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In this episode we talk about the growth of data use in the media and the potential impact of misinformation on the public's trust in official statistics.   Navigating podcast host Miles Fletcher through this minefield is Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, from the University of Cambridge; Ed Humpherson, Head of the Office for Statistics Regulation; and award-winning data journalist Simon Rogers.    Transcript    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics, I'm Miles Fletcher. Now we've talked many times before in these podcasts about the rise of data and its impact on our everyday lives. It's all around us of course, and not least in the media we consume every day. But ‘what' or ‘who' to trust: mainstream media, public figures and national institutions like the ONS, or those random strangers bearing gifts of facts and figures in our social media feeds?  To help us step carefully through the minefields of misinformation and on, we hope, to the terra firma of reliable statistical communication, we have three interesting and distinguished voices, each with a different perspective. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter is a well-known voice to UK listeners. He's chair of the Winton Centre for Risk Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge and was a very prominent voice on the interpretation of public health data here during the COVID pandemic. Also, we have Ed Humpherson, Director General of regulation and head of the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the official stats watchdog if you like, and later in this podcast, I'll be joined by award winning data journalist and writer Simon Rogers, who now works as data editor at Google.  Professor, you've been one of the most prominent voices these last few years – a fascinating few years, obviously, for statistics in which we were told quite frankly, this was a golden age for statistics and data. I mean, reflecting on your personal experience as a prominent public voice in that debate, when it comes to statistics and data, to be very general, how well informed are we now as a public, or indeed, how ill-informed on statistics?     DAVID SPIEGELHALTER  I think things have improved after COVID. You know, for a couple of years we saw nothing but numbers and graphs on the news and in the newspapers and everywhere, and that went down very well. People didn't object to that. In fact, they wanted more. And I think that has led to an increased profile for data journalism, and there's some brilliant ones out there. I'm just thinking of John Burn-Murdoch on the FT but lots of others as well, who do really good work. Of course, in the mainstream media there is still the problem of non-specialists getting hold of data and getting it wrong, and dreadful clickbait headlines. It is the sub editors that wreck it all just by sticking some headline on what might be a decent story to get the attention and which is quite often misleading. So that's a standard problem. In social media, yeah, during COVID and afterwards, there are people I follow who you might consider as - I wouldn't say amateurs at all, but they're not professional pundits or media people - who just do brilliant stuff, and who I've learned so much from. There are also some terrible people out there, widespread misinformation claims which are based on data and sound convincing because they have got numbers in them. And that, I mean, it's not a new problem, but now it is widespread, and it's really tricky to counter and deal with, but very important indeed.     MF  So the issue aside from - those of us who deal with the media have heard this a hundred times - “I don't write the headlines”, reporters will tell you when you challenge that misleading kind of headline. But would you say it's the mainstream media then, because they can be called out on what they report, who broadly get things right? And that the challenge is everything else - it's out there in the Wild West of social media?     DS  Yeah, mainstream media is not too bad, partly because, you know, we've got the BBC in this country, we've got regulations, and so it's not too bad. And social media, it's the Wild West. You know, there are people who really revel in using numbers and data to make inappropriate and misleading claims.     MF  Is there anything that can be done? Is it the government, or even those of us like the ONS who produce statistics, who should we be wading in more than we do? Should we be getting out there onto the social media platforms and putting people right?     DS  It's difficult I mean, I don't believe in sort of censorship. I don't think you can stop this at source at all. But just because people can say this, it doesn't give them a right for it to be broadcast wide, in a way and to be dumped into people's feeds. And so my main problem is with the recommendation algorithms of social media, where people will see things because it's getting clicks, and the right algorithm thinks persona will like it. And so we just get fed all this stuff. That is my real problem and the obscurity and the lack of accountability of recommendation algorithms right across social media is I think, a really shocking state of affairs. Of course, you know, we come on to this later, but we should be doing something about education, and actually sort of pre-empting some of the misunderstandings is something I feel very strongly about with my colleagues. You've got to get in there quick, and rather than being on the backfoot and just reacting to false claims that have been made, you've got to sort of realise how to take the initiative and to realise what misunderstandings, misinterpretations can be made, and get in there quickly to try to pre-empt them. But that of course comes down to the whole business of how ONS and others communicate their data.     