A few weeks ago, the RSS and Centre for Public Data published an interim summary of findings from our poverty data gaps research, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Insight Infrastructure team. Some of the findings discussed there were systemic , such as issues with data access. Others were closer to the ground – gaps that affect a specific topic, variables in a key dataset, or particular sets of research questions.
While many of these issues are well known, throughout our conversations it became clear that sometimes those data gaps themselves are also invisible. Today we’re launching something designed to help address that problem: the Poverty Data Gaps Explorer – an interactive tool that lets you explore, filter and contribute to a shared picture of the key gaps. Here’s why you should try it out and help us build a more complete view of the landscape.
What is the Poverty Data Gaps Explorer?
The Explorer is a start towards a catalogue of what’s missing, built from the gaps identified in our research and designed to grow with contributions from practitioners, researchers and organisations across the UK.
Each row represents a single data gap, categorised using a taxonomy: access, quality, sufficiency, timeliness, linkage, and more. You can click through to see the context of each gap, the source it came from and, where relevant, the specific research question someone was unable to answer because the data wasn’t there.
Over time, as more people submit their own experiences – via our short contribution form – we hope the explorer will evolve into a living map of the UK’s poverty data landscape, its blind spots and its bottlenecks. The tool will periodically be updated to reflect your contributions and, where applicable, new context or developments from stats producers.
The value of this ‘living’ approach is that it can track ongoing changes to the system. As new datasets emerge or researchers and frontline anti-poverty analysts encounter new problems, the landscape shifts. Capturing that shift is vital if the UK’s statistical system is to support a realistic and inclusive understanding of poverty.
Why have we created the Explorer?
As the project progressed, we often found similar gaps being mentioned by multiple individuals or organisations. Although the stats system supports a lot of user engagement and is aware of many gaps in their respective domains, a public catalogue of those gaps has been missing.
This means it is easy to make assumptions about which issues are most pressing and why, or to hear from only the most engaged researchers about their issues. A crowd-sourced gaps explorer can help bring otherwise disjointed information together to help inform decision-making.
The tool is also a way for us to highlight some of the specific gaps that we noted in our interim report: among others, that data around gendered poverty, homelessness, migrant and refugee populations, disability, and wealth are all areas that are especially in need of solutions. You can read more about these issues in our last blog post.
Why your contributions matter
It is vital to the success of a tool like this that the people closest to the data contribute to its evolution. The more submissions we receive, the clearer the emerging and central problems will become.
Every submission will be checked by a member of the RSS research team before being added. Over time, these contributions will shape the tool and help guide our conversations with policymakers, statisticians and data owners across government.
Without a statistical system that captures people’s realities, supports legitimate research and enables informed policymaking, we risk missing opportunities to affect real change. The explorer is a step towards a shared, transparent understanding of what we know, what we don’t, and what we need to build a fuller picture.
If you work with poverty data (or often struggle to work with it!) we’d love to hear from you. Explore the gaps that have been identified so far, contribute your own, and reach out if you have any questions. You can email RSS Policy Researcher Dakota Langhals at d.langhals@rss.org.uk for more information.
Attributions: we’re grateful to the Joseph Rowntree Insight Infrastructure team for supporting this research, and we’re also grateful to the team at Climate Change AI, whose own data gaps explorer and taxonomy helped inspire this work. We’re also grateful to Nicola Rennie for her work developing this tool.