for the public benefit in this way. But all that changed, didn't it? A few years back with a new piece of legislation which liberalised, to an extent, what the ONS is able to do. PS So, the Digital Economy Act, passed in 2017, effectively put on a standard footing the ability of other departments to make their data available for researchers in the same way that ONS had already been able to do since the 2007 System Registration Service Act. It gave us parity, which then gave other departments the ability to make their data available and allow us to help them to do so, to take the expertise that the ONS has in terms of managing these data securely, managing access to them appropriately, accrediting the researchers, checking all the outputs and so on, to give the benefit of our expertise to the rest of government. In order that the data that they hold, that has previously been underutilised arguably, could then be fully used for analyses to develop policies or deliver services, to improve understanding of the population or cohorts of the population or geographic areas of the country, or even sectors of industry or segments of businesses, for example, in a way that hasn't previously been possible, and clearly benefits the country overall. MF So the aim here is to make full use of a previously untapped reservoir, a vast reservoir, an ocean you might even say, of public data. But who decides what data gets brought in in this way? PS We work closely with the departments that control the data, but ultimately, those departments decide what use can be made of their data. So, it is for HMRC, DWP, the Department for Education, it’s for them to decide which data they choose to make available through the Secure Research Service (SRS) or the Integrated Data Service (IDS) that we run in ONS. When they're supportive and recognise the analytical value of their data, we then manage the service where researchers apply to use those data. Those applications are then assessed by ONS first and foremost, we then discuss those requests and the use cases with the data owning departments and say, do you agree this would be a sensible use of your data? MF Is there an independent accreditation panel that reports to the UK statistics Authority Board, that assesses the request to use the data is in the public interest, that it serves the public good? PS The ethics of the proposal are also assessed by an independent ethics advisory committee, whether it's the national statistician's data ethics advisory committee or another. There's a lot of people involved in the process to make sure that any and every use of data is in the public interest. MF From what we know from the evidence available, certainly according to the latest public confidence and official statistics survey - that's a big biannual survey run by the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) - I guess for that, and other reasons, public trust remains high. The Survey said 89% of people that gave a view trusted ONS, and 90% agreed that personal information provided to us would be kept confidential. But is there a chance that we could lose some of that trust now, given that there is much greater use, and much greater sharing, of admin data? It should be said that it doesn't give people the chance to opt out. PS I think one of the reasons that trust has remained high is because of the robust controls we have around the use of data. Because of the comprehensive set of controls and the framework that we put around use of data that protects confidentiality, that ensures that all uses are in the public interest. And another important component of it is that all use of data that we support is transparent by default. So, any analyst wanting to use data that are held by ONS, or from another department that we support, we publish the details of who those analysts are, which data they're using, what they're using them for, and then we require them to publish the outputs as well. And that transparency helps maintain public trust because if someone wants to know what their data is being used for, they can go to our website or directly to the analyst, and they can see the results tangibly for themselves. Now, they might not always agree that every use case is explicitly in the public interest, but they can see the thought process. They can see how the independent panel has reached that conclusion, and that helps us to retain the trust. There's a second half of your question around whether there is a risk of that changing. There is always a risk but we are very alive to that, which is why as we built the Integrated Data Service, and we look to make more and more government data available, that we don't take for granted the trust we've already got, and that we continue to work with the public, and with privacy groups, to make sure that as we build the new service and make more data available, we don't cross a line inadvertently, and we don't allow data to be used in a way that isn't publicly acceptable. We don't allow data to be combined in a way that would stretch that comfort. And this is that kind of proactive approach that we're trying to take, that we believe will help us retain public trust, despite making more and more data available. MF Professor Floridi, we gave you those survey results there, with people apparently having confidence in the system as it stands, but I guess it just takes a couple of negative episodes to change sentiment rapidly. What examples have we seen of that, and how have institutions responded? LF I think the typical examples are when data are lost, for example, inadvertently because of a breach and there is nobody at fault, but maybe someone introduced the wrong piece of software. It could be a USB, someone may be disgruntled, or someone else has found a way of entering the database - then the public gets very concerned immediately. The other case is when there is the impression, which I think is largely unjustified, but the impression remains, that the data in question are being used unjustly to favour maybe some businesses, or perhaps support some policies rather than others. And I agree with you, unfortunately, as in all cases, reputation is something very hard to build and can be easily lost. It's a bit unfair, but as always in life, building is very difficult but breaking down and destroying is very easy. I think that one important point here to consider is that there is a bit of a record as we move through the years. The work that we're talking about, as we heard, 2017 is only a few years ago, but as we build confidence and a good historical record, mistakes will happen, but they will be viewed as mistakes. In other words, there will be glitches and there will be forgiveness from the public built into the mechanism, because after... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/24071325

