Agriculture, Energy and Environment

Volunteering at COP26 – being part of something big

I felt immensely excited and proud to be one of the 1,000 volunteers helping at COP26 in my home city of Glasgow. Volunteers came from different corners of the globe, to perform a range of tasks. I was a shuttle hub volunteer which means I helped those going to COP26 get from there and back by bus shuttle from the key transport hubs – over 7,000 people on one day in the hours I was there.

What gets me out of bed in the morning is feeling like being part of a greater whole. COP26 makes me realise that climate change and net zero is the bigger picture. As VIPs with their outriders whizzed by me, I was focussed on people keen to get their day going, like the lady who travelled for days from the islands of Palau or the man from Samoa to make sure they get their voices heard alongside the more well-known world leaders. The Volunteers logged the peoples from different parts of the world that they’ve welcomed to Glasgow – now covering almost all the 196 nations at COP26.

Glaswegians had varied responses to COP26. Most saw it as a great opportunity for the world. Some reflected the views of Greta Thunberg, that it’s more about “blah blah blah” than substance. Some bemoaned the inconvenience to their daily routine, although Glaswegians are renowned for their humour and make a joke of any temporary disruption to their day.

Coming from a mining family, I started my career in the coal industry, and was enormously proud to work in a nationalised industry. A phrase I heard a lot back then was that Britain was an island founded on coal surrounded by fish.

I was one of 20 young graduates that joined the National Coal Board (NCB) in 1979 and many, like me, came from coalfield communities. Early in 1980, I was sent on behalf of the NCB’s Economics Intelligence Unit, to monitor the Select Committee on Energy at the House of Commons to feed back on its inquiry into alternative sources of energy. I reported back that I didn’t see renewables taking off or being any competition to coal. I was deeply attached to coal as a nationalised resource. The prevailing economic thinking at the time was the mixed economy – nationalised industries, public corporations and private enterprise.

I so wish now that I could have heard statistics about the threat to the planet (those statistics came much later) and the imperative of reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and ramping up clean alternatives. At that time in the early 1980s the environmental problem of burning 120m tonnes of coal in the UK was making coal a little cleaner. I was astonished to learn that more coal is produced in the world today (~7.6 billion tonnes) than early 1980 (~3.8 billion tonnes), according to statistics from the International Energy Agency.

Climate change statistics are important, but change will rely on leadership

During these weeks at COP26, I saw and heard the leaders and politicians on the TV radio and through the media. As I spoke with those going to COP26, I heard their hopes and fears. I realised that climate change is more than the science; political leadership is crucial. Leaders need to be skilled in the appropriate use of data as part of their role in persuading the public to make the behavioural changes and embrace the consequences. E M Forster said “Only Connect!…Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted”. Leaders connect the prose and the passion and need to skilfully deploy the statistics. Leaders can give statistics a social life.

As we’ve learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of senior leaders in government is also vital in providing support to statisticians. The lessons learned throughout the pandemic should show us how to better help people to understand the choices open to us all to respond to the challenges of net zero.

Statistics play a key role in helping the public understand the bigger picture on climate change. They are also essential for helping governments design and monitor policies that reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation) and prepare us for the expected impacts of climate change (adaptation). Because it’s such a complex topic, climate change statistics add insight when related sets of statistics are brought together to tell a clear story of what is happening and why. They also add value when they are presented in ways that help different types of users understand what the data is telling us, and when users can access the information they need. Our recent review of the UK’s climate change statistics looked at exactly these two things: their coherence and accessibility.

I’m nostalgic for people in Britain as a society having a concept of being part of a greater whole, that realises we’re dependent on each other. We need to connect with each other locally and globally and we’ll appreciate being part of something much bigger than ourselves.

The people behind the Office for Statistics Regulation in 2020

This year I’ve written 9 blogs, ranging from an exploration of data gaps to a celebration of the armchair epidemiologists. I was thinking of making it to double figures, setting out my reflections across a tumultuous year. And describing my pride in what the Office for Statistics Regulation team has delivered. But, as so often in OSR, the team is way ahead of me. They’ve pulled together their own year-end reflections into a short summary. Their pride in their work, and their commitment to the public good of statistics, really say far more than anything I could write; it’s just a much better summary.

So here it is (merry Christmas)

Ed Humpherson

Donna Livesey – Business Manager

2020 has been a hard year for everyone, with many very personally affected by the pandemic. Moving from a bustling office environment to living and working home alone had the potential to make for a pretty lonely existence, but I’ve been very lucky.

This year has only confirmed what a special group of people I work with in OSR. Everyone has been working very hard but we have taken time to support each other, to continue to work collaboratively to find creative solutions to new challenges, and to generously share our lives, be it our families or our menagerie of pets, all be it virtually.

I am so proud to work with a team that have such a passion for ensuring the public get the statistics and data they need to make sense of the world around them, while showing empathy for the pressures producers of statistics are under at this time.

We all know that the public will continue to look to us beyond the pandemic, as the independent regulator, to ensure statistics honestly and transparently answer the important questions about the longer term impacts on all aspects of our lives, and our childrens’ lives. I know we are all ready for that challenge, as we are all ready for that day when we can all get together in person.