MF  Because when you ask the public whether they trust them - and the UK statistics authority does this every two years - you ask the public if they trust ONS statistics, and a large proportion of them say they do. But of course, if they're not being presented with those statistics, then they're still going to end up being misled.     DS  Yeah, I mean, it's nice to get those responses back. But, you know...that's in terms of respondents and just asking a simple question, do you trust something or not? I think it's good to hear but we can't be complacent about that at all. I'm massively influenced by the approach of the philosopher, Baroness Onora O'Neill, who really makes a sharp distinction between organisations wanting to be trusted and revelling in being trusted, and she says that shouldn't be your objective to be trusted. Your objective should be to be trustworthy, to deserve trust, and then it might be offered up to you. And so the crucial thing is trustworthiness of the statistics system and in the communications, and that's what I love talking about, because I think it's absolutely important and it puts the responsibility really firmly back to the communicator to demonstrate trustworthiness.     MF  So doing more as stats producers to actually actively promote data and get people to come perhaps away from the social platforms, and to have their own websites that present data in an accessible way, in an understandable way, where people can get it for nothing without requiring an expensive subscription or something, as some of the best of the media outlets would require.     DS  The other thing I'd say is there's no point of being trustworthy if you're dull, as no one's going to look at it or take any notice, and other media aren't going to use it. So I think it's really worthwhile to invest, make a lot of effort to make what you're putting out there as attractive, as vivid and as grabbing as possible. The problem is that in trying to do that, I mean, that's what a lot of communicators and media people want to do, because of course they want people to read their stuff. But what that tends to do largely is make their stuff kind of opinionated and have a very strong line, essentially to persuade you to either do something or think something or buy something or vote something. So much communication has to do with persuading that I think it's just completely inappropriate. In this context, what we should be doing is informing people.    In a way we want to persuade them to take notice, so that's why you want to have really good quality communications, vivid, get good people out there. But in the end, they're just trying to inform people, and that's why I love working with ONS. I just think this is a really decent organisation whose job is just trying to raise the...to obviously provide official statistics...but in their communications, it's to try to raise the level of awareness raise the level of discussion, and by being part of a non -ministerial department, they're not there, the comms department, to make the minister look good, or to make anyone look good. It's just there to tell people how it is.    MF  Exactly. To put that data into context. Is this a big number or is this is a small number, right? Adjectives can sometimes be very unhelpful, but often the numbers don't speak for themselves, do they.    DS   Numbers never speak for themselves, we imbue them with meaning, which is a great quote as well from Nate Silver.    MF  And in doing that, of course, you have to walk the same line that the media do, in making them relevant and putting them into context, but not at the same time distorting them. There's been a big debate going on recently, of course, about revisions. And if you've listened to this podcast, which we'd always advise and consume other articles that the ONS has published, we've said a lot about the whole process of revising GDP, and the uncertainty that's built into those initial estimates, which although helpful, are going to be pretty broad. And then of course, when the picture changes dramatically, people are kind of entitled to say, oh hang on, you told us this was something different and the narrative has changed. The story has changed because of that uncertainty with the numbers, shouldn't you have done more to tell us about that uncertainty. That message can sometimes get lost, can't it?     DS  Yeah, it's terribly important. You've got to be upfront. We develop these five points on trustworthy communication and the first one was inform, not persuade. And the second is to be balanced and not to have a one-sided message to tell both sides of the story, winners and losers, positives and negatives. And then to admit uncertainty, to just say what you don't know. And in particular, in this case, “provisionality”, the fact that things may change in the future, is incredibly important to emphasise, and I think not part of a lot of discussion. Politicians find it kind of impossible to say I think, that things are provisional and to talk about quality of the evidence and limitations in the evidence, which you know, if you're only basing GDP on a limited returns to start with, on the monthly figures, then you need to be clear about that. And the other one is to pre-empt the misunderstandings, and again, that means sort of getting in there first to tell you this point, this may change. This is a provisional judgement, and you know, I think that that could be emphasised yet more times, yet more.     MF  And yet there's a risk in that though, of course the message gets lost and diluted and the...    