Looking ahead - from our ADR Scotland Co-director

Just over a year ago I was pleased to be appointed as the interim Chief Statistician in Scottish Government and as part of this role, became the interim Co-director of ADR Scotland. In June 2023, I was delighted to accept both roles on a permanent basis. Together with my fellow ADR Scotland Co-director, Professor Chris Dibben, we will bring together our combined expertise to maximise the value from administrative data. 

Chris has vast experience from academia; researching population, health and place with a focus on poverty, deprivation and inequalities, and has been in the role at ADR Scotland since 2018. What I hope to bring to the role is my experience working with predominantly Public Sector data for over 15 years. Having been an analyst and researcher in varied roles from the Police through to Agricultural data, I have learned the value of exploring our rich datasets to make a difference to the outcomes of people in Scotland.

I'm grateful to Chris for his support throughout the last year, whilst I got to grips with the role of Co-director and together we look forward to achieving ADR Scotland's vision to transform the way researchers access Scotland’s wealth of public sector data, by joining up the abundance of administrative data already being created by government and public bodies across Scotland and making it available to approved researchers in a safe and secure way. Thus enabling vital research that has the potential to lead to better informed policy decisions and more effective public services.

Professor Chris Dibben says:

I am delighted to hear that Ally will be continuing in his role as Co-director of ADR Scotland. It is an exciting time for administrative data research and I am really looking forward to working closely with Ally to develop an efficient and effective public benefit information system for Scotland.

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD)

I took up my post in Scottish Government nearly ten years ago. It was a privilege to be given Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) as my first project, having previously used it. Also, having lived in a deprived area myself, I was aware of the value SIMD could bring to communities. My goal was to make these data and the SIMD tools accessible to everyone. Through promotion and education across Scotland we helped to democratise the data. Local communities could use SIMD to evidence the issues that they knew existed. This helped make a difference and improve the outcomes of disadvantaged areas.

SIMD is made possible by bringing large datasets together. By combining data from public sector organisations like HMRC and Police Scotland, we get a rich picture of society and what it is like to live in our communities. It is used extensively in research and analysis. It helps to bring into sharp focus the inequalities in our society. Recent publications showed that alcohol specific deaths are more than four times as frequent in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived. People from deprived areas are more likely to suffer mental health issues, experience crime and have poorer educational outcomes. A female living in a deprived area is likely to have around 25 years less of healthy life expectancy than her counterpart living in a less deprived area. For men that gap rises to 26 years.

But these statistics on their own illuminate problems, they do not solve them.

Greater Insights from Data Linkage

What we need, to tackle issues related to deprivation and many other societal issues, is further insights.

Researchers are working across the country to look at the drivers for improving lived experiences. They are using data gathered from society and analysing it with tools like SIMD to help inform policies to direct interventions to those in greatest need. But some of the greatest insight can come from linking data. These insights can efficiently direct interventions. From my experience of making SIMD available to deprived communities, I have seen the power of sharing data to make better decisions. Working with Chris and the academic community I want to empower them to make the most of our data.

That is why the focus of my team will be getting more education, health and service leavers data into the research environment. And I want to help extend that support into environmental data as well. Very soon, as part of a cross-UK project, we will be making agricultural data available for linkage.

Delivering at Scale

My aim is to support researchers get access to more data, deliver more projects and help them make more impact with their research. 

Over the course of the coming months and years I will be reaching out to our ambassador’s network and speaking to researchers to ensure their projects help drive better policies and decisions across the public sector.