Labour & Wages: The tracking of employment and pay across the UK 07/26/2022

Labour & Wages: The tracking of employment and pay across the UK David Freeman and Nicola White join Miles to discuss how the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tracks employment and pay across the UK. Transcript: Hello and welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. In this episode, we enter the world of work and clock on for a shift with the ONS labour market team. We'll explore how they keep track of employment and pay across the UK and find out how the figures we hear so much about in the news should really be interpreted. At your service, are employees of the month, our head of labour market and household statistics David Freeman, and later on his colleague, senior statistician Nicola White. David, let's start with the basics. And one common misconception you still hear around the official statistics on unemployment is that they're based on the number of people claiming out of work benefits. And so, the theory goes therefore, that they're subject to manipulation in some way. But to be absolutely clear, the figures don't come from any other government department. This is data that comes from the ONS talking directly to real people, in their tens of thousands. DAVID FREEMAN That's absolutely right, Miles. The bulk of the information that we publish as part of our labour market statistics come from something called the ‘Labour Force Survey’. As this is one of our big household surveys, every three months we sample 40,000 households across the UK. And we go and we interview the people in those households about their labour market status. So, are they working, are they not working. We also gather a lot of information about the people in those households, what age they are, whether they have got a disability, what ethnic group [they belong to], which gives a us rich picture of the UK labour market. MILES FLETCHER And by the standards of any survey, any regular survey, that's a huge sample isn’t it. I know we don't go in for superlatives, but it's possibly the biggest household survey regularly undertaken of any kind? DAVID FREEMAN I think it is the biggest one in the UK, outside of the Census of course, and again, through the data that we use, we’ll learn about the labour market, but the data will also feed into things like population estimates. So quite a wide range of uses, but its core purpose is really trying to measure the UK labour market. MILES FLETCHER And it's that time spent with people to gather a whole raft of data from them, and at scale, that can give a localised picture, which is so important too. DAVID FREEMAN Absolutely, we get a lot of information from the Labour Force Survey, either by age groups, by country of birth, also by regional level, and we have an annual version of the Labour Force Survey where we put the data together across a longer time period, which means we can get data down to things like local authority levels as well which is important for local government. MILES FLETCHER And how do we choose people to take part? DAVID FREEMAN It’s a totally random process. So we have access to the postcode directory for the UK, which is effectively a list of all the households in the UK, and we take a random sample of those. However, we make sure within taking that sample that we're represented across the country. So within each local authority area, we've got enough people to be able to give us a robust estimate of what's happening there. MILES FLETCHER You stay in the survey a little while, don’t you? DAVID FREEMAN You do, that's right, and that's one of the strengths of the Labour Force Survey. If you're selected to take part, you are in there for what we call “five waves”. So if you're selected in January, we'll also come back and talk to you again in April, July, October and the following January. And that's important because not only do we find out what people are doing now, as you say we find out how people have changed, and whether they have moved into employment, out of employment, how have their circumstances changed. And that gives a deep insight into how people are flowing through the labour market and changing over time. MILES FLETCHER So, big sample, lots of data coming in. When it comes to the analysis though, essentially, we group people under three big categories. Now the first of those is employment. It sounds self-evident, but what is the definition of an employed person? DAVID FREEMAN To be employed is to be someone who has done paid work in the reference week, so when we interview people we’ll say, what were you doing in the week before we're interviewing you? They are considered employed if they have done paid work for a minimum of one hour in that week. So the bar is, you could say it’s quite low, in terms of one hour of work a week. But we have looked, and not that many people work that little in a week – less than 3% of people work less than five hours. So, as well as you'll get paid, we have a couple of other areas as well. We cover people who are employees, so employed by a company, the self-employed, people in government training schemes and people who work for their family business and might not get a wage packet but benefit from working for that business. MILES FLETCHER What is the average number of hours that employed people do? DAVID FREEMAN Overall, the average is around about 31 hours a week, and that does differ between if you're full time or part-time. So if you're full time, then the average is around 36. If you're part time, the average is around 16 hours a week. MILES FLETCHER Okay, so that's a working week. Now who is unemployed? Technically speaking. DAVID FREEMAN The technical definition of unemployed, there are three elements to it. Firstly, you've got to be not employed, so not doing any paid work. But you must also be actively seeking work in the previous four weeks. So that means applying for jobs, going to interviews, looking through listings, etc. And finally, you must be available to start work in the next two weeks. So you have got to be available to start a job within the next fortnight after we interview you. Again, another international definition used across the world to define who's unemployed. MILES FLETCHER And how long do you have to be unemployed to be classed as long-term unemployed? Because that's a very important category to understand as well. DAVID FREEMAN To be considered long-term unemployed, a person must have been in that position for a year or more. MILES FLETCHER What's the average time that people are currently spending unemployed? DAVID FREEMAN It's a bit hard to say, we don’t have a technical age or an average time, but the majority of people who are unemployed have been unemployed for less than six months. So people moving into unemployment after having recently lost a job or moving through unemployment to get to a job. And it's just under 1 in 3, who have been unemployed for more than a year. MILES FLETCHER So if you don't satisfy any of those two definitions. You're not doing any kind of paid work and you're not actively seeking it in the way you've described, where does that leave you? DAVID FREEMAN Well, that leaves you in a third group that we call the “economically inactive”. And so these people are not in work, and are either not actively seeking work, or are unavailable to start work. So you can be looking for work and not available, and you'd be economically inactive, or you might be available and not looking, and again, you'd be economically inactive there. And the sort of people included in this category are the sort of people who may be looking after family or home, they are stay-at-home parents, or they have caring responsibilities that mean they can't work. They might have a long-term illness or disability which means they are not able to work, or they may have retired. It's the people who aren't working and are not looking or available for work. MILES FLETCHER One contentious area under this definition of the economically inactive is a group that swells and contracts according to the economic cycle, and it’s that group of people who are unable to work and are collecting benefits. What do we understand about that group at the moment? DAVID FREEMAN That group as you say, it does change over time. And the reason for that is because people on benefits depend on the rules around those benefits. So, over the years we have published something we call the “claimant count”. This counts people claiming benefits and the main reason they're claiming benefits is because they're out of work. MILES FLETCHER And that used to be the main measure of our unemployment, as it was understood. DAVID FREEMAN You’re absolutely right. If we go back to the early mid 90s, it was a lead measure. But at that point the rules around the benefits were such that the official unemployment count and the benefit count was about the same. However, when we moved to Jobseeker's Allowance in the late 90s, the rules changed on benefits. So fewer unemployed qualified for the benefits, and the two measures did diverge there. MILES FLETCHER It's been said that there's a very large group now who are on out of work benefits alone, and that is hidden unemployment? DAVID FREEMAN Some of these people will be unemployed if they're out of work, and actively seeking or available to work. However, out of work benefits will also include people who we would class as economically inactive. Such as people who have a long-term illness or disability that prevents them from working. They'll be getting out of work benefits because they're not working, but because they're not able to look for work, or not actively looking for work, we wouldn't count them in our unemployment statistics. So yes, there are a lot of people on out of work benefits, more than we would count as unemployed. But not all these people would fit that definition of unemployed that we use. MILES FLETCHER But nonetheless a very important indicator when you're thinking about how people might be helped into work. DAVID FREEMAN That's right. Yeah, and and it indicates what that potential workforce could be. But obviously, some of these people may need some help to get themselves into a position where they're able to look for work and gain employment. MILES FLATCHER Okay, well what that briefly explained, is how the headline measures - you might like to call them your classic ONS measure of employment and unemployment - work. But one criticism that you might care to make about this system is that it takes a while to process and the numbers when they come out...there's a bit of a lag isn’t there. DAVID FREEMAN There is a little bit of a lag, again because of the size of the sample, the amount of data we have to process and the fact that we have to make sure we're getting enough responses in. There’s about a six-week lag between the end of the period we're looking at and the data being published into the public domain. MILES FLATCHER So in order to speed things up a bit, and to have a timelier indicator of what was happening with employment, and this came in very useful with the arrival of the pandemic, we've been using faster sources of information to supplement the headline employment figures. Can you talk us through that? What progress has been made and how useful these other sources of data have been? DAVID FREEMAN Yeah, so probably the biggest one that we've been using throughout the pandemic has been the counting of people for the real time tax information from the Revenue and Customs department. So this is a big database that HMRC hold, and it contains information about everyone on a payroll. So if you are on a pay as you earn scheme, all your information is collated in HMRC for the purposes of calculating your tax. At the end of 2019, we started working with HMRC on publishing regular data from that system. I counted the number of people on payroll schemes and how much they're earning. The benefits of this are that it is a complete count of people on the pay as you earn scheme, so it gives us lots of information, meaning we can analyse smaller levels and small groups of people without impacting on the confidentiality of the data. When the pandemic started, we worked with HMRC to see if we could speed the data up, because previously it was at the same sort of pace as the Labour Force Survey, so about six weeks, and we managed to move to what we call a flash estimate. This means we can publish the data for a particular month within three weeks of the end of that month, which is so much faster and was a real benefit at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information quickly about what was happening to employees on tax schemes. MILES FLETCHER And that was vital wasn't it, to inform the policy response to the pandemic when it arrived. Because you know, waiting a few weeks could have been too late for a lot of people. DAVID FREEMAN It could have been, and this is a big step forward in using this local administrative data in the labour market, and we've carried on doing that flash estimate. And as well as that we've been, over the pandemic period and up to the present day, adding more and more information from the pay as you earn tax data. So, a company produces data for a local authority level, we also do it by regional and industry. So, lots of information much more quickly than we can get it from our survey data. MILES FLETCHER You could say we've got the best of both worlds now. We've got the rich data coming out of the Labour Force Survey. But on the other hand, we've also got the much quicker data coming hot off the systems of HMRC to give that flash picture as you described it. DAVID FREEMAN One of the things that has been very developed over the pandemic is having this extra data and it provides a very, very rich picture. And when you put it together, you do get a very, very good picture of what's happening in the economy. I mean, the next step is to try and actually bring these data sources together. So linking data from the tax system to survey data, and trying to exploit even more, the benefits of having these sorts of information available. MILES FLETCHER Do you think we'll get to the point where we replace the survey completely? Or will it continue to have that very important central role? DAVID FREEMAN I think surveys will always have a central role. The tax data is brilliant. It does only cover employees, so we don't we don't cover the self-employed, you don't cover government trainees or people working for their family business. Also, the level of information we get from the Labour Force Survey is much bigger than we get from administrative data. On the tax system, we merely have information that's relevant to people paying tax. So that means we don't get a lot of the information that we get from labour force surveys - whether someone's got a disability, what their ethnic group is, what their nationality is - and these are all important variables in terms of informing government policy and giving a picture of what's happening in the UK. MILES FLETCHER You mentioned that the tax data was a development that was already in progress before the pandemic, but it was sped up given the urgency of that situation, but other sources of data have been coming in as well? DAVID FREEMAN Another big source of data that we've been working with over the pandemic period has been the online job vacancies data from a company called Azuna, who we've been partnering with over the period. And this has been another big step forward in calculating the number of vacancies in the UK economy. The data we are getting is really really timely, so we can take a download of data on the Friday, and we’re publishing it the next week. So really timely. And, the information you're getting in an online job vacancy means we can look at things like where the vacancy is, so what geography it’s located in, and some indication of the skills or the occupation of that vacancy as well. MILES FLETCHER Obviously, if you think about impacts of the pandemic for quite a period, over the last two years, when you add it all up, we spent a lot of time chained to our laptops, in many cases, working from home. How has that rubbed off on the workforce now, and what do we think is the lasting impact of the working from home trend? DAVID FREEMAN Certainly, on the latest data we've got, it does look like there's been a bit of a shift in terms of the number of people who work at home on a regular basis. Prior to the pandemic, fewer than three in 10 people had ever worked from home at any point, whereas if you look at the most recent data, around 35% of people are working from home regularly. So that 1 in 3 people are now doing some work at home during the working week. MILES FLETCHER So that's a huge change and we reckon that is, to some extent, showing signs of lasting? DAVID FREEMAN It does look like it is lasting. Home working doesn't necessarily work for everyone. When we did the analysis, there's quite a few professions or occupations where homework is relatively low. That’s particularly in the caring occupations, retail, catering and construction, where it's hard, or if not impossible, to work from home. MILES FLETCHER We'll have to see how that develops over the months ahead. But another phenomenon that was spotted as we emerged from the pandemic was what's been called ‘The Great Resignation’. Over 50s apparently disengaging with the labour market, and that I guess, is them going from employment in large numbers into the ‘economically inactive’ category? What do we know about that? DAVID FREEMAN You're absolutely right. This is something we've seen particularly in the last 12 months, people over 50 are moving out of the labour market into economic inactivity. Some of these people are retiring, so particularly the over 60s, most of those people are retiring. However, for the people aged 50 to 59, a lot of them are retiring for health reasons. They've developed a long-term illness, which again may be related to COVID, which is preventing them from carrying on with work. And this is having an impact on the overall labour market because the employment rate is still lagging behind where we were pre-pandemic, and a lot of that is down to these people moving outside into economic inactivity. MILES FLETCHER That's an important factor because other ONS statistics tell us that there were some 800,000 people who report, or we estimate, are suffering the effects of long COVID. So that would be a big factor in this, one might think, and it really isn't a question then of people having had a taste of being at home all the time and thinking, “Oh I just don't want to go back to work. Let's call it a day now”. DAVID FREEMAN ... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/23827649

A Matter of Life & Death: The impact of declining fertility rates; the re-birth of a dataset buried for 50 years; and why you should call your baby Nigel. 06/20/2022

