Blog by Dakota Langhals, RSS Policy Researcher
On the 28th of July, the RSS and Centre for Public Data (CfPD), with support from the Women’s Budget Group, held a roundtable to discuss data gaps in the UK poverty-data landscape. The roundtable brought together experts from our networks with experience of working at the intersection of gendered issues and poverty with the aim of gathering information about key issues they have faced while trying to work in this field.
This roundtable was the first in a series of meetings that we will hold as part of our poverty data gaps research, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) Insight Infrastructure team. There has been a growing awareness of gaps in statistics in recent years, but the statistical system has struggled to respond effectively due to limited resources and competing priorities. Additionally, this project comes at a time of intense scrutiny of the UK’s official statistics system, as seen through the recent Lievesley Review, Devereux Review, and the UK Statistics Assembly. Considering this challenge, part of this project seeks to put forward practical, achievable, user-led recommendations for where the system can focus its efforts while being mindful of the context in which it is operating.
This briefing summarises the main threads and themes coming out of our discussion. Rather than providing detail on everything discussed, we pull out the key points that were raised, taking account of both the breadth of opinion and the impact issues have had on the attending organisations.
The roundtable had 3 main objectives:
- To identify specific data gaps that are affecting people that research, work in, or experience issues at the intersection of gender and poverty.
- To understand how people in this domain interact with the statistical system so that we can advocate for appropriate resource allocation.
- To understand the limitations of the questions people are able to answer within the current system, and to understand what the desired changes are.
Several key themes emerged from the discussion:
- Limited granularity and intersectional analysis. Participants emphasised that much UK poverty data cannot be disaggregated by more than one protected characteristic at a time, severely restricting intersectional analysis. In many cases this is related to data suppression or small sample sizes when trying to do analysis at small geographical levels such as local authorities. In others it is related to inconsistencies between datasets collected at the local level or by devolved administrations.
- Household-level measurement obscures intra-household dynamics. Income and poverty measures are typically produced at the household level. This makes many questions of interest simply unanswerable insofar as they require individual-level data to be available. This particularly affects analysis of women’s access to resources, intra-household decision-making and behaviours, and economic control.
- There is a general underutilisation of data linkage and data sharing issues abound. While administrative datasets have the potential to fill gaps, linkage across systems is limited. Additionally, data sharing between government and third-sector organisations is often limited, which makes organisations reliant on the incomplete pictures that are made public. Since a lot of data is already collected but just not shared outside of government departments, many questions of interest would be answerable if data was more widely accessible.
- It is often not straightforward to access data, even when they are publicly available. Both technical and non-technical users brought up difficulties they have had getting the data that they need for their questions. Attendees expressed the need for more streamlined access and use of data.
- User engagement could be improved. Attendees flagged that they were often unsure how their contributions to prior user engagement activities hosted by official statistics producers were considered. They also felt that some surveys could have been improved with better engagement with third-sector organisations and people with lived experience of poverty.
See a full write-up of the discussion here.
Get Involved
Over the coming weeks, we will be launching the next phase of our research, which will involve semi-structured interviews with data experts who can speak to specific data gaps that have a wide and / or deep impact on poverty research. This phase of the project will also include two additional themed roundtables that will serve information-gathering purposes.
To have your say in what themes we cover in future meetings, please fill out this form.
If you would like to share details of your experience with poverty-related data gaps, please fill out our open call for input. You can also use that form to register your interest in taking part in one of our stakeholder interviews and staying updated on our progress.