DS  Oh no, it always gets trotted out - oh, we can't admit uncertainty. We can't tell both sides of story. We have to tell a message that is simple because people are too stupid to understand it otherwise, it's so insulting to the audience. I really feel a lot of media people do not respect their audience. They treat them as children - oh we've got to keep it simple, we mustn't give the nuances or the complexity. All right, if you're going to be boring and just put long paragraphs of caveats on everything, no one is going to read that or take any notice of them. But there are ways to communicate balance and uncertainty and limitations without being dull. And that's what actually media people should focus on. Instead of saying, oh, we can't do that. You should be able to do it. Good media, good storytelling should be able to have that nuance in. You know, that's the skill.     MF  You're absolutely right, you can't disagree with any of that, and yet, in communicating with the public, even as a statistics producer, you are limited somewhat by the public's ability to get used to certain content. I mean, for example, the Met Office recently, a couple of years back, started putting in ‘percentage of chance of rainfall', which is something that it hadn't done before. And some work on that revealed just how few people actually understood what they were saying in that, and what the chances were actually going to be of it raining when they went out for the afternoon's work.     DS  Absolute nonsense. That sorry, that's completely I mean, I completely rely on those percentages. My 90-year-old father used to understand those percentages. Because it's a novelty if you are going to ask people what they understand, they might say something wrong, such as, oh, that's the percentage of the area that it's going to rain in or something like that. No, it's the percentage of times it makes that claim that it's right. And those percentages have been used in America for years, they're completely part of routine forecast and I wouldn't say the American public is enormously better educated than the British public. So this is just reluctance and conservatism. It's like saying oh well people don't understand graphs. We can't put up line graphs on the news, people don't understand that. This is contempt for the public. And it just shows I think, a reluctance to make an effort to explain things. And people get used to stuff, once they've learned what a graph looks like, when they see it again, then they'll understand it. So you need to educate the public and not, you know, in a patronising way, it's just that, you know, otherwise you're just being misleading. If you just say, oh, you know, it'll rain or not rain you're just misleading them. If you just say it might rain, that's misleading. What does that mean? It can mean different things. I want a percentage and people do understand them, when they've got some experience of them.     MF  And what about certainty in estimates? Here is a reaction we add to the migration figures that ONS published earlier in the summer. Somebody tweeted back to say, well estimates, that's all very good but I want the actual figures. I want to know how many people have migrated.    DS  Yeah, I think actually, it's quite a reasonable question. Because, you know, you kind of think well can't you count them, we actually know who comes in and out of the country. In that case it's really quite a reasonable question to ask. I want to know why you can't count them. And in fact, of course ONS is moving towards counting them. It's moving away from the survey towards using administrative data to count them. So I think in that case, that's quite a good question to ask. Now in other situations, it's a stupid question. If you want to know if someone says, oh, I don't want an estimate of how many people you know, go and vote one way or do something or other, I want to know how many, well then you think don't be daft. We can't go and ask everybody this all the time. So that's a stupid question. So the point is that in certain contexts, asking whether something is an estimate or not, is reasonable. Sometimes it's not and that can be explained, I think, quite reasonably to people.     MF  And yet, we will still want to be entertained. We also want to have numbers to confirm our own prejudices.     DS  Yeah, people will always do that. But that's not what the ONS is for, to confirm people's prejudices. People are hopeless at estimating. How many, you know, migrants there are, how many people, what size ethnic minorities and things, we know if you ask people these numbers, they're pretty bad at it. But people are bad at estimating all numbers. So no, it's ONS's job to try to explain things and in a vivid way that people will be interested in, particularly when there's an argument about a topic going on, to present the evidence, not one side or the other, but that each side can use, and that's why I really feel that the ONS's migration team, you know, I have a lot of respect for them, when they're changing their format or consulting on it, they go to organization's on both sides. They go to Migration Watch and the Migration Observatory and talk to them about you know, can they understand what's going on, is this data helping them in their deliberations.     MF  Now, you mentioned earlier in the conversation, education, do we have a younger generation coming up who are more stats literate or does an awful lot more need to be done?     