A Matter of Life & Death: The impact of declining fertility rates; the re-birth of a dataset buried for 50 years; and why you should call your baby Nigel. In this episode Miles is joined by Dr James Tucker and Sarah Caul MBE to talk about how and why the Office for National Statistics count births and deaths, and what current fertility trends might mean for the future population. They look at the impact of popular culture on the most common baby names in England and Wales, and discuss the new significance of a dataset that was itself buried for 50 years. Transcript: MILES FLETCHER I’m Miles Fletcher and this episode of ‘Statistically Speaking’, the official ONS podcast, is literally a matter of life and death. Specifically how and why we count births and deaths and what those numbers are telling us. We'll talk about the possible impacts of declining fertility rates in the UK and of children being born to older parents. And at the other end of life we'll look at the new significance of a dataset that was itself almost buried for 50 years I'm joined here at ONS by two people who lead on all our data around births and deaths - Head of Analysis in our health and life events teams, James Tucker, and our very own Head of Mortality, Sarah Caul MBE, honoured for her work during the pandemic about which we will talk later. Starting with you then James, at the beginning as it were, with births - how does the ONS gather information about the number of children being born in England and Wales week in, week out? JAMES TUCKER So the registration of births is a service that's carried out by local registration services in partnership with the general register office in England and Wales and the good thing about this, from the perspective of having a really nice complete dataset, is that birth registrations are actually a legal requirement, giving us a really comprehensive picture of births in the countries. MF So we gather the numbers, we add them up, what do we do with the information then? JT So there's a couple of ways that we look at the data. One is to simply look at the number of births per year. So for example, we're looking at about 600,000 births per year at the moment. But an alternative approach is to use what we call the ‘total fertility’ rate, which is basically the average number of live children that women might expect to have during their childbearing lifespan. So it's a better measure than simply looking at the trends in the number of births because it accounts for changes in the size and age structure of the population. MF So it has a sort of multi-dimensional value then statistically that you can use to infer various things about the age at which people are likely to have children, and how many they're likely to have. JT That's exactly right. So we've seen some changes in the total fertility rate in recent years. So if you've heard the expression 2.4 children as describing the average number of children per family it's now considerably lower than that. In fact, it hit a record low in 2020 when the total fertility rate was 1.58. MF That's a sharp decline. In fact, though, you've got to go as far back as 1970, when the current series began, that's when it really was 2.4. What's really striking is if you look at that graph, the decline that happened between 1970 and about 1977 - very sharp decline there. Do we know what happened during that period? What were the factors driving that particularly? JT I think there can be all sorts of socio-economic factors affecting the fertility rate: improved access to contraception, reduction in mortality rates of children under five, which can result in women having fewer children. And also, more recently, as we've seen the average age of mothers going up, we might see some lower levels of fertility due to difficulties conceiving because of that postponement in childbearing. MF Sarah, I can see you want to come in on this. SARAH CAUL So my mother had three children by the time she was 30, and growing up I would just assume that that was the route I was going to take because it was what I've known. I am now 31 and I think if I was pregnant, that thought would scare me. I don't think I've grown up enough to have a child. I’m a dog mum, but those don't come into the statistics. MF So there was a bit of fanciful talk about people in lockdown finding - how should we put it delicately? - you know, things to do with their time, and that might lead to a boom in births. But that didn't really transpire? JT The increase in 2021 would actually coincide with conceptions across the second and third lockdowns. So yes, there was some speculation that people may have had enough of board games and were occupying their times in other ways, but I think it's actually more likely that it's a result of people delaying having children earlier on in the pandemic because of the uncertainty that was around at that point. And then towards the end of 2020 people had moved on from that and we saw a bit of an increase. MF Nonetheless though, historic data shows that there is a most common time of the year for conceptions to take place and that has something to do with the festive period, doesn't it? JT That's right. So the most common birthday is generally - almost always in fact - towards the end of September. So it doesn't take a statistician to work out that means the most popular time to conceive is over the Christmas and New Year periods. So that could be due to the Christmas festivities, but it might be also be something a bit less romantic than that. Some people, for example, might consider that there's an advantage to children being older in their year in school for example. MF The ONS also publishes the list of most popular baby names every year, and it is apparently one of the most downloaded and most popular bits of content on the ONS website. James, a lot of people scoff at this as an exercise. Is there any value in this list of baby names? Or is it something the ONS just produces because people like it? JT As you say it is one of our most popular releases and I think people use it to inform their own choices of names, and it can also tell us some really interesting things about culture in the country at the time. The top of the league table hasn't been that interesting, to be honest. So Oliver and Olivia have been the most popular names for the last few years, but it's beneath that that there's some really interesting trends emerging. So there's always a lot of interesting names that are going extinct. For example, last year, it was picked up a lot in the press about the name Nigel, which joined the list of critically endangered names like Gordon, Carol and Cheryl, and we do also see some really interesting influences of popular culture. And also royal babies always have a big influence. Some of the interesting ones from the last few years - we've seen some more Maeves and Otis’, which are characters from the TV series ‘Sex Education’, and even some Lucifers from the series of the same name. But generally you'd expect there to be positive associations with baby names so you do almost always see an influence of royal babies - we've already seen that with George but might be predicting a rise in Archies with Prince Harry’s son. MF And it’s quite interesting, seeing the cyclical thing with names that you might have associated with previous generations coming back into popularity, and Archie is a great example of that, isn't it? Sarah was one of the most popular girls names for a long time, certainly in the 80s and the 90s. But Sarah it's dropped out of the top 100 altogether. SC It has dropped down, but there's a Sarah in every single generation in my family. I think we're all named after each other. So my family is doing its best to keep it alive. JT Just a bit of a question for you. Where would you put the name Miles in the ranking? MF Well, it’s probably not in the top 100 James. JT Yeah, I'm afraid it's not quite top 100 material, but it is number 144. There were 390 Miles in 2020. And it's actually been on a bit of a roll recently. So that's the highest ranked it's been since 2002. MF Perhaps it’s the growing popularity of this podcast James, or maybe something else at work. Anyway... One thing worth noting about this before we move on, it should be pointed out that producing the baby names list is not an expensive exercise for the ONS. JT No, the data is very straightforward to collect. It's just a matter of compiling it into something that can be easily accessible and interesting for people to look at. MF And it's also one of the reasons that we don't compare the spelling of different names, because there's this long running thing isn't there about how if you added up the different spellings of the name Muhammad, then that would be the most popular boys name in England. That's not something the ONS does because, quite simply, we're just seeing the spelling that people enter on the system. JT Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think increasingly that could become even more of a task to compile those, because we're seeing an increasing use of shortened versions of names or alternative spellings. And if we were to try to compile those into one then that would definitely increase the time that we spent on it. MF Well, there you are, everything you need to know about baby names and - more seriously - the measurement of births and fertility. Plenty more information of course on the ONS website. With that, we must turn to the other end of life, and that is measuring deaths - a topic which has been very much in the news for the last couple of years since the outbreak of the pandemic. Right at the centre of that has been my colleague Sarah Caul, who's sat with us this afternoon. Sarah, you're recognised for your achievements during that period with an MBE, official honour, which you collected from Windsor Castle. SC It was definitely very surprising. I wasn't expecting it, but I'm very thankful for it. It's quite a proud moment in my life. If you ever see my mum, she'll just scream at you: “My daughter’s got an MBE”, so that's always nice. MF Recognised now then as an authority in this area - it's fair to say that the ONS was publishing this list of weekly deaths very quietly, almost unnoticed, for many years. And then of course, sadly, that changed at the start of the pandemic. SC With ‘weekly deaths’ it did have a small audience, to the point where they were considering actually not publishing it anymore. Pre-pandemic it wasn't a very large part of my job, because it was just something very quick and easy to do. My main analysis would be on annual data - we release annual data the summer after the end of the reference period. We would look at different causes of death and see where we could investigate further to help monitor the picture of what people are dying from, and if that can be prevented. MF That all changed of course March / April 2020 with the arrival of COVID-19. SC We started quite early thinking of what we could do with COVID and we added just one line into the spreadsheet, which was the number of deaths. It went from something like five to over 100 in one week and we were like “okay, we have to do a lot more of this now”. It just grew bigger and bigger because we were having more and more deaths and we needed to get out, as quick as possible, as much information as we could. We would be doing something that would usually take us months to do in a matter of days, every week. And we're actually still doing it to the same level now because we are still seeing COVID death - it hasn't completely gone away. MF Incredible demand for information from government, from everybody, of course - desperately concerned about what was happening. There was suddenly this incredible focus and attention, and huge pressure, on you to get those numbers out very quickly. SC Those first few months were quite a blur, because we were publishing weekly and monthly and were constantly adapting and constantly trying to figure out what people were interested in seeing. And getting that information out into the public domain is probably the most challenging time that I've had here. I don't think I've ever worked at that pace before. But we have got so many experts in the health analysis and life events area that we're in. We had expert coders, experts in different causes of death. It was great to see everybody come together and work really well together. Despite the enormous amount of pressure, we were having to deliver things that would normally take us months in days, and sometimes hours. MF Your team were actually among the first to see the full impact, because there wasn't so much testing going on among people who have been infected. And it was in those mortality figures that the real impact was first being revealed. SC It wasn't until our death certificate information came out, because testing was so limited in the early days, that you could kind of see the impact, and see how quickly it was increasing. MF How do we gather those numbers? SC So when somebody dies, the informant - or family member usually - will register the death, usually within five days, but depending on if it needs to go to a coroner, it could take months or even years to register that death. And we don't know about a death until it is registered. When that information gets put through all of the causes of death listed on the death certificate comes through to us at the same time with an assigned underlying cause of death, as well as contributory cause of death. So we have all of that information on each and every death registered in England and Wales. MF And it's very important to understand you can have more than one cause of death because this is very relevant to understanding how many people might actually have died because of COVID. SC The majority of deaths, regardless of cause, have more than one cause listed on the death certificate because you have complications, and one cause could lead to another cause. So the way we categorise it is deaths ‘due to’ COVID - where COVID was the underlying cause of death or any other condition - and then deaths ‘involving’ it - so where it was mentioned on the death certificate as the underlying cause or a contributory factor. MF Do you think a lot of people were actually confused by that? SC One of the things that people struggled to understand sometimes during the pandemic was that this is a different number to the public health measure. So somebody could test positive for COVID-19 but not have COVID-19 on the death certificate, because it didn't contribute to the death. So the example that gets told quite a lot is if somebody tests positive and then gets hit by a bus, it's very unlikely that COVID will be mentioned on the death certificate. MF And that's absolutely vital in understanding how many people have died ‘from’ COVID as opposed to a death ‘involving’ COVID. SC Yeah, so it's very important. The public health measure’s great because it's really fast, and it gives us a more instant knowledge of what's happening. Our statistics come out about 11 days later, but it's where COVID contributed to the death, and not just was present time of death MF That helps us to really understand what the mortality impact of COVID-19 has been so far. SC It is really important. So from the start of the pandemic to the week ending 13th of May, we know there's about 195,000 death certificates that had COVID on them, and that's the whole UK as we've worked with colleagues in Northern Ireland and Scotland to bring a UK figure together, as usually we only report on England and Wales. And then that enabled us to do further investigations about who was most at risk of dying from COVID. And we did a lot by age, place of death and any breakdowns we thought possible to try and help identify those most at risk. MF Another great strength you might say of the ONS numbers is the comprehensive nature of the way the information is gathered centrally and reported very quickly. And that was evident during the pandemic when you saw the UK numbers coming along and influencing policy decisions really quite rapidly, compared to similar countries around the world. Central to that is the whole concept of ‘excess deaths’. That's a good objective measure of impact, regardless of what doctors have written on the death certificate. Sarah, tell us how that works, particularly what is its statistical value, and what's it been saying? SC We use ‘excess deaths’, which is the number of deaths we see in a period compared to what we would expect - and to get the expected number we use an average of the previous five years. By doing this, it takes into account the direct and indirect impact of COVID, so we have a fuller measure. It's really useful as well for international comparisons, because we're not relying on everybody recording deaths in the same way. It's just a straightforward “how many deaths above what we would expect are we seeing?” MF And what has it shown so far - what has been the impact on excess deaths? SC So we've seen quite a high number of excess deaths during the pandemic. In 2020, we saw over 75,000 more deaths than we were expecting originally. In 2021 that is lower - we saw around 54,000 deaths more than we'd expect. And currently to date for 2022 we are seeing the number of deaths slightly below what we'd expect looking at our five year average. MF Do we know yet - at the least the early indications - for what this might all mean for life expectancy? SC We have released some life expectancy statistics for 2018 to 2020 as we do three-year combined, and we do see a bit of a dip in the last year because of the high number of deaths in 2020, which was due to the pandemic. We're still seeing the numbers are significantly higher than at the start of our time period, which was 2001 to 2003. Somebody in England in 2018 to 2020 would live to about 79 years as a male, or 83 years as a female. Whereas in 2001 to 2003 it was more like 76 years old for males and 81 years old for females. MF So in recent history we've seen these really quite pronounced increases in life expectancy for men and women. SC People are living longer. It’s increased more for males than it has for females. It's reducing that inequality gap, because we do see that women do tend to live longer. MF Do we know why men are catching up with women in terms of life expectancy? Is it lifestyle, nature of work perhaps? SC There is a lot more of a decline in heart diseases, and especially in males, so I think that could indicate healthier choices, which would then increase somebody's life expectancy. MF Another important concept when understanding how the ONS looks at mortalities is the whole question of ‘avoidable deaths’. So how does that... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/23446385

Evolution of the Economy: The science of measuring rapid change in a complex, globalised and increasingly turbulent economic situation. 05/23/2022

