Improving access to poverty data: what we heard at our latest workshop, and what might actually help

Guest blog by Dakota Langhals RSS Policy Researcher 

Accessing crucial poverty-related data shouldn’t be hard for those who rely on it to do their jobs. Yet charities, researchers and policymakers consistently face barriers when trying to find and use the data they need. 

We explored these frictions through a workshop with data users from civil society, data producers and systems thinkers as part of our project with the Centre for Public Data on gaps in poverty data, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Insights and Infrastructures Team. The aim was to collectiely brainstorm ways to improve access routes at every level. This builds on our findings published so far, detailed in the project’s interim report. 

The full workshop write-up is now available, but here’s what we learned in brief. 

Where frictions bite 

Capacity is uneven; friction compounds it. Many frontline organisations lack the time, skills, or tooling to engage with data in meaningful ways. Other organisations have capacity but struggle accessing the best data in useful timeframes.  

Discoverability is a persistent pain point. Even when data are public, users struggle to find the right dataset, understand what’s inside it and judge its fitness for purpose, especially when documentation is highly academic or inconsistent. This challenge becomes worse when a question involves navigating multiple datasets, data owners and access routes. 

Security and permissive gateways create trade-offs. Producers are rightly cautious about disclosure risk and legal bases for sharing data, but access restrictions mean many projects never get off the ground. This means frontline interventions against poverty can be slow to advance or ineffective at driving learning. 

Trust is strained by low transparency. People told us they rarely see why an access decision was made, why some data are considered more secure than others, or how to escalate when engagement stalls. 

 

Promising directions brought up by participants 

1) Build an intermediary “middle layer” between producers and users. Some possibilities for what this might look like include: 

• A convening or 'data broker' function to help users find the right data and navigate access routes, aggregate, prioritise and convey user needs to producers in a structured way 

• Trusted intermediaries (e.g., think tanks) undertaking analyses inside secure environments on behalf of smaller charities, returning safe outputs without each charity needing its own TRE access. 

2) Invest in networking, dialogue and resource sharing. 

• Regular, two-way forums for producers and civil society to discuss emerging needs, dataset changes, and pain points with tools. 

• Space for upstream conversations about how we conceptualise and measure poverty, including ways to translate lived experience into specific, actionable data asks. 

• Practical platforms for 'what works' resources, templates and how-to guides tailored to non-academic users. 

3) Improve discovery tools and user capacity. 

• A central, user-oriented catalogue spanning major UK administrative and survey datasets, with concise summaries covering variables, disaggregations, quality caveats and access routes. 

• Smarter search and navigation (potentially AI-assisted) to guide users to datasets and variables they didn’t know existed or otherwise struggle to navigate. 

• Training pathways – from data basics to guides for accessing more secured datasets – plus stronger coproduction with civil society in academic projects, supported by funders. 

4) Make access processes more proportionate and predictable. 

• Fast-track routes for low-risk organisations or repeat analyses with strong compliance records. 

• Tiered access arrangements calibrated to data sensitivity and organisational capability, instead of a one-size-fits-all application process for the best data held in secure environments. 

• A 'default to share' culture (with safeguards) to reduce reliance on Freedom of Information requests and Parliamentary Questions, backed by clearer decision rationales, service standards and escalation routes. 

 

What we’ll do next – and how you can help 

We’re now synthesising findings across workstreams into concrete recommendations targeted at several stakeholder groups working in the realm of poverty data. We’ll also publish case studies showing how data gaps affect researchers in more concrete ways. 

This research relies on individuals and organisations working with poverty data sharing their issues and experience with us. Our Poverty Data Gaps Explorer is live and growing. You can browse gaps we’ve extracted from hundreds of civil society reports since 2020 and submit your own to help prioritise fixes. 

The signal from this workshop was clear: building a better data access regime will require several components – simpler discovery, proportionate controls, practical support, and sustained dialogue. Taken together, these steps would free up scarce time, reduce duplication and, most importantly, enable organisations to use data to improve people’s lives. 

Read the full write-up here.