Digital Economy Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Scott Mann and Thangam Debbonaire

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Scott Mann]

Q One of the biggest contributing factors for people moving house is having access to a decent broadband signal. Have you done any statistical or economic modelling of population densities and movement away from cities to rural areas? Is that a piece of work that you would be prepared to do to find out the economic benefits to rural areas as part of the USO?

Professor Sir Charles Bean: That is not really my territory.

Hetan Shah: Ditto. I am here to talk about the stats and research clauses. I do not know about the other bits, I am afraid.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

Q You have both talked about other European countries and Canada. Forgive me for not knowing whether this is the correct term, but are we talking here about big data? Is that the term I hear bandied about? Either way, could you tell me a bit more about the benefits and outcomes in terms of policy information? Give us a bit more information about what these other countries are doing better and how their politicians are better equipped as a result.

Professor Sir Charles Bean: I think most people use the term “administrative data” to refer to large information held within the public sector that accrues as a by-product of whatever the public authority is doing. Tax information is a classic example, and it is something that is obviously potentially of use to the Office for National Statistics in constructing economic statistics. Big data is a wider concept that embraces the vast range of information that is generated by various sorts of private sector organisations, which includes the scanner data that Hetan mentioned. It is the sort of information that is generated by the likes of Google and phone companies. Big data is much broader.

There is a question about the extent to which you can use big data in the construction of official statistics. I think there are two obvious areas that you might want to exploit. One is scanner data for constructive price indices, which Hetan has already mentioned. The other area where I could see private sector big data being of considerable use is on payment information—information from payments processors and payments providers.

Of course, there is a vast amount of other information that is generated by the private sector. Some of that information might be useful for shedding light on new puzzles or new phenomena in the economy. One might want to be a little bit wary about relying on them to build the regular official statistics because you cannot be sure they are always going to be there, whereas you will probably have a reasonable presumption that the payments information and scanner data will continue to be available, and the Office for National Statistics could therefore use them on a regular basis.

Hetan Shah: I can give a couple of examples or case studies. One is pensions. In this country we have made quite a lot of changes in recent years around pensions policy, but it is very hard to track the impact of that. The Bill will allow for the ONS to bring together the benefits and pensions data, which are held by the DWP, the HMRC data, and also to go out to companies or to either regulatory bodies or federated bodies and get their data and bring those together so that we can see what auto-enrolment has actually meant, in terms of the amount people are putting into their pensions, and you can actually start tracking policy.

Another example is international student migrants, which is clearly a hot topic at the moment. At the moment there are Home Office data in one place, the Higher Education Statistics Agency holding useful data in another place and there are labour market data held in a third place. You could bring all those things together to actually track the impact and the numbers and so on, which at the moment we just do not have a good handle on. Those are the sorts of things that are possible if you give your statistical office access to the aggregate data from other Departments and also some access to private sector data.