Evolution of the Economy: The science of measuring rapid change in a complex, globalised and increasingly turbulent economic situation. Our topic this time, and it's a big one, is the economy. The science of measuring rapid change in a complex, globalised and now increasingly turbulent economic situation. In this episode Miles is joined by second permanent secretary Sam Beckett, and head of inflation, Mike Hardie, to look at how the ONS is keeping on top of rising prices, and how two of the biggest economic shocks in recent history have helped shape the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) current approach to collecting its key economic data. TRANSCRIPT: Miles Fletcher Sam, one angle I'd like to explore with you is the extent to which everything has changed recently, and the way that the ONS measures the UK economy, the extent to which that was informed by the experience of what happened 14 years ago now and the financial crisis. Could you talk us through what happened there in terms of the ability of the statistical system to actually spot what was going on? And what lessons were learned during that period? Sam Beckett Yes, certainly. That is going back quite a while now, isn't it? But I think one of the key things that you can really compare and contrast with where we are now compared to then, is about the timeliness of GDP. Back at the time of the global financial crisis the Office for National Statistics was very slow to spot the turning point. We were dealing with crucial data for the economy's output. And it was probably about six months before we were able to sort of scale the downturn in the economy and see the economy going into recession. MF Meanwhile, during that period, of course, people were being hit quite badly by that economic downturn. But the official statistics that were available had nothing to say about what was happening. SB No, that's right. So we would have been waiting to find out the extent of the downturn as people were seeing it hit their livelihoods, for something like six months back in 2008. If you fast forward then to the experience that we've had over the pandemic. You know, our monthly GDP statistics are out about six weeks after the period they refer to so you're getting a very timely indicator on what is happening to the real economy now. So you can really compare a sort of six months gap to a six weeks gap now. And if you think about the way the pandemic played out with, you know, the economy being closed down to try and limit transmission and then opened up again successively, and in the waves, if we'd been waiting three months or six months to find out what was happening, it really would have been a hopeless situation. But we got those very timely official statistics on GDP, but not only those but even more timely statistics from business surveys, and opinions and lifestyle surveys that we've done, where we can actually get a two week turnaround on what is happening to the economy and how people are responding. MF So it was really a question of learning from that experience and putting in place the kind of mechanisms that can help us as a country to actually find out what was going on closer to the point it was actually happening out there in the real world. Has the rest of the world learned that lesson as well, or is the UK among countries that have been quicker onto this do you think? SB We're certainly one of only a handful of countries that publish a monthly GDP figure. So I think in that big kind of headline and official statistic, we're still in a relatively select group that publish as frequently as monthly and as close to the time. We're also looking at financial card transactions data; we are looking a lot at admin data on the labour force, and trying to bring together a host of statistics that shine a light on what is going on, on the ground during the economy. And I think we count ourselves amongst a relatively small group of national statistical institutes that are cutting edge in their use of innovative data sources. MF So by the time the pandemic then comes along, two years ago now, the ONS is in a better state to actually find out what's happening, but nevertheless, was there a certain extent to which the organisation had prepared for another downturn like 2008, rather than what actually happened which nobody had foreseen, a widespread pandemic including a serious risk to life? SB Indeed, I mean, who would have thought that you know, we would have been hit by a pandemic of such a global scale and impact? I think one of the things that is a huge advantage for the government and the UK economy has been to have this objective handle on the level of infection out in the community. And that is something that the Office for National Statistics signed up to deliver really early on in the pandemic. So, our COVID infection survey, which has now swabbed millions of people on their doorstep, gave us a great handle on just how many people have had COVID, not just relying on the data of people who were turning up at doctors and hospitals, who had symptoms already. So you know, the COVID infection survey was a more random sample of the community and gave us that objective handle on how many people had COVID and indeed, some of them asymptomatic, you know, no symptoms of COVID but tested positive on the doorstep and that gave us a great insight over the pandemic and helped advise the government on what should be done to try and limit transmission. MF So meanwhile, as well as setting up that very important survey, there were a lot of other very quick changes that were put in place as well to measure the economic impact, the impact on individuals, on businesses as well. Can you talk us through some of the work that was done there to give that very quick turnaround, the fast indicators, that quick view of how items in the shops are being affected; how people in the workforce were being affected; and how the country and the effects of lockdown - to what extent they were actually hitting the economy in real time? SB I mean, starting with those quick turnaround surveys, there's two really that are really good companions to each other. The first is the business insights and conditions survey - and that surveys about 40,000 businesses and asks them questions around, you know, what is happening to their customer base, what is happening to their workforce. And there's about a two-week turnaround on that information. So, we could ask questions of businesses about how many of their staff, for example, they were intending to put on furlough and get that information just two weeks later to give us a handle on what a big uptake there would be on that scheme. The companion one is the opinions and lifestyle survey and through that we were able to ask people things like were they wearing a mask when they went to the shops? You know, were they staying at home as per the guidance and what were they leaving the home to do? And you know, were they washing their hands more and all those non pharmaceutical interventions that were so important in controlling the early stages of the pandemic. And again, between that sort of survey of households and individuals and businesses, you could track those two sides of how the pandemic and the government's measures to control it were impacting on people's lives and livelihoods. MF So in the old world of statistics, where paper forms would have been sent off, we'd have been able to produce an estimate in, ooh I don't know, a couple of months. But actually with the onset of the pandemic, this information was being fed into government, directly into government within a matter of a few days and informing that response, the actual action that was being taken on the ground. SB Absolutely. And I think also looking at some of our more traditional statistics, there had to be huge effort to keep the show on the road. Labour market statistics, I mean, incredibly important, over a period of economic turbulence, we had to go from what had been a face to face survey to a telephone based survey. And we reinforced that picture by getting information from payrolls from HMRC’s PAYE database, to understand what was happening to the labour market and keep that total picture, even though our standard survey had to move rapidly to a telephone based one. But I should add, you know, when people think about that admin data, I would like to emphasise that we're incredibly careful that none of that would identify anything about individuals. And we're extremely careful to ensure that we don't collect data that we don't need and that everything is de-identified. MF And that's a very important point now, because it's not just a question of people taking part in surveys is it? It's about the ONS having relationships with the credit card companies, for example, with mobile phone providers as well. And while these huge datasets give a fantastic up to the minute picture of of what's going on - money being spent and how movement is being affected as well - people are going to be understandably concerned about government having access to that sort of data. So how do we ensure that that is working in the public interest, only producing information that's genuinely needed for the public good? SB Our reputation rides on treating people's data incredibly carefully, and by abiding by all the regulations that are appropriate to personal data and business data. So we're incredibly scrupulous and careful in this regard. We don't gather data that can identify people if it is not needed, and we have got very reliable methods to de-identify data before we use it for analysis or indeed publish it. So you know, that's incredibly important to maintaining public trust in our statistics. MF So what have we been doing to try and measure the individual impacts that some of the price rises we've seen recently have had on households with different incomes? SB We are facing a period of some time to come where I think this is going to be incredibly high profile in the public debate about the challenges of the economy and what people are facing and indeed of measurement for us as an office of statistics. What we've been doing is trying to think about ways in which you can dig under that very average national figure of inflation. Now that is going up and most forecasters, such as the Bank of England will expect it to go up further, but it does, as you say, fail to show how different people can be impacted. You know, if they drive a lot and the cost of fuel has gone up a lot, relatively poor households spend a high proportion of their money on energy bills and on food and we know that both of those categories have been affected. So we have published some statistics that seek to look at inflation cut by different income brackets of households. MF Given that there is now so much data from supermarket scanners, from credit cards, from an incredible range of digital sources. What are the limits of all this do you think? SB Data is a by-product of the productive economy these days, isn't it? You know, data is being produced in all the other activities that we undertake online in our lives. So along with that, computing power has got so much cheaper and you put those two things together, and you just have this enormous capacity to measure activity in so many different ways, and so much more up to date, I mean, compared to anything we could have done, instead of 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, and the cost of them has come down massively. And with that, the sort of potential to get insight from them has expanded. MF Now we’ve mentioned GDP several times of course – that’s Gross Domestic Product - the traditional very long-established way of measuring activity in the economy. And it's held by many still to be the single most important national economic statistic. But at the same time, there's a debate going on at the moment about the continuing usefulness and relevance of GDP, particularly as it takes no account of the environmental dimension as well. And of course, in this country and internationally, that environmental dimension and climate change has become evermore important. So what are we doing as an organisation to factor the environment into the economic picture? SB GDP is an important measure of the productive economy. I think it's here to stay. But even in terms of it measuring the productive economy we're continually trying to improve its quality and make it more timely as we've talked about, but also more granular, you know, get more of a sense of what is happening down at a more granular level of geography. What we're trying to do is develop further, all aspects of our kind of economic welfare measures and bring things into the kind of spotlight that GDP has that are really important to all our futures. And I think, you know, climate and net zero, and those environmental statistics are one area where we're working really hard to try and give them a due prominence. I mean, we are relatively far ahead of international averages in terms of our level of development here. We've been publishing natural capital accounts for some 10 years. So we're starting from a good base, but there's so much more we can do. So, we've got two strands of work here. First, we've got an approach which tries to extend that concept of GDP, the production and asset boundaries that it measures to natural capital in the environment, as you've mentioned, but also human capital, as well. You know, the extent to which the skills of the UK workforce are being enhanced, and other aspects of economic activity, which currently fall outside of GDP, like household production, like unpaid for household work, which also really ought to be in your concept of how productive you are as an economy. So, we're developing this suite of measures that sort of extends the national accounts into these harder to measure areas that we also know are really important to our sense of economic progress and prosperity as a nation. And so that's that sort of integrated set of extending the concept of GDP to these broader concepts. But also, alongside that, we are doing some things that are a little bit more tactical and fleet of foot. They have a framework to them, like our Climate Statistics Portal, but that brings together all kinds of climate statistics from across government into a kind of one stop shop for users to explore things like climate and weather and emissions by different area, impacts and mitigations and provide insights from that. Now, not in a way that you can really aggregate with the GDP number, but in a way that would give you sort of broad insight as to progress towards net zero and what is happening to our climate and weather. So, this is a huge agenda. We call it the ‘Beyond GDP’ agenda, something where we are a relatively leading internationally but so much more work that we can do. We've got some really interesting stuff coming out later this month that will look at some of these issues and you can obviously catch up with that on our website. MF So much more change still to come. Finally, Sam Beckett, a very wise economist once said - slightly tongue in cheek – that the chief function of economic forecasting is to make astrology seem respectable. Do you think the point will come at ONS when the data becomes so good and so rapid, that actually the ONS could get into the whole business of forecasting the economy with a great deal of accuracy? SB Well, I think we are increasingly getting up to the moment, if I can put it like that in terms of our economic statistics. Yes, there's still some time lag between the observation and the publication of the data in in most cases, but we're getting closer and closer. And we are using techniques where even where some data might be missing, we can use sophisticated economic modelling techniques to bring it up to date. So, a good example there would be if we didn't have a full local breakdown of GDP data for last month, we could make up for that using what we know about the other areas, and how they changed in GDP, and also the past performance of the missing areas. So, we can put together this picture that brings things really up to date using some of those modern techniques. I think the world of measurement is different from the world of forecasting, quite fundamentally. And, you know, we leave that to colleagues at the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England, who do kind of look ahead and try and paint that future picture. But the two are interconnected. And I think you can only produce good forecasts, if you've got really reliable readings on what is happening now and what past trends have been. So, they are hand in glove and I wouldn't want to say those were two distinct but we do have our own particular objective, which is about you know, economic and societal measurement. We're not yet in that forecasting game. But we are bringing it as up to the minute as possible. MF So, while not actually trying to predict the future, at least we can measure the very, very recent past. Sam, thank you very much for speaking to me. Now, after decades of relatively low inflation, rising prices are back in the news. Tracking the impact of that on households is of course, vitally important work and at the ONS, that's the responsibility of the head of inflation, Mike Hardie. Well, Mike, anyone who follows the news and particularly recently with concern about the rising cost of living will understand the importance of inflation. But there are lots of different measures of it. Can you talk us through the different ways in which ONS measures inflation, and why each of them is significant? Mike Hardie So we have a range of inflation measures. The first family of statistics are consumer price statistics. And so we have the consumer prices index which most people will be familiar with and the consumer prices index including owner occupied housing costs, and they are our macro economic measures of inflation that are based on economic principles. We also have a second group of statistics which are called the household cost indices, and they are specifically designed to measure the changing costs and prices faced by different household groups. And that completes our family a consumer price statistics. And then beyond those, we produce business prices. So those measure what we describe as output or ‘factory gate’ prices. So those are the prices of goods leaving the factory gate and we also produce input prices as well. So all of the component parts that are used in the production process to produce a final product, how the price of those has changed over time, too. And that completes our business statistics. And then beyond that, we also produce house prices as well, which is very topical at the moment given the buoyant housing market in the UK. MF And underlying all those different measures of inflation is a very large data gathering operation. Now, there's a lot of change going on in that area at the moment, but first of all, describe for us how this traditionally has been done. MH Traditionally, in order to produce our consumer price statistics, we have sent price collectors out across the UK. We have over 300 price collectors, they go to over 140 different locations in the UK, with mini clipboards, and they go into stores and they price a range of different items. So at the start of the year, we construct a large shopping basket, a virtual shopping... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/23163920

