Tackling Poverty and Disability Data Gaps: RSS & CfPD Roundtable

Guest blog by Dakota Langhals, RSS Policy Researcher

Earlier this month, the RSS and Centre for Public Data (CfPD) brought together leading voices from disability policy, advocacy, and research to tackle a critical question: what do we know — and what don’t we know — about poverty and disability in the UK? 

This conversation is feeding into our research into poverty data gaps and how to address them, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) Insight Infrastructure team. Our goal is simple but ambitious: to help the system focus on what matters most, while recognising the real-world constraints it faces. 

This roundtable was the third in a series of meetings exploring where the UK’s data falls short. Previous roundtables examined poverty through the lens of gender and assessed the state of wealth data in the UK. 

The roundtable had 3 main objectives: 

  1. To identify specific data gaps that are affecting researchers and campaigners that work at the intersection of disability and poverty, broadly construed. 

  1. To sample views on the state of the UK’s poverty statistics and how they might be improved. 

  1. To dive deeper into questions that had arisen during the first half of our research for this project, which will be summarised in an interim summary report soon after the publication of this write-up. 

Key Themes 

Disability data in the UK suffer from a variety of issues, including: 

  • Problems of inclusion in data collection and use; 

  • Insufficient detail about disabilities and poor granularity of geographical information about people with disabilities; 

  • Poorly developed methodologies around accounting for the additional costs of disability; 

  • Inaccessible data and a lack of transparent, open dialogue or infrastructure around acquiring and using data; 

  • Inconsistent standards regarding how disability data are collected and reported. 

We heard many ideas for how the above issues could be addressed.  A sampling of these includes: 

  • Open data access by allowing more disaggregated data to be made available on Stat-Xplore and, where possible, making higher-quality data available for organisations to do their own analysis. 

  • Make publication of more detailed disability-related information standard, especially where this relates to economic, financial, and health outcomes. 

  • Publish local-area statistics for disability modelled after the successful Children in Low-Income Families (CiLIF) local-area statistics. 

  • Re-introduce a disability-focused survey at the national level modelled after the discontinued Life Opportunities Survey to collect much more detailed and comprehensive information about the prevalence of disabilities and the experiences of people with disabilities 

  • Safeguard the quality of surveys and administrative data sources by making data collection and communication materials more accessible to would-be survey participants and service users. 

  • Facilitate comparison between UK nations by applying a consistent, harmonised approach to disability data collection across the Censuses in 2031. 

  • Develop a long-term data infrastructure strategy that prioritises data sharing between government departments as well as with external organisations and researchers. 

Read the full report, with more detail on these key themes, here.  

Next Steps and How to Get Involved 

We’ll soon be sharing an interim summary of our findings so far, bringing together insights from across this project. These findings, alongside what we learned from this latest roundtable, will help shape our priorities for the next phase of research as we move toward the project’s conclusion in spring 2026. 

Early in the new year, we’ll take the next step: a series of focused workshops designed to bring expert data users and data owners into the same room. These sessions will zero in on one or two issues where we believe real progress is possible, turning broad conversations into practical, achievable solutions. Details will be announced soon. 

If you have experience poverty-related data gaps, we want to hear from you. Please share your insights via our open call for input, and use the same form to register your interest in future roundtables or interviews. 

This project is about more than identifying gaps. It’s about seizing the opportunity to direct attention and action toward the issues that matter most to researchers and organisations working on the frontlines of poverty. Together, we can make the data work harder for the people who need it most. 

 

I would like to thank Maddy Rose and Owen Bowden, our colleagues at Mencap who were an invaluable help with linking us to researchers working in this area. 

 

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