DS  A lot more needs to be done in terms of data education in schools. I'm actually part of a group at the Royal Society that is proposing a whole new programme called mathematics and data education, for that to be put together within a single framework, because a lot of this isn't particularly maths, and maths is not the right way or place to teach it. But it still should be an essential part of education, understanding numbers, understanding data, their limitations and their strengths and it uses some numeracy, uses some math but it's not part of maths. The problem has always been where does that fit in the syllabus because it doesn't, particularly at the moment. So that's something that every country is struggling with. We're not unique in that and, and I think it's actually essential that that happens. And when you know, the Prime Minister, I think quite reasonably says people should study mathematics until 18. I mean, I hope he doesn't mean mathematics in the sense of the algebra and the geometry that kids do, get forced to do essentially, for GCSE, and some of whom absolutely loathe it. And so, but that's not really the sort of mathematics that everyone needs. Everyone needs data literacy. Everyone needs that.    MF  Lies, damned lies and statistics is an old cliche, it's still robustly wheeled out in the media every time, offering some perceived reason to doubt what the statisticians have said. I mean looking ahead, how optimistic are you, do you think that one day we might finally see the end of all that?     DS  Well my eyes always go to heaven, and I just say for goodness sake. So I like it when it's used, because I say, do you really believe that? You know, do you really believe that, because if you do you're just rejecting evidence out of hand. And this is utter stupidity. And nobody could live like that. And it emphasises this idea somehow, among the more non-data-literate, it encourages them to think that numbers they hear either have to be sort of accepted as God given truths or rejected out of hand. And this is a terrible state to be in, the point is we should interpret any number we hear, any claim based on data, same as we'd interpret any other claim made by anybody about anything. We've got to judge it on its merits at the time and that includes do we trust the source? Do I understand how this is being explained to me? What am I not being told? And so why is this person telling me this? So all of that comes into interpreting numbers as well. We hear this all the time on programmes like More or Less, and so on. So I like it as a phrase because it is so utterly stupid, then so utterly, easily demolished, that it encourages, you know, a healthy debate.    MF  We're certainly not talking about good statistics, we're certainly not talking about quality statistics, properly used. And that, of course, is the role of the statistics watchdog as we're obliged to call him, or certainly as the media always call him, and that's our other guest, Ed Humpherson.     Ed, having listened to what the professor had to say there, from your perspective, how much misuse of statistics is there out there? What does your organisation, your office, do to try and combat that?      ED HUMPHERSON     Well, Miles the first thing to say is I wish I could give you a really juicy point of disagreement with David to set off some kind of sparky dialogue. Unfortunately, almost everything, if not everything that David said, I completely agree with - he said it more fluently and more directly than I would, but I think we are two fellow travellers on all of these issues.      In terms of the way we look at things at the Office for Statistics Regulation that I head up, we are a statistics watchdog. That's how we are reported. Most of our work is, so to speak, below the visible waterline: we do lots and lots of work assessing reviewing the production of statistics across the UK public sector. We require organisations like the ONS, but also many other government departments, to be demonstrating their trustworthiness; to explain their quality; and to deliver value. And a lot of that work just goes on, week in week out, year in year out to support and drive-up evidence base that's available to the British public. I think what you're referring to is that if we care about the value and the worth of statistics in public life, we can't just sort of sit behind the scenes and make sure there's a steady flow. We actually have to step up and defend statistics when they are being misused because it's very toxic, I think, to the public. Their confidence in statistics if they're subjected to rampant misuse or mis explanation of statistics, it's all very well having good statistics but if they go out into the world and they get garbled or misquoted, that I think is very destructive. So what we do is we either have members of the public raise cases with us when they see something and they're not they're not sure about it, or indeed we spot things ourselves and we will get in contact with the relevant department and want to understand why this thing has been said, whether it really is consistent with the underlying evidence, often it isn't, and then we make an intervention to correct the situation. And we are busy, right, there's a lot there's a lot of there's a lot of demand for work.     MF  Are instances of statistical misuse on the rise?     EH  We recently published our annual summary of what we call casework - that's handling the individual situations where people are concerned. And we revealed in that that we had our highest ever number of cases, 372, which might imply that, you know, things are getting worse. I'd really strongly caution against that interpretation. I think what that increase is telling you is two other things. One is, as we as the Office for Statistics Regulation, do our work, we are gradually growing our profile and more people are aware that they can come to us, that's the first thing this is telling you; and the second thing is that people care a lot more about statistics and data now, exactly as Sir David was saying that this raised profile during the pandemic. I don't think it's a sign that there's more misuse per se. I do think perhaps, the thing I would be willing to accept is, there's just a generally greater tendency for communication to be datafied. In other words, for communication to want to use data: it sounds authoritative, it sounds convincing. And I think that may be driving more instances of people saying well, a number has been used there, I want to really understand what that number is. So I would be slightly cautious about saying there is more misuse, but I would be confident in saying there's probably a greater desire to use data and therefore a greater awareness both of the opportunity to complain to us and of its importance.      