The changing data landscape: How the data revolution and the fight against COVID are changing UK stats forever 04/19/2022

The changing data landscape: How the data revolution and the fight against COVID are changing UK stats forever In the third episode of Statistically Speaking we talk to Professor Sir Ian Diamond, the UK’s National Statistician, and Dr Louisa Nolan, Chief Data Scientist at the ONS Data Science Campus about the past, present and future of stats. We explore how the pandemic has been transformative for the use and understanding of public data and how the data revolution and the fight against COVID are changing UK stats forever. Transcript: MILES FLETCHER Welcome to Statistically Speaking: the podcast where numbers talk and we talk to the people behind them. In this third episode, we meet professor Sir Ian Diamond, UK National Statistician and Dr Louisa Nolan, Chief Data Scientist at the ONS Data Science Campus. We explore how the pandemic has been transformative for the use and understanding of public data and how the data revolution and the fight against COVID are together changing UK stats forever. But to begin I asked Sir Ian what led him to a life of stats SIR IAN DIAMOND Okay, well, I'm going to be absolutely honest Miles: genetics. I have no idea why I was always interested in numbers and statistics but I always was. And so something in my genes said I like numbers. Something else in my genes said I like numbers but numbers which have an application and a practical application. And that led me to not only be interested in statistics, but to study statistics and then to work as a statistician in academia for some decades, but always interested in numbers and their application to policy and to improving the lives of people. And if you take that as a starting point, then it's what I've always done, and led me to at times work in partnership with different government departments. And that led me to partnerships with ONS, which has led me here. MILES FLETCHER A lot of people sort of regard statistics as numbers on a page, something that can seem quite abstract, but they exist of course to help people make important decisions. Can you think of an example in your pre-ONS career, your pre-National Statistician life, where you first used numbers and statistics to actually help solve a real-world problem? SIR IAN DIAMOND Well, yes, I mean, if I go back to the very early 1980s, at that time, the observation was made, that there had been a decline in the number of children born in the UK. That was going to be a decline of around 30% in the number of 18-year-olds, and it was suggested that therefore there would be a reduction in the demand for higher education. Working initially with Fred Smith and then subsequently on my own, I was able to project the future demand for higher education, on the basis of some assumptions that the number of women going into higher education would increase, that there would be social mobility in the country as a whole. And also, that there would be an increase in what we now call widening participation. When you bring all those things together, you get a very, very different number for the demand for higher education than from simply following the number of births. And that had an impact alongside work that other people did on influencing policy for higher education. MILES FLETCHER So a busy, very successful academic career is followed then by stint as National Statistician. You're in the job, what six months last March, just as the pandemic, as we as we came to know, was starting to break. At what point did you realise that it was going to be as big as it turned out to be and that a very special response was going to be required from the statistical system, the UK statistical system, ONS, and all the statisticians in government departments, the system that you're responsible for? SIR IAN DIAMOND I mean, I think early in 2020 Miles. We identified, very sadly, the first death from COVID at the beginning of March 2020. We now think there might have been one earlier but, you know, I think very early on we at ONS recognised that this was something that the statistical community needed to really step up for, not least working with the wider international community to define a cause of death as being due to COVID. I'd say March 2020 is when we really became aware there was going to need to be some really fast and accurate estimates of all kinds of things around the pandemic, whether it was impacting on the economy, or indeed the pandemic itself, and that led to us in April to putting together a survey which estimated both prevalence but also the level of antibodies, and subsequently now of course, issues around vaccination. MILES FLETCHER So it was a very important decision point where it was realised that the traditional, if you put it that way, the main data sources that ONS and others in government were producing were not going to be enough to measure a very, very important factor in this, that's actually how many people have got the virus at any at any one time. What point did that arise and what happened next? SIR IAN DIAMOND We had a conversation early in April. We said ONS could use our ability to be able to design nationally representative surveys and to pivot some of those designs into collecting the biomedical data that are important in order to be able to identify both prevalence and antibodies, but we will only do so in partnership with other experts. And so we very, very quickly set up partnerships with the University of Oxford, the Wellcome Trust, and the Department of Health and the Office of Life Sciences. We were able to set up a team that in one week, was able to move from a decision to go for it, to design, to ethics to the first field workers collecting some data. MILES FLETCHER And it was mounting, what was by anybody's standards, a huge field operation, as you say, in very short order to get around households up and down the United Kingdom eventually, when the survey was running at full scale. To do that very, very quickly, a huge operation… SIR IAN DIAMOND Two stages Miles: the first of which is we stood it up as a nationally representative sample, which would make estimates for England. And, you know, it takes a lot of things at pace. So getting from the field workers getting the swabs to the laboratories, getting the tests, getting them back, doing some really quite sophisticated statistical analysis to make estimates. Getting all that done requires a lot of logistics, and I think the team deserves an enormous pat on the back for so doing. And then that success led to the scaling up. So that we can make original estimates so that we can make age-specific estimates. And we were able to do that. But then that was a huge scale up in September of 2020 and I think again, the logistics of scaling that up was incredibly challenging, but successful. And at the same time working with our colleagues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, to be able to produce estimates for those administrations too was something that I'm very proud of. MILES FLETCHER And the record shows exactly what was achieved during those pressured early months of the pandemic. And of course, right at the start there were plenty of people around who doubted whether the statistical system, whether the ONS and others were really capable of doing that job. Was it satisfying to confound those critics? SIR IAN DIAMOND I didn't hear them, I just got on and did it, to be absolutely honest, Miles. I knew what we could achieve in terms of both the survey which was able to measure prevalence and antibodies, but also the social survey because you need to know how people are feeling about the restrictions. You need to know how people are feeling about the pandemic. Were they anxious or not? And then as people started to talk about, for example, face coverings. What were people's attitudes to those things and, and were people adhering to the restrictions? So, there was a social survey, that was producing weekly estimates as well. That was incredibly important, and we were producing economic statistics, as well. So I have to say it wasn't a question of was the statistical system standing up and delivering a survey to estimate prevalence of the pandemic. But it was addressing a whole set of other questions, which required not only statistical collection, but in some cases, further analysis, and data linkage and a whole range of sophisticated statistical methods to be able to provide information for the government and for the population so that they understood exactly where we were at any time. MILES FLETCHER And what do you think that all that has done for the general trust the public have in the statistics that they see from us or from the media? SIR IAN DIAMOND ONS has always been a very trusted organisation. I mean, one of the important things that we have in the UK is the independence of the ONS and I think that’s incredibly important and the public in all the surveys that we have done over many years have demonstrated great trust in the statistics that we produce. And I think that the public has continued to show that trust over the pandemic. And I hope although at this stage I stress I'm hoping, that the public will feel that the ONS has delivered during the pandemic and therefore will be prepared to continue to trust the ONS in the future. MILES FLETCHER Talking about the public and involvement, coinciding with this pandemic has been census of course in England and Wales and we asked every household once again to complete the census. Again, at the beginning, some said it couldn't be done because of the pandemic and others even more said it shouldn't be done because of the cost. How has it all gone? And will it tell us what we now urgently need to know about our population? SIR IAN DIAMOND We had a really very good and very strong response. We're now in the process of doing the analysis so that we can produce really accurate results and that's going to be incredibly important. Should we do a census? Well, I think a census is a statement of great confidence from a country that is prepared to say that on one day, this is a picture of what that country is and how many people there are and their characteristics. And that is so important for all kinds of reasons. So yes, it was incredibly important I think that we did. Yes, it was incredibly important that we did it at the time of the pandemic, because we needed to know where we were at that time. Of course, we will be working very hard to update our statistics over time to really understand the post pandemic world. I'd have to say also that you know, the cost is high, no question. And we will be working very, very hard over the next 18 months or so, to produce a set of recommendations as to the future of population data collection. Do we need another census or can we do things that administrative way. In 2014 we thought about this with regards to 2021 and a really good report done by the late Chris Skinner, together with John Hollis and Mike Murphy, recommended that this census that we've just done, digital first census, should go ahead, but we should aim to make a recommendation about the future. And that's what we're planning to do. It will require support from many other parts of government. I'm confident that we will get that support. And the one thing I can say Miles is that over the next 18 months or so we'll be working flat out to be able to make a recommendation that is extremely tight and extremely evidence based. MILES FLETCHER Now this whole question of whether there should be another census, actually it chimes with a reaction that we saw coming back from the public, and we did certainly get a good response rate. We reckon 97 percent of households did take part in the census and that's as good a response as there's ever been - perhaps there was a certain advantage to holding it during lockdown even - but some people asked why they have to fill in this census because surely the government should already have all this information to hand by now. How far are we down the road to be able to gather all the information from other sources already as many countries do. SIR IAN DIAMOND Well other countries do and other countries for example, particularly those in Scandinavia require a Population Register where you have to if you leave the country, come back into the country, you have to register that you are there. And if you move you have to register. We don't do that. So we do not require you to register that, for example, you have moved house or register with the Office for National Statistics. You may register with the land registry but if you don't, if you just move, we don't require you to register that. Interestingly, there is no one source for occupation in this country other than the census. So, while you may think that data are held everywhere, Miles, they actually aren't. And so, while there are a lot of government data, there are no single sources which cover a lot of the things that a Census does and also there are one or two questions that one has in the census which are attitudinal, for example. So, you ask about well being. Well the only way you can ask people about wellbeing is to ask them, so you actually need to collect those data on a census. So there's a whole set of things that we ask on the census that very simply we don't ask elsewhere. And therefore, it's important, I think that we do get those data. MILES FLETCHER And of course data has to be fast to be effective now, or certainly faster. During the pandemic again we've seen advances in how new data sources have been used: anonymised credit card data, traffic camera data, mobile phone data, shipping data to provide these really fast readings of economic impact. Novel and brought in, in some cases, and as a specific response to the urgencies of the pandemic. But will these last now? SIR IAN DIAMOND One hundred percent. I think one of the things we've seen over the last few years has been the increase in born digital data, and we need to recognise the potential benefits of those data for our understanding of society and the economy, and indeed the environment and we need to be using them at pace in every way possible. And asking the question, do they replace things that we always have? Or are they in addition? And if they are, in addition, are they really adding value? Very easy to get involved in what you might call a data deluge. Yeah, there's loads of data out there so we’d better have it. I think you have to be very, very focused on whether any particular data add value and insight to the subject under study. If they do, then I think that it's important for us to use them and to access them. If they're just simply adding some more data then we do not need to follow them up. So data for insight, not data for data's sake. MILES FLETCHER So we've had two years driven mainly, but not wholly by the pandemic, but two years of incredible progress in our statistical system. Looking to the next decade, what comes next, what do you think we're going to see in statistics and data, how it's going to be used and what sort of issues are we going to be addressing? SIR IAN DIAMOND We will be able to process ever bigger datasets and to do so ever faster. So all the kinds of things we have been talking about, about more digital data, analysis of texts, as well as numbers and data produced at speed and at pace will be the norm. But that doesn't stop us wanting to continue to collect some pretty important data, for example, GDP or inflation data and to do so, perhaps, in a new way. In the last year we've calculated GDP using some innovative data sources, but in a way which enables those long time series that we started talking about at the beginning of this conversation Miles, to be maintained. I think it’s incredibly important that we do maintain time series while at the same time produce evermore exciting and new data sources. And I return finally to the point that we will still want attitudes. If you want attitudes, we'll need to continue to do surveys. So I think it’s an exciting time, one of the other areas that I think we will see, real progress is improved data visualisation and improved interoperability with people. And I think that's important when it comes back to trust, if people are able to go on and manipulate the data themselves very, very easily, then again, the transparency and the openness and the use of data will be something that will remain at the heart of what we do. MILES FLETCHER That's Sir Ian Diamond, the National statistician. Now if there was one single development that made the ONS and perhaps the whole of the UK statistical system ready to cope with the pandemic, it was arguably the ONS Data Science Campus. Established in 2017 its mission is to work at the frontier of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, building skills and applying tools, methods and practices it says, to create new understanding and improve decision making for the public good. So what does that all mean in practice, and what has the campus achieved in its first four years? Questions I put to Dr. Louisa Nolan, its chief data scientist. Louisa to take it from the top as it were: tell us, what is the data science campus and what are you out to achieve? LOUISA NOLAN The data science campus was set up four and a half years ago, and our mission is to explore new types of data, new types of technology, new techniques in data science, to make sure that we're making the most out of the data that's available, the ever increasing types of data that are available to us. And we also build capability in data science not just in ONS but across government and the wider public sector as well. So data science is really about the analysis of that data, getting that data together. But we need to get hold of the data. We need the right tools and platforms to use that data, particularly big data. It's about testing those technologies and how we do that to build those insights as well. MILES FLETCHER And when does data that you harvest, when does it become statistics? LOUISA NOLAN That's a really interesting question. And different people probably would give different answers. Statistics, I would say is a summary. So it's a summary, it might be the average the mean, or it might be a trend, it's looking at the overall picture, whereas data might be your input. So the satellite picture or the information somebody's given on the census, and statistics really is turning it into something that we can then understand broadly, what's going on and why those things are going on. MILES FLETCHER And it's your job then, in essence, to find how best to use that, those mountainous volumes of data and transfer them into usable, useful statistics and insights. LOUISA NOLAN Absolutely, and there's the technical part of that the techniques but also understanding those new types of data, understanding their quality and their bias and how we can best use them so that we produce something that's useful for decision making and not misleading. MILES FLETCHER The data science campus has been around for just a couple of years really, but what have you achieved in the time since it's been running? LOUISA NOLAN We've achieved a lot. So on the capability side we've set up data analytics apprenticeships, the graduate data science programme, the data masterclass, which is about teaching senior leaders data literacy, we've delivered face to face training, we've trained more than 600 analysts across... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/22790873

