Proposal Description

A long and winding track? Non-official statistics as a source of insight

The long and winding track begins in 2019. Steve MacFeely of the World Health Organsations and Bojan Nastav of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development wrote a paper entitled “You say you want a (data) revolution”, which highlighted the potential for non-official data sources to be accredited as serving the public good. At the same time the Office for Statistics Regulation developed the concept of voluntary adoption, which allows organisations to adopt the Code of Practice for Statistics for non-official statistics. And in London, Transport for London was making huge progress in opening up its data sets for public use. This session takes the story forward from that point – how the thinking relating to the original paper has evolved; how the OSR’s concept of voluntary adoption has developed; and how Transport for London, as one of the most open data transport systems in the world, has used the Code of Practice to support the provision of a wide range of data and statistics to the public. The session will explore both the benefits and challenges of adopting the standards of official statistics outside the central government sector, and highlighting how, in the transport sector in the UK, this long and winding track is leading to genuine public benefit.