MF  Underlying all of your work is compliance with the UK code of practice for statistics, a very important document, and one that we haven't actually mentioned in this podcast so far…      EH  Shame on you, Miles, shame on you.      MF  We're here to put that right, immediately. Tell us about what the code of practice is. What is it for? what does it do?      EH  So the Code of Practice is a statutory code and its purpose is to ensure that statistics serve the public good. And it does that through a very simple structure. It says that in any situation where an individual or an organisation is providing information to an audience, there are three things going on. There's the trustworthiness of the speaker, and the Code sets out lots of requirements on organisations as to how they can demonstrate they're trustworthiness. And it's exactly in line with what David was saying earlier and exactly in line with the thinking of Onora O'Neill – a set of commitments which demonstrate trustworthiness. Like a really simple commitment is to say, we will pre-announce at least four weeks in advance when the statistics are going to be released, and we will release them at the time that we say, so there is no risk that there's any political interference in when the news comes out. It comes out at the time that has been pre-announced. Very clear commitment, very tangible, evidence-based thing. It's a binary thing, right? You either do that or you do not. And if you do not: You're not being trustworthy. The second thing in any situation where people are exchanging information is the information itself. What's its quality? Where's this data from? How's it been compiled? What are its strengths and limitations? And the code has requirements on all of those areas. That is clarity of what the numbers are, what they mean, what they don't mean. And then thirdly, in that exchange of information, is the information of any use to the audience? It could be high, high quality, it could be very trustworthy, but it could, to use David's excellent phrase, it could just be “dull”. It could be irrelevant, it could not be important. And the value pillar is all about that. It's all about the user having relevant, insightful information on a question that they care about. That's, Miles, what the Code of Practice is: it's trustworthiness, it's quality and it's value. And those things we think are kind of pretty universal actually, which is why they don't just apply now to official statistics. We take them out and we apply them to all sorts of situations where Ministers and Departments are using numbers, we always want to ask those three questions. Is it trustworthy? Is it quality, is it value? That's the Code.      MF  And when they've satisfied your stringent requirements and been certified as good quality, there is of course a badge to tell the users that they have been.      EH  There's a badge - the badge means that we have accredited them as complying with that Code of Practice. It's called the National Statistics badge. The term is less important and what it means what it means is we have independently assessed that they comply in full with that Code.      MF  Most people would have heard, if they have heard of the OSR's work, they'll have seen it perhaps in the media. They'll have seen you as the so-called data watchdog, the statistics watchdog. It's never gently explained as it it's usually ‘slammed', ‘criticised', despite the extremely measured and calm language you use, but you're seen as being the body that takes politicians to task. Is that really what you do? It seems more often that you're sort of gently helping people to be right.      EH  That's exactly right. I mean, it's not unhelpful, frankly, that there's a degree of respect for the role and that when we do make statements, they are taken seriously and they're seen as significant, but we are not, absolutely not, trying to generate those headlines. We are absolutely not trying to intimidate or scare or, you know, browbeat people. Our role is very simple. Something has been said, which is not consistent with the underlying evidence. We want to make that clear publicly. And a lot of time what our intervention does actually is it strengthens the hand of the analysts in government departments so that their advice is taken more seriously at the point when things are being communicated. Now, as I say, it's not unwelcome sometimes that our interventions do get reported on. But I always try and make these interventions in a very constructive and measured way. Because the goal is not column inches. Absolutely not. The goal is the change in the information that's available to the public.      MF  You're in the business of correcting the record and not giving people a public shaming.      