Counting a nation: the story of the UK’s once-a-decade census 03/21/2022

Counting a nation: the story of the UK’s once-a-decade census Since 1801 the UK has undertaken the mammoth task of counting its entire population, transforming over the years to uncover a wealth of information about the people of our country. With all the data collected for Census 2021 our most comprehensive quality assurance programme ever is currently under way, drawing on the unique insight and expertise of local authorities across England and Wales to help us produce the best possible statistics for every local area. With results expected in early summer, Statistically Speaking meets the people who ran the first digital-by-default census during the pandemic to find out how it went and what the results will able tell us. Transcript: MILES FLETCHER Welcome to ‘Statistically Speaking’ the podcast where numbers talk and we talk to the people behind them. This month we peek behind the scenes of one of the UK’s biggest mass participation events, the Census. Almost every ten years since 1801 the UK has undertaken the massive task of counting its entire population. But what began as a headcount to measure population growth has gradually transformed over the years to add a wealth of information about all of the people in our country. So now, with all the forms collected, a very large programme of quality assurance is going on and that means taking data from an array of alternative sources, information gathered by the government for other purposes, to see how far that corroborates the picture that's emerging from the census forms. And also for the first time this year we're drawing a unique insight and expertise of councils across England and Wales as to use their local knowledge to help us produce the best possible statistics for every area. Taking the further evidence gathered from those 250 organisations into account, we now aim to publish the first results in early summer 2022. However, some releases of early data have already helped to shed light on the effects of the pandemic, and more recently, the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today I'm joined by Pete Benton, one of the people chiefly responsible for running the first ‘digital by default’ census during the pandemic, and Sanjay Jagatia one of our vital Census Community Advisors. Pete Benton, the England and Wales census, it's the largest statistical operation certainly that any government has to undertake, and it's sometimes described as the largest regular peacetime operation that UK government does. But just give us a sense of the scale of the whole thing and what's involved in numbers. PETE BENTON Well, the simplest way to think about it is we're asking everybody, every household in the country, to do something in the same way on the same day. That's quite a challenge. You know, people compare running a census with standing up the London Olympics. That’s a big job but you don't have to get everybody to take part. And in simple numbers, there are about 25 million addresses in England and Wales and we need to get a response from everybody. MILES FLETCHER The ONS, it's a relatively small organisation for a Herculean task like this. It isn't a case of everybody in the ONS downing tools for a few weeks, is it? And this time around we're measuring COVID and the economic impact and all of that. So, who are the census people, where do they come from, and how long do they stay with us? PETE BENTON Well, it really does take us 10 years to plan every census. The 2021 census - I actually started with a team in June 2011, just after we'd done the 2011 census. Now, the first question wasn't how are we going to do the next one? The first question was, do we need another one or can we get the information that is so desperately needed about the size of the population from data sets that already exist? So, we spent three years looking at questions, specifically after the 2011 census, and then in about 2014 came fairly firmly to the conclusion that we do need a census in 2021. And there were seven years-worth of efforts and some people were still around from 2011. There were even some from 2001, one or two people who'd even been part of the 1981 census so you get a little bit of corporate memory, but most people are new when each census comes along. We have a small team to start with. And then it just grows. And in particular, in the last year or two, you fill up the office with the people that are going to run the operation. MILES FLETCHER As well as the people in the office, you've got to organise this huge army of people, this ‘fieldforce’, who actually, as you say, go out and knock on doors. PETE BENTON You're right. When I joined back in the 2001 census, just after that, that census took about 70,000 staff. And the census before that took over 100,000. By the time we got to 2011, with advances in technology able to support people in different ways, we brought that down to 35,000 staff, and for the 2021 census it was under 20,000. So actually, we’ve become better and more efficient as technology enables us to change the way we do things. MILES FLETCHER Now there was less activity on the doorstep perhaps this time of course because for the first time we were trying to get everybody, if they could, to do it online. What were the challenges of that particularly? PETE BENTON Well, interestingly, it’s always been a self-completion job, or at least certainly for recent decades. You get a paper questionnaire come through your door, you fill it in and you give it back or post it back. The big difference this time was that we wanted the vast majority of people to do it online. There was no online option for 2011. By the time we'd given everybody a paper questionnaire, they mostly did it on paper. 16% in 2011 did it online. But for 2021 we’re at 89% of households who completed the census having done it online, and 11% having done it on paper. Now that's quite a shift in a decade and so far, I think that's the highest online percentage of any census around the world. There are a few going on at the moment. Australia's has only recently happened and we're still waiting to hear how theirs went. But that shift to doing online actually genuinely for most of the population did make it quicker and easier. And for us, in ONS, because it's all electronic, we can see immediately when every household has responded and can see those that still need some further help. MILES FLETCHER The technology on the day. It was smooth, it was efficient? PETE BENTON It was fabulous. So of course we thought long and hard about how big might the peak actually be and we scaled the system to be able to cope with our predicted online demand. And we've actually worked very, very close with our estimates. At the peak we had 60,000 submissions in a 10 minute period at near lunchtime on census day. And that's the submissions, but when you think that people are looking at our website and they're going through every question, the load on the website was quite phenomenal. During that peak period we had 30,000 requests per second for information to our website, whether it was to serve the next question on the questionnaire, or to get a bit of extra information about the census. And because we built it in the cloud that just scaled naturally and easily. We worked with the cloud providers to make sure that we understood how to make things dynamically scale according to the numbers of users, and it worked absolutely seamlessly. You can imagine there were a few people biting their nails in the days running up to it, with something quite that big, but on the day it went without a blink. MILES FLETCHER Now there’s always a bit of a PR push to let everybody know that the Census is taking place. This time around we had some new events and happenings taking place. Do you want to just talk us through how we drew people's attention to it, and got it onto the media and into the news? PETE BENTON It was a mixture of things. I mean, every address got a postcard through the door two or three weeks before to say “the census is coming, watch out for it”. Every address got a letter through the door a bit later to say “census is coming, here's your access code”. So, every address had something that said it's coming. But sitting around that was a huge campaign. There were TV adverts, there were radio adverts. There was an awful lot of stuff just in the news because we were pushing it out there and people got behind it. But we also for the first time had 300 local staff, six months before the census, just working on local community engagement, getting the word out. We worked really closely with local authorities to use all of their local networks to promote the census to every local group so that everybody knew that it was coming, and also just how much it mattered for their community to be counted. Because if they weren't counted they wouldn't be in the numbers, and services couldn't be planned to meet their needs - services like the NHS and school places and transport - these things all depend on the number of people in a local area. That campaign was essential to get the response rates up. MILES FLETCHER And it's the campaign that has to reach the parts that other campaigns can't reach because, when you're trying to reach every single household in the country, there's always quite a proportion you cannot reach through the media. Who are those people, and how did we get them particularly? PETE BENTON So, we translated all of our materials into 50 different languages. And we had specific adverts in certain languages on the radio and on the telly, and we were tailoring the content and tailoring the networks we were using to get the broadest reach we possibly could. And we estimate that after census day, well over 95% of people were aware of the census and knew that it was coming. It was incredibly successful and it translated into over 97% occupied households actually filling in a census, because only one person for each address needs to do that. So you don't have to have every person knowing that it's coming but at least have one person from every household. MILES FLETCHER And that engagement of course comes to a head as Census Day approaches. We have buildings being lit up in the census colour of purple; we had mentions on soap operas; you're on the BBC One Show as well, banging the drum for the Census. And what was fascinating is that you could see in real time, because so many responses were coming in online, the completion rates were being boosted by those appearances as they took place. PETE BENTON Absolutely. We had real time dashboards telling us both how many people were on our website and how many were completing the questionnaire at any given point in time, and you genuinely could see spikes where the number of people on our website jumped fivefold in a particular minute when the census was mentioned on Gogglebox. And you saw peaks when the census was talked about in EastEnders and on The One Show and BBC News, and then when the TV advert went out on the Saturday night before census day, you could see it in the Ant and Dec broadcast. So through the spikes you could see the impact of the advertising that we did. MILES FLETCHER So, you could see some of these early returns going well, but what's it like to be in charge and responsible for that huge operation on the morning of census day itself? Does it feel like Christmas day or do you wake with a sense of trepidation about whether or not it's all gonna work? PETE BENTON Well, by the time you get to Census Day, interestingly, you kind of have a sense of how it's going because the letters land on every doorstep three weeks before Census day. So you've got a sense of how many people have been responding, and what times of day they've been responding, over previous days and previous weekends. And interestingly, we had the weekend profile from the two previous weekends before census weekend and we could see on the Saturday and on the Sunday what time of day the most responses came in. And it was typically about 11 or 12 o'clock. So by 11 o'clock on the Sunday of census day we knew that was the peak hour probably, from what we've seen the week before. We knew by seven or eight o'clock how big that peak was likely to be, because on previous weekend days we'd seen that eight o'clock peak was about a quarter of what the peak was going to be at lunchtime. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I was looking at seven or eight in the morning to try and predict “how high is the peak?” and what's the total likely to be. And by the time we got to 10 o'clock I think we were comfortable that the peak looked like it would be manageable within our projections and it certainly was. MILES FLETCHER And that continued then according to your expectations during the day. Did you have a sense then, come the end of that day, just how many people had completed and whether you were on course for success? PETE BENTON Yeah, we could see that we were ahead of what we'd expected at that point. And that is a census-takers dream because you can imagine knowing that you've got this fixed window as a census day. It's a fixed day, there's a period of letters that are going to come out and remind those that haven't responded after the census date, and then a fixed period of field staff. And you know you're on tenterhooks waiting to see whether the response is going to come in quick enough and be big enough. And by the end of the Census Day, we could see actually things were going well and at that point, you can breathe and say, “Okay, we're going to be alright”, you know. When things go wrong it can be horrible. There are stories from around the world of websites breaking on census day and front page news for weeks as the public follow this kind of scenario unfolding, and you know that God willing, we won't end up there, but you know that it's possible and so as you get towards the census there's both nerves and excitement kicking in. MILES FLETCHER Okay, so by the end of census day you've got a pretty good picture of how well you're doing, but you know that not every household can possibly have completed it. What do you do next? How do you pull in those remaining households that haven't taken part? PETE BENTON So there's probably three big things that we do. We continue the publicity campaign, we look for the opportunities to get on the radio and on the telly and just talk about how well it's gone. We put press releases out so the conversation continues, and that was really successful. But then we can see of course, which addresses have responded and which haven't. There's a slight lag in the ones that have come back as paper questionnaires - it takes a while for those to be receipted. But nonetheless, we can see which addresses haven't responded, and at that point we send a reminder letter. The most effective thing we can do is send a letter - it would cost an awful lot more to send a person out on the street. Firstly, we try and get people to respond without needing a reminder through all that publicity campaign. Secondly, we send reminder letters and people can get three or four over a period of three or four weeks. And then after about a week, that's when in earnest we start sending out field support staff to go knock on the door and say “we see you haven't done the census yet, can we help?” And most people would say “oh, I've done it” or “I’m about to do it”, and they would genuinely get on and do it. But there were some that needed a few more reminders than that. But eventually we could see that those letters were working and that the field responses were working. And of course there was also the option for people to fill it in on telephone, if they couldn't get online weren't able to fill it in on paper, but could do it more easily over the phone. And so by making multiple options available and making sure they were well promoted, we got a fabulous response. MILES FLETCHER There was an issue wasn't there with some people who thought they completed it, but hadn’t pressed ‘Submit’, and were then getting chased up. PETE BENTON That's right, the Census is a legal document and you actually have to say “to the best of my knowledge and belief this is a true reflection of my household” and press the submit button. And there were a few people who had got to the end, thought they've done the job, but hadn't pressed ‘Submit’. And so actually, they ended up getting a letter that was very specifically worded that said “we can see you've started the census online, but you haven't yet pressed ‘Submit’ would you like to get back and finish it off?” And we saw a good response to that as well. I'll let you into a little secret. I actually got one of those letters. It wasn't because I had forgotten to press ‘submit’. It was because my kids actually weren't at home on census day. Two of them are out of the country. And I was debating with them. When are you coming home and are you to be counted in the census because there are some quite precise rules. Because if you're out of the country for more than 12 months, you shouldn't be counted, but if you’re out of the country for less than 12 months you should. So we were just discussing “when are you going to be home? Do you think you'd be home within 12 months?” They said yes, but we didn't quite get there by Census day. I’d filled in my bits, my wife had done hers, as had my stepdaughter, but I was just waiting for two bits from my other kids. And it was fabulous that they could using our access code from our household which I shared securely with them via a secure link. They could go in and fill in their details, pass it back to me and eventually I pressed ‘submit’ a few days after census day. MILES FLETCHER How difficult was the decision to go ahead with this census, despite all the years of planning? How difficult was it to press the button and go ahead despite the fact that there was a pandemic still in full swing and the country was still in effective lockdown? PETE BENTON Well, you can imagine that was one of the biggest decisions that we've made. And in principle there were essentially two questions that we asked. The first was “can we keep the public safe? And can we keep our field staff safe?” And the second was, “can we get good statistics?” And you can gather from the fact that we went ahead that our answer to both of those questions was “yes, we can keep people safe and we can produce good statistics” but we spent a lot of time looking into that and we actually changed a fair bit of the operation. All of our recruitment and training for our field staff moved to being online where sometimes we might have gone into somebody's home to give them support, we were very clearly not going to be going into anybody's home. We kept two metres distance, we kept masks on at any point where we did do a field visit, and even doing those field visits there’s a big decision to go ahead and continue. We had options just to use letters to remind people. But we went ahead and we got good statistics. We had to give some extra guidance here and there for certain questions. When we asked “Where do you normally work from, at home or in the office?” We always ask that because many people always have worked at home. But people we saw as we tested some of those things out were kind of thinking well, “what do you mean, do you mean now or do you mean prior to the pandemic?” So, we gave some guidance on a few questions to say answer now, as it is now. So that guidance was clear and straightforward. But there will be some interesting artefacts that we find from this census. So one of the questions the census asks is “Where do you live? Where do you work? And how do you travel to work by car, by train or by bike or by... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/22415774

A survey like no other: Tracking the spread of COVID-19 in the general population 02/21/2022

