Epilogue: progressive ways ahead

How can our society’s relationship with its data be improved? Our authors offer many pointers to the way ahead. We hope this book will make you better informed, but also help you develop types of action appropriate to your situation as you see it, as an active citizen....

Critical statistical literacy and interactive data visualisations

Large amounts of data, relevant to decision making and political argument, are now available. However, these data are often accessible only to people with reasonably developed skills in data acquisition and exploration; less skilled users must depend on interpretations by others. This chapter shows how large amounts of evidence relevant to decision making can be made accessible to a broad public, via software the authors have developed and made widely available. The Constituency Explorer resulted from a collaboration between the House of Commons Library and Durham University, and was designed to support analysis and decision making in the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections. It facilitates access to 150 variables for each of the 650 parliamentary constituencies in the UK, which can be explored in an interactive way. The authors describe the design and features of the interface, and some of the ways it has been used. Finally, they outline some strategies for public engagement which include ‘gamification’ via a quiz accessible to smartphones.

Lyme disease politics and evidence‑based policy making in the UK

There are few ‘accepted’ approaches to dealing with tick- borne infections (including Lyme disease) that have not been challenged. This case study looks at my role in UK Lyme patient’s activism and policy change (for example, related to the NICE clinical guidelines process) focussing on one specific policy issue. It shows how critical analysis of scientific, clinical and other real- world evidence drew on and reflected the ethos of the Radstats network. It is a story showing how I worked with others with statistical skills - using science and evidence to challenge policy successfully. It explains how communities can take action, while using or creating scientific knowledge - to improve policy and people’s health. It shows how networks of communities can engage through social change (based on an understanding of policy and science) to make it more socially relevant and responsive, as well as more scientifically robust.

The Radical Statistics Group: using statistics for progressive social change

The UK-based Radical Statistics Group has a long-standing role in shaping statistics to support progressive social change. It has worked to demystify and critique official statistics, and to trace the consequences of using statistical models and their assumptions The Group has used its energies to encourage statistical literacy and campaigning effectiveness among progressive groups that seek its help. Its early days from the 1970s were characterised by a range of ‘progressive’ publications and well-received interventions in crucial debates and official consultations. In the 1990s it contributed to the wave of reforms of statistical outputs and procedures brought to fruition by the incoming Labour government. At the current time it provides ongoing resources of annual conferences, regular journal and email, a website and social media. Campaigns are often developed outside Radical Statistics structures, but with the key support of RadStats contacts, resources and ideas. At a time when it is archiving its first forty years of papers in the Welcome Library, Radical Statistics envisages a future enhanced by the activity of a range of allies, and the resources they provide, so as to formulate effective alternatives to the dominant discourses of our time.

Labour market statistics

The chapter begins by identifying the theoretical roots of labour market concepts, notably the Phillips Curve relating unemployment and inflation. It then presents the definitions of “employment” and “unemployment” developed by the International Labour Organisation. These are measured by the quarterly Labour Force Survey, which provides not just simple counts but also flows between these categories, here presented graphically. One problem is that localised unemployment data use different definitions from the national headline rate, but a larger problem is that in all measures individuals must be counted as either employed or unemployed, when increasing numbers of workers work fewer or more hours than they wish, sometimes on variable hours contracts or as insecure sub-contractors in the “gig economy”. These new forms of work, generally disadvantaged, make gathering reliable data harder, and the chapter ends by discussing earnings data, and measuring the impact of minimum wage legislation.

Welfare reform: national policies with local impacts

Welfare reform has been central to UK policymaking since the election of a Conservative-led government in 2010. The welfare reforms apply across the whole of the country, but their impacts vary profoundly from place to place – a consequence that government seems largely to have ignored. The measures introduced are targeted at working age people which leads to a disproportionate impact on areas with weaker local labour markets. This chapter draws on a range of official statistics, including local area claimant data, to document the financial losses in different parts of the country. It concludes that although the overall financial loss to claimants proved less than originally anticipated it remains very large, even before the implementation of Universal Credit and the post-2015 benefit changes, and that one of the main impacts of welfare reform is to hit the poorest places hardest.

The statistics of devolution

This chapter reviews the forms of statistical information available across devolved levels of governance in the UK. The focus is not only on statistics from the devolved nations – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but also on statistics available for other levels where these is significant roles for devolved governance including city regions. Particular attention is paid to the regional / devolved nation Government Expenditure and Revenue Statistics (GERS) given both the salience of these in political argument and their significance in understanding the imbalance in the UK’s space economy. Data for sub-national geographies in England includes not only standard regions and local authorities but other forms including combinations of authorities and Local Economic Partnerships. Data about these levels is very useful for exploring variation within the nation which contains more than 80% of the UK's population.

The control and ‘fitness for purpose’ of UK official statistics

This chapter describes the evolution of UK Official Statistics over an 80 year period under the influence of personalities, politics and government policies, new user needs and changing technology. These have led to changing institutional structures – such as the Statistics Commission - and periodic oscillations in what statistics are created and the ease of their accessibility by the public. The chapter concludes with the impact of the first major statistical legislation for 60 years, particularly as a consequence of its creation of the UK Statistics Authority. This has included major investment in quality assurance of National and Official Statistics and in professional resourcing. These changes are very welcome, as is the statutory specification of government statistics as a public good by the 2007 Statistics and Registration Service Act. But problems of access to some data sets and the pre-release of key economic statistics to selected groups of users remain. Given the widespread societal consequences of the advent of new technologies, what we collect and how we do it will inevitably continue to change rapidly.

Counting the population in need of international protection globally

Different international and regional agencies count the number of persons crossing borders and internally displaced within states worldwide. Boosted in particular by conflicts in the Middle East, the number of refugees has grown to 15.1 million in 2015 and people of concern to 63.5 million. States have also sought to reduce the number recognised as Convention refugees (as defined in 1951) and are seeking to reinterpret their obligations and introducing limitations on those to be protected. The quality of data used to advance UNHCR programmes varies from one category of protected person to another, thus raising important questions for the management and delivery of protection-related services. Moreover, data are not disaggregated by age and gender, and in spite of greater efforts at multilateral cooperation, these datasets do not cover the same populations as those produced by other agencies. This chapter reviews the coverage of people of concern in the UNHCR’s guidelines and identifies gaps in the datasets used by UN and multilateral agencies tasked with the protection of refugees, IDPs and other people of concern. It suggests that these datasets need to be broadened to include other categories of vulnerable individuals and groups and that further disaggregation is needed.

Using survey data: towards valid estimates of poverty in the South

It is important to be cautious about making inferences from survey data. This chapter focuses on one very important but unexamined problem, that of the undercount of the poorest in the world. This arises both by design (excluding the homeless, those in institutions and nomadic populations) and in practice (those in fragile households, urban slums, insecure areas and servants/slaves in rich households). In developing countries, it is difficult to make inter-censal estimates because essential data like birth and death registration are not systematically collected. Donors have therefore promoted the use of international standardized household surveys. A possible alternative is Citizen surveys initiated by an Indian NGO (Pratham). Comparisons are made between citizen surveys and contemporaneous Demographic and Health Surveys in three East African countries