Roger Halliday: Improving the Lives of Society’s Most Vulnerable People with Data

Roger Halliday, Chief Statistician for The Scottish Government,
shares how public service organizations across Scotland are
‘joining the dots’ between their datasets to help the most
vulnerable members of society

In the UK today, much of the data public sector organizations
collect about British citizens lives in silos. But as pioneering
countries such as Estonia have shown in recent years, governments
can greatly improve the quality and efficiency of the services
they provide by breaking down those silos and working toward a
360-degree view of their citizens.


In this week’s Business of Data podcast episode, Roger Halliday,
Chief Statistician for The Scottish Government, talks about the
work he’s doing to help Scotland provide better services to its
citizens with data.


“I’m responsible for whatever numbers come out of public bodies
across Scotland,” Halliday explains. “There are 40 or so
organizations, from schools to prisons to the health service and
so on.”


“I’m [here] to tell the story of a nation in an objective way and
in an open and transparent way,” he continues. “I’m responsible
for making sure that the numbers are trusted, that they’re high
quality and that they’re actually used to improve the lives of
people and improve decisions that are taken.”
Two Ways Scotland is Improving Society with Data

The COVID-19 pandemic is one obvious example of how curating and
sharing valuable datasets can help governments provide better
services and make more informed policy decisions. Indeed,
Halliday says this has been a significant focus for him over the
past 18 months.


“[For] the last year, for example, I was leading up the COVID-19
analysis team for the Scottish government,” he says. So, we were
modelling the epidemic, getting evidence together for the
difficult decisions that governments around the UK [and] the
world have had to make.”


But Halliday also highlights an initiative geared toward
providing essential services to homeless people to illustrate
some of the more strategic ways Scotland’s government is
harnessing the power of data.


“We’ve been collecting data on homelessness for many years,” he
says. “When [we] put it together, we found that 8% of people in
Scotland have been homeless at one time or another over the last
15 years.”


“We thought, if you put that data together with other bits of
information, then maybe we’ll be able to better help people who
are in that situation,” he continues. “So, they’re able to link
that data on homelessness with data on the health services that
people that are homeless receive and, not surprisingly, found
that [these] people have difficulty accessing health services and
that their health is a lot poorer.”


Through analyzing these connected datasets, Scotland’s public
service organizations have developed new ways for people to
access key services they might otherwise have struggled to access
if they were homeless.


Perhaps more interestingly, they have also identified ‘trigger
events’ that frequently cause people to become homeless. This is
helping them develop ways to predict which citizens are at risk