A survey like no other: Tracking the spread of COVID-19 in the general population Since April 2020, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey has provided vital weekly snapshots of the level of SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating within the community. We’re joined by three central figures in the project, Ruth Studley, Tina Thomas and Professor Sarah Walker, for the inside story on one of ONS’s most ambitious surveys, set up in a matter of weeks as the pandemic took hold. (This episode was recorded in September 2021, before the emergence of the Omicron variant) Transcript: Miles Fletcher, Head of Media and Public Relations at the ONS Numbers, numbers everywhere, but here we’ll take some time to think about where they come from what they mean, and where they're going. Welcome then to the first episode of statistically speaking the new official podcast from the UK’s Office for National Statistics. In this series the nation's number crunchers, as some people still insist on calling them, chew the fat and spill the beans on the stories behind the stats. Lately, they've been making headlines, some would say ruling our lives, like never before. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this first episode we'll be looking at how millions of swab tests and finger prick blood tests allowed the Office for National Statistics and its partners to track the progress of COVID-19 across the UK. During the pandemic, the COVID infection survey has proved a vital source of regular data on Coronavirus infections, antibodies and symptoms. We'll hear why this huge study was needed in the first place, how it was set up in double quick time and what it's told us about the virus and its human impacts, and why it remains important now. Joining us are three central figures in the project: Tina Thomas, who runs the survey operation itself, leading a force of thousands of study workers out gathering data in the field; Ruth Studley Head of Analysis for the ONS, whose job it is to turn those test results into fast statistical estimates that we hear about in the news every week; and from the University of Oxford, the chief investigator and academic lead of the infection survey, Professor Sarah Walker. Sarah, to start with you first, how did this study get underway? And well, why was it needed in the first place? Professor Sarah Walker, Chief Investigator and Academic Lead for the COVID-19 Infection Survey So it was back in April 2020, when a lot of people had, you know, been sick with COVID in the first wave. But we really didn't know how many because at that point, we didn't have the PCR tests that are done in the laboratories, we didn't have the tests on a stick, the lateral flow test that lots of people do before going to school or work. And we really have no idea how many people had actually already had COVID. And at the time, there was actually a hope that we might even be close to herd immunity then. And so initially, in the middle of April, the infection survey was first of all a study looking for antibodies in the blood. And the initial plan was to sample just around a thousand households in the first month, then a further thousand households a month for a year to just find out how many people had had COVID already. But over literally the course of two or three days from the 17th to the 19th of April, we realized that actually, we didn't know so much more, in particular about how many people were infected without having any symptoms, how many people were passing it on to other people in their household, how many children were infected. And very rapidly, the survey increased to sampling over 11,000 households in the first month with an initial plan to then resample another 11,000 households a month for a year. Miles Fletcher Quite simply, you needed to have that representative sample of the whole population, it wasn't enough just to rely on people coming forward who suspected they had COVID. Sarah Walker Well, exactly, because what we cared about was what was really going on in the community. And it's well known that people who come forward for testing tend not to represent their communities completely. And so this was why initially, just because we had to get going so fast, we did actually approach at random people who had been in previous ONS surveys and said they would be interested in taking part in future research. But very quickly, we moved to just sampling from addresses. So, to really get a completely random sample of people living in private households across the UK. Miles Fletcher And how did that connection with the ONS come about? Because it's a new departure for the ONS, we normally measure the economy and migration and so forth, but not medical testing. So how did that partnership get started? Sarah Walker So, I really think it was a case of everybody just working as hard as they could together to make this happen fast. And what ONS do have huge experience with is these very large population representative sampling frames, and they also had access to this databank of people who had been randomly selected for previous surveys and who had said they would be interested in taking part. It's a huge field operation and obviously ONS has got huge expertise in that. So, I think they were in many ways, you know, the obvious partner to really take it on. And it was a huge collaborative effort between the Department for Health and Social Care as well as the University of Oxford and ONS. Miles Fletcher And this all had to happen in a fraction of the time that's normally available to plan a big survey, for example a census, and it was almost on that sort of scale. You need every community, every age group or socio demographic group represented in that massive sample. All this had to happen in a matter of a few days to start with to get the first estimates. Sarah Walker We wrote the first draft of the protocol on Friday the 17th of April, we submitted it for ethical approval on Monday the 20th of April. So that's just four days later, during which time we had gone through three major changes in scope and size. It was approved on Tuesday the 21st of April, we recruited our first participant on Sunday, the 26th. So literally ten days after the first draft, and we published our first estimates two weeks later, on Sunday the 10th of May. And interestingly, the positivity rate was 0.24%, around 136,000 individuals in England which we thought was enormous. Miles Fletcher Oh, well we’ll have a lot to say about what we've actually found. But just thinking about those early days and having to achieve in a matter of just a few days, what would normally take months. Tina Thomas, what was your reaction? What was your reaction when you first heard about this project and what it was trying to achieve? Tina Thomas, Deputy Director for the COVID-19 Infection Survey My reaction! So, before COVID, I was running the ONS social survey field community, and that's about 1,200 people, 1,200 interviewers, so they were keeping me busy. I had a phone call from one of our deputy directors on a Sunday night. They said, they want us to run an infection survey and they need me for the operations. And to be honest with you Miles, last year was a little bit of a blur. Usually, when we do surveys like that we take our time in working out the actual survey model, how are we going to do it, what we need, what our end goal is. And like Sarah has just articulated, everything was needed within days and weeks. To submitting a protocol on a Friday to recruiting our participants and the field staff out in the field, collecting the swabs and asking the questions was just short of 10 days, I believe, which was just something that we had never, ever done before. Did we think we could do it? There was a lot of nervousness but there was also so much passion to get this out there because we knew how important this data was. And everybody who worked on this, as Sarah said before, a huge collaborative effort to get it started. But it was just something that none of us had ever tried to tackle before. And it just proves what you can do. At pace, under pressure – we did it. Miles Fletcher And it's a huge collaborative effort involving not just Sarah and her academic colleagues at Oxford, but also the University of Manchester, a whole fleet of specialist contractors helping us to run the field study and specialist providers of all sorts right across the country. And, of course, government partners, chiefly the Department of Health and Social Care in England and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This is a huge UK-wide effort. Now in those early days, of course, it's the start of the survey, it started in a relatively small scale. It was, as I recall, about 12,000 households to start with, but then it grew rapidly didn't it? Tina Thomas Yes, that's right. I think it was, it was changing hourly some days. But yes, it started off relatively small and then it was within a matter of days “we want 150,000 unique participants providing swab samples across the UK”. We started off in England, we didn't actually bring any of the devolved nations onboard until around about the summertime, so a couple of months after the study had been running. That involved Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, which really brought its own operational challenges. Scotland and Wales are obviously a bit more rural than England. They wanted us in Scotland to go to the highlands and the islands and of course, going into Wales everything had to be translated into Welsh. And we had to make sure that we had Welsh speakers who could answer the phones for queries and also study workers that could speak Welsh as well. So really what was going on in the background from an operational perspective was very, very much like the swan analogy. We seemed quite calm on the surface, but with so much going on underneath - it was just incredible. And it's not just about recruiting those participants and getting the study workers out there. There's all the logistics around it, like how do