EH  Exactly, exactly. And even correcting the record actually, there's some quite interesting stuff about whether parliamentarians correct the record. And in some ways, it'd be great if parliamentarians corrected the record when they have been shown to have misstated with statistics. But actually, you could end up in a world where people correct the record and in a sort of tokenistic way, it's sort of, you know, buried in the depths of the Hansard parliamentary report. What we want is for people not to be misled, for people to not think that, for example, the number of people in employment is different from what it actually is. So actually, it's the outcome that really matters most; not so much the correction as are people left understanding what the numbers actually say.      MF  Surveys show - I should be careful using that phrase, you know - nonetheless, but including the UKSA survey, show that the public were much less inclined to trust in the words of the survey. Politicians use of statistics and indeed, Chris Bryant the Labour MP said that politicians who have been who've been found to have erred statistically should be forced to apologise to Parliament. Did you take that on board? Is there much in that?     EH  When he said that, he was actually directly quoting instances we've been involved with and he talks about our role very directly in that sense. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We support that. It will be really, really good. I think the point about the correction, Miles, is that it shows it's a manifestation of a culture that takes fidelity to the evidence, truthfulness to the evidence, faithfulness to the evidence, it takes that seriously, as I say, what I don't want to get into is a world where you know, corrections are sort of tokenistic and buried. I think the key thing is that it's part of an environment in which all actors in public debate realise it's in everybody's interests or evidence; data and statistics to be used fairly and appropriately and part of that is that if they've misspoken, they correct the record. From our experience, by and large, when we deal with these issues, the politicians concerned want to get it right. What they want to do is, they want to communicate their policy vision, their idea of the policy or what the, you know, the state of the country is. They want to communicate that, sure, that's their job as politicians, but they don't want to do so in a way that is demonstrably not consistent with the underlying evidence. And in almost all cases, they are… I wouldn't say they're grateful, but they're respectful of the need to get it right and respect the intervention. And very often the things that we encounter are a result of more of a cockup than a conspiracy really - something wasn't signed off by the right person in the right place and a particular number gets blown out of proportion, it gets ripped from its context, it becomes sort of weaponized; it's not really as a deliberate attempt to mislead. Now, there are probably some exceptions to that generally positive picture I'm giving. but overall it's not really in their interests for the story to be about how they misuse the numbers. That's not really a very good look for them. They'd much rather the stories be about what they're trying to persuade the public of, and staying on the right side of all of the principles we set out helps that to happen.      MF  Your remit runs across the relatively controlled world sort of government, Parliament and so forth. And I think the UK is quite unusual in having a body that does this in an independent sort of way. Do you think the public expects you to be active in other areas, we mentioned earlier, you know, the wilder shores of social media where it's not cockup theories you're going to be hearing there, it's conspiracy theories based on misuse of data. Is there any role that a statistics regulator could possibly take on in that arena?      EH  Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier that the way we often get triggered into this environment is when members of the public raised things with us. And I always think that's quite a solemn sort of responsibility. You know, you have a member of the public who's concerned about something and they care about it enough to contact us - use the “raise a concern” part of our website - so I always try and take it seriously. And sometimes they're complaining about something which isn't actually an official statistic. And in those circumstances, even if we say to them, “well, this isn't really an official statistic”, we will say, “but, applying our principles, this would be our judgement”. Because I think we owe it to those people who who've taken the time to care about a statistical usage, we owe it to take them seriously. And we have stepped in. Only recently we're looking at some claims about the impact of gambling, which are not from a government department, but from parts of the gambling industry. We also look at things from local government, who are not part of central government. So we do we do look at those things, Miles. It's a relatively small part of our work, but, as I say, our principles are universal and you've got to take seriously a situation in which a member of the public is concerned about a piece of evidence.     MF  Professor Spiegelhalter, what do you make of this regulatory function that the OSR pursues, are we unusual in the UK in having something along those lines?     DS  Ed probably knows better than I do, but I haven't heard of anybody else and I get asked about it when I'm travelling and talking to other people. I have no conflict of interest. I'm Non-Executive Director for the UK Stats Authority, and I sit on the regulation committee that oversees the way it works. So of course, I'm a huge supporter of what they do. And as described, it's a subtle role because it's not to do with performing, you know, and making a big song and dance and going grabbing all that attention but working away just to try to improve the standard of stats in this country. I think we're incredibly fortunate to have such a body and in fact, we know things are never perfect and there's always room for improvement of course, but I think we're very lucky to have our statistical system.     