Caroline Jones – Statistics Regulator, Health and Social Care Lead

2020 started off under lockdown, with the nation gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic and avidly perusing the daily number of deaths, number of tests, volume of hospitalisations and number of vaccines. This level of anxiety has pushed more people into contacting OSR to ask for better statistics, and it has been a privilege to work at the vanguard of the improvement to the statistics.

To manage the workload, the Health domain met daily with Mary (Deputy Director for Regulation) and Katy, who manages our casework, so we could coordinate the volume of health related casework we were getting in. We felt it important to deal sympathetically with statistic producers, who have been under immense pressure this year, to ensure they changed their outputs to ensure they were producing the best statistics possible. It’s been rewarding to be part of that improvement and change, but we still have a lot of work to do in 2021 to continue to advocate for better social and community care statistics.

Leah Skinner – Digital Communications Officer

As a communications professional who loves words, I very often stop and wonder how I ended up working in an environment with so many numbers. But if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that the communication of those numbers, in a way that the public can understand, is crucial to make sure that the public have trust in statistics.

This has made me reflect on my own work, and I am more determined than ever to make our work, complex as it can be, as accessible and as understandable to our audiences as possible. For me, the highlight of this year has been watching our audience grow as we have improved our Twitter outputs and launched our own website. I really enjoy seeing people who have never reached out to us before contacting us to work with us, whether it be to do with Voluntary Application of the Code, or to highlight casework.

As truly awful as 2020 has been, it is clear now that the public are far more aware of how statistics affect our everyday lives, and this empowers us to ask more questions about the quality and trustworthiness of data and hold organisations to account when the data isn’t good enough.

Mark Pont – Assessment Programme Lead

For me, through the challenges of 2020, it’s been great to see the OSR team show itself as a supportive regulator. Of course we’ve made some strong interventions where these have been needed to champion the public good of statistics and data. But much of our influence comes through the support and challenge we offer to statistics producers.

We published some of our findings in the form of rapid regulatory review letters. However, much of our support and challenge was behind the scenes, which is just as valuable.

During the early days of the pandemic we had uncountable chats with teams across the statistical system as they wrestled with how to generate the important insights that many of us needed. All this in the absence of the usual long-standing data sources and while protecting often restricted and vulnerable workforces who were adapting to new ways of working. It was fantastic to walk through those exciting developments with statistical producers, seeing first-hand the rapid exploitation of new data sources.

2021 will still be challenging for many of us. Hopefully many aspects of life will start to return to something closer to what we were used to. But I think the statistical system, including us as regulators, will start 2021 from a much higher base than 2020 and I look forward to seeing many more exciting developments in the world of official statistics.

Emily Carless – Statistics Regulator, Children, Education and Skills Lead

2020 has been a challenging year for producers and users of children, education and skills statistics which has had a life changing impact on the people who the statistics are about.  We started the year polishing the report of our review of post-16 education and skills statistics and are finishing it polishing the report of our review of the approach to developing the statistical models designed for awarding grades.  These statistical models had a profound impact on young people’s lives and on public confidence in statistics and statistical models.

As in other domains, statistics have needed to be developed quickly to meet the need for data on the impact of the pandemic on children and the education system, and to inform decisions such as those around re-opening schools. The demand for statistics in this area continues to grow to ensure that the impact of the pandemic on this generation can be fully understood.

What we’ve learned from the Defra Group about user engagement

Note: this blog post was updated on 27 August 2020.

Today we published the findings of our review of user engagement in the statistics producers that make up the Defra Group. The Defra Group produces a large and broad collection of statistics covering many topic areas, including food, farming and the environment, and the statistics have a wide range of users and uses.

When we review compliance with the Code of Practice for Statistics, we often look at how individual teams engage with their users. With this review we have looked much wider. This approach, the first time we’ve looked at user engagement in this way, has allowed us to understand how individual teams and the Defra Group as a whole engage with their users and to identify the key factors that can make user engagement effective and impactful. We focused our review on a set of 10 statistics which reflects the diversity of Defra Group statistics.

Although the target audience for the report is the Defra Group, we hope that other statistics producers will find it helpful, including our framework of Telling users about the statistics, Understanding use and Listening to users, and use it to inform their thinking about user engagement. We will be adding case studies from the report to the online Code of Practice as examples of best practice in user engagement.

The world has changed dramatically in recent months due to COVID-19. This means that statistics teams may have to become more creative in engaging with users and move more discussions with users online. We recognise the challenges of COVID-19 for the Defra Group and have recommended that teams take a flexible and proportionate approach to user engagement.

We’re not the only ones with an interest in user engagement. The Government Statistical Service (GSS) Best Practice and Impact Division is currently developing a new strategy for user engagement which will be published later this year. Have a look at Tegwen Green’s blog, also published today, which gives an update on this important work. Our review of Defra Group user engagement complements the work on the new GSS strategy, and we will continue to work closely with the Best Practice and Impact team to support its development.