we get the swabs to the labs? How do we get the test results back? Who's going to do all our printing? Who's going to send all the letters out? I'd wake up in the morning and think okay, so what challenge are we going to have to deal with today and I was never disappointed. Miles Fletcher And meanwhile always this huge expectation, from government, from the media, from ordinary citizens wanting to know exactly where the infections were, where the path of the virus was going. And during those very hectic early days, just one operational upset could throw the whole schedule into disarray. Fifteen months on, the survey is settled into a regular, pretty steady pattern now of hundreds of thousands of enrolled participants. And from their number, a large group taking a regular finger prick blood or swab test. How is that? Has it become easy to run now or are there still huge challenges out there? How are people, how about the participants themselves? How have they responded? And what's been their role in keeping this study running and keeping its findings meaningful? Tina Thomas So yeah, I mean, at this moment in time, we've got just over 457,000 live participants in CIS, 5.5 million swab tests have been taken to date. And just under a million blood tests. A daily rate for swab test is around 14,000, there's about four and about 5,000 blood tests being taken as well. We couldn't do this without our participants. Last year, when we had lockdowns, we had a bit of a captive audience. So, the study workers could get through their appointments. As we've seen lockdown restrictions lifted, it started to make operations a little bit more difficult. So, we've had to kind of pivot and change the way our study workers operate. So that's maybe working more in the evenings, offering weekend appointments. But our participants are just absolutely critical to this. And we can't thank them enough. It takes a lot of their time. We're asking a lot of them, but they majority of our participants are just really willing to do this. And you know, actually quite enjoying being in surveys while really feeling like they're making a difference. Miles Fletcher Tina, talk us through - we've got this small army of people out there in the field, covering households up and down the UK, tell us how the process works. Tina Thomas It's not such a small army, there's just over 3,000 study workers that are contracted to work on CIS, as you said, spread all across the UK. They are given what we call an allocation each day. So that's about visiting households to keep within protocol. So, some are still on weekly visits, some households are on monthly visits, they have to think ahead and have all their kit together: barcodes, test tubes, the swabs, the blood kits, and their mobile devices. So, they ring a household, usually the night before and agree a date and a time for them to visit. When they arrive at the household it’s a non-contact visit and they hand over the kits to the household members and scan the barcodes to make sure that we get the right test against the right person when they go to the labs. That's for swabs only. If the household is blood too then it's on to the fingerprick blood tests, which the participants usually take inside to do. And then they come back to the doorstep and there is a questionnaire that they'll need to answer, which Ruth touched on, which is about if they've had COVID, if they've had symptoms, what their social interaction has been like, and obviously that's more and more important now that lockdown restrictions are being lifted. Then the study worker completes the visit. And at some point during that evening they will drop the swabs off at a courier point where they'll go overnight to the labs. And the test results are usually back within two to three days. We've recently just introduced a new process, which saves quite a bit of money and also a lot of trees in that the test results now go out to our participants by email rather than by letter. If it's unfortunate to be positive, it gets notified to test and trace who then get in contact with the household. Miles Fletcher And of course, running something on this scale, it doesn't mean things always run entirely smoothly. We've had some quite colourful encounters on the doorsteps… Tina Thomas We have! So we have had a couple of study workers who've arrived at a pre-agreed date and time for the door to be opened by somebody who wasn't wearing any clothes. That's happened a couple of times and I think actually one study worker did ask the gentleman to go and put some clothes on and he came back with a T-shirt on, which just about covered his top half. And with the finger prick blood test as well, so it's quite a neat kit that comes in a cardboard box and it's got a plaster and a lancet and the test tube that we need them to collect the blood. The lancets are not needles, they're tiny, tiny blades because the actual volume of blood that we need to test is quite high. But we have had a couple of participants who I think were laborers on building sites, whose hands were very calloused from the job that they do, where the lancet just would not pierce the skin. And because they were so willing to provide that blood sample and wanted to provide that blood sample, I think we've had a couple of instances where they've come back with Stanley knives and actually managed to get blood out the finger with that. We wouldn't approve that or suggest that's the best way to do it. But what it does show, certainly the last one, is that people are just so keen and passionate to be included in this survey that they'll do what they can to help us. Miles Fletcher Made of sterner stuff than me, willing to take a stanley knife to yourself in the cause of science. And please, everybody don't try that yourselves. Some people haven't been quite so robust on the doorstep though. Tina Thomas No. Since we introduced the fingerprint blood test for antibodies, we have had a number of participants who have fainted whilst trying to get a blood sample for us. And unfortunately, a very high percentage of those are men. But we do have procedures in place with a study worker to help people when that happens. And obviously it remains a non-contact visit. But they have got a list of instructions if somebody does, unfortunately, pass out. And I think at this point as well, Miles, I'd really like to just say a massive, massive thank you to our study workers working on this who have been out doing this, during those early dark days of the pandemic, through every type of weather you can think of, to get us these samples and the data that we need. Miles Fletcher Thank you, Tina. So Ruth, this is where you come in – the field force have gone out, they've done their job, they've gathered in these thousands and thousands of samples, what do you do first? Ruth Studley, Head of Analysis for the COVID-19 Infection Survey So, what happens first is all of those swabs are sent to the different Lighthouse Laboratories to be tested using different PCR arrangements. That is part of the national testing programme and we use exactly the same process as the rest of the UK, that then gives us a set of data which we could use. And that is sent to us securely in ONS, where we process that data to understand exactly what is going on in the raw data before we use our modelling arrangements to produce our headline estimate. So, as part of looking at that data, we want to know things like what the different cycle threshold value is, for example. Now that is a bit of a technical term, and if I try and describe it very basically, it's the number of times, the number of cycles that each PCR test has to go through before a positive result is detectable, for example. And if there's a high quantity of the virus, you would expect that to be identified after a low number of cycles. So we would say that that was a low CT test, and it will be regarded as a high viral load. And so we look at things like that. And there's lots and lots of different things that we would look at in the raw data before then moving on to doing our modelling. The modelling that we use is a Bayesian multilevel regression post stratification model. And that's used to calculate breakdowns of positivity by region, and age across England. That all happens at breakneck speed. So the data arrives on day one, and we are virtually ready to produce information by day three, we publish by day five. It's very, very rapid. I'm not sure if any other official statistics are produced that rapidly. Miles Fletcher But such as the need for that data. Have the findings ever surprised you? Ruth Studley Yes and no. So, you wouldn't expect it to change very rapidly in the course of a few days. And usually, if there is something that you were surprised by, it would usually be an indicator that you want to do some further analysis. And there have been occasions where we've seen things and thought, does that make sense? And you dig a bit deeper, and you find that there's something going on in the data. But whilst, like Sarah was saying, you would never propose to predict what is going to happen, you would expect the changes to be relatively smooth. Miles Fletcher So, out on the doorstep every day, 12,000 swab and blood tests being taken, on average, at the moment nearly 6 million in all gathered under this survey. But what happens to those test results when they come in? Ruth, it's your job to make sense of them, and to turn them into statistics that can be relied upon. What's the secret to keeping those estimates reliable and trusted? Ruth Studley So that's a really great question Miles. I was thinking when I was listening to Sarah and to Tina then, what is it about this team that has allowed us to produce such fantastic results that have been so vitally important to the UK? And I think it’s the three Ps you know, we've got people who... /episode/index/show/3470c01f-d2e6-4ea5-95b5-fb243d11309c/id/22180076

Introducing Statistically Speaking 01/24/2022

Statistically Speaking

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