MF  A final thought from you...we're at a moment in time now where people are anticipating the widespread implementation of AI, artificial intelligence, large language models and all that sort of thing. Threat or opportunity for statistics, or both?    DS  Oh, my goodness me, it is very difficult to predict. I use GPT a lot in my work, you know, both for sort of research and making inquiries about stuff and also to help me do codings I'm not very good at. I haven't yet explored GPT-4's capacity for doing automated data analysis, but I want to, and actually, I'd welcome it. if it's good, if you can put some data in and it does stuff - that's great. However, I would love to see what guardrails are being put into it, to prevent it doing stupid misleading things. I hope that that does become an issue in the future, that if AI is automatically interpreting data for example, that it's actually got some idea of what it's doing. And I don't see that that's impossible. I mean, there were already a lot of guardrails in about sexist statements, racist statements, violent statements and so on. There's all sorts of protection already in there. Well, can't we have protection against grossly misleading statistical analysis?     MF  A future over the statistics watchdog perhaps?    DF  Quite possibly.    EH  Miles, I never turn down suggestions for doing new work.   MF  So we've heard how statistics are regulated in the UK, and covered the role of the media in communicating data accurately, and now to give some insight into what that might all look like from a journalist's perspective, it's time to introduce our next guest, all the way from California, award-winning journalist and data editor at Google, Simon Rogers. Simon, welcome to Statistically Speaking. Now, before you took up the role at Google you were actually at the forefront of something of a data journalism movement here in the UK. Responsible for launching and editing The Guardian's data blog, looking at where we are now and how things have come on since that period, to what extent do you reckon journalists can offer some kind of solution to online misinterpretation of information?    Simon Rogers   At a time when misinformation is pretty rampant, then you need people there who can make sense of the world and help you make sense of the world through data and facts and things that are true, as opposed to things that we feel might be right. And it's kind of like there is a battle between the heart and the head out there in the world right now. And there are the things that people feel might be right, but are completely wrong. And where, I think, Data Journalists can be the solution to solving that. Now, having said that, there are people as we know who will never believe something, and it doesn't matter. There are people for whom it literally doesn't matter, you can do all the fact checks that you want, and I think that is a bit of a shock for people, this realisation that sometimes it's just not enough, but I think honestly, the fact that there are more Data Journalists now than before...There was an EJC survey, the European Journalism Centre did a survey earlier this year about the state of data journalism. There are way more data journalists now than there were the last time they did the survey. It's becoming much more...it's just a part of being a reporter now. You don't have to necessarily be identified as a separate data journalist to work with data. So we're definitely living in a world where there are more people doing this really important work, but the need, I would say it has never been greater.     MF  How do you think data journalists then tend to see their role? Is it simply a mission to explain, or do some of them see it as their role to actually prove some theories and vindicate a viewpoint, or is it a mixture, are there different types of data journalists?     SR  I would say there were as many types of data journalists as there are types of journalists. And that's the thing about the field, there's no standard form of data journalism, which is one of the things that I love about it. That your output at the end of the day can be anything, it can be a podcast or it can be an article or a number or something on social media. And because of the kind of variety, and the fact I think, that unlike almost any other role in the newsroom, there really isn't like a standard pattern to becoming a data journalist. As a result of that, I think what you get are very different kind of motivations among very different kinds of people. I mean, for me, personally, the thing that interested me when I started working in the field was the idea of understanding and explaining. That is my childhood, with Richard Scarry books and Dorling Kindersley. You know, like trying to understand the world a little bit better. I do think sometimes people have theories. Sometimes people come in from very sophisticated statistical backgrounds. I mean, my background certainly wasn't that and I would say a lot of the work, the stats and the way that we use data isn't necessarily that complicated. It's often things like, you know, is this thing bigger than that thing? Has this thing grown? You know, where in the world is this thing, the biggest and so on. But you can tell amazing stories that way. And I think this motivation to use a skill, but there are still those people who get inured by maths in the same way that I did when I was at school, you know, but I think the motivation to try and make it clear with people that definitely seems to me to be a kind of a common thread among most of the data journalists that I've met.    MF  Do you think that journalists therefore, people going into journalism, and mentioning no names, as an occupation...used to be seen as a bit less numerous, perhaps whose skills tended to be in the verbal domain. Do you think therefore these days you've got to have at least a feel for data and statistics to be able to be credible as a journalist?     SR  I think it is becoming a basic skill for lots of journalists who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves data journalists. We always said eventually it is just journalism. And the reason is because the amount of sources now that are out there, I don't think you can tell a full story unless you take account of those. COVID's a great example of that, you know, here's a story that data journalists, I think, performed incredibly well. Someone like John Burn-Murdoch on the Financial Times say, where they've got a mission to explain what's going on and make it clear to people at a time when nothing was clear, we didn't really know what was going on down the road, never mind globally. So I think that is becoming a really important part being a journalist. I mean, I remember one of my first big data stories at the Guardian was around the release of the coins database – a big spending database from the government - and we had it on the list as a “data story” and people would chuckle, snigger a little bit of the idea that there'll be a story on the front page of the paper about data, which they felt to be weird, and I don't think people would be snickering or chuckling now about that. It's just normal. So my feeling is that if you're a reporter now, not being afraid of data and understanding the tools that are there to help you, I think that's a basic part of the role and it's being reflected in the way that journalism schools are working. I teach here one semester a year at the San Francisco Campus of Medill. There's an introduction to data journalism course and we get people coming in there from all kinds of backgrounds. Often half the class are just, they put their hands up if they're worried about math or scared of data, but somehow at the end of the course they are all making visualisations and telling data stories, so you know, those concerns can always be overcome.     MF  I suppose it's not that radical a development really if you think back, particularly from where we're sitting in the ONS. Of course, many of the biggest news stories outside of COVID have been data driven. think only of inflation for example, the cost of living has been a big running story in this country, and internationally of course, over the last couple of years. Ultimately, that's a data driven story. People are relying on the statisticians to tell them what the rate of inflation is, confirming of course what they're seeing every day in the shops and when they're spending money.     SR  Yeah, no, I agree. Absolutely. And half of the stories that are probably about data, people don't realise they're writing about data. However, I think there is a tendency, or there has been in the past, a tendency to just believe all data without questioning it, in the way that as a reporter, you would question a human source and make sure you understood what they were saying. If we gave one thing and that thing is that reporters would then come back to you guys and say ask an informed question about this data and dive into a little bit more, then I think we've gained a lot.     MF  So this is perhaps what good data journalists are bringing to the table, perhaps and ability to actually sort out the good data from the bad data, and actually, to use it appropriately to understand uncertainty and understand how the number on the page might not be providing the full picture.    SR   Absolutely. I think it's that combination of traditional journalistic skills and data that to me always make the strongest storytelling. When you see somebody, you know, who knows a story inside out like a health correspondent, who knows everything there is to know about health policy, and then they're telling a human story perhaps about somebody in that condition, and then they've got data to back it up - it's like the near and the far. This idea of the near view and the far view, and journalism being the thing that brings those two together. So there's the view from 30,000 feet that the data gives you and then the individual view that the more kind of qualitative interview that you get with somebody who is in a situation gives you. The two things together - that's incredibly powerful.    MF  And when choosing the data you use for a story I guess it's about making sound judgements – you know, basic questions like “is this a big number?”, “is this an important number?”     SR  Yeah, a billion pounds sounds like a lot of money, but they need to know how much is a billion pounds, is it more about a rounding error for the government.    MF  Yes, and you still see as well, outside of data journalism I stress, you still see news organisations making much of percentage increases or what looks like a significant increase in something that's pretty rare to start with.     SR  Yeah, it's all relative. Understanding what something means relatively, without having to give them a math lesson, I think is important.     MF  So this talk about supply, the availability of data journalism, where do people go to find good data journalism, perhaps without having to subscribe? You know, some of the publications that do it best are after all behind paywalls, where do we find the good stuff that's freely available?    SR  If I was looking from scratch for the best data journalism, I think there are lots of places you can find it without having to subscribe to every service. Obviously, you have now the traditional big organisations like the Guardian, and New York Times, and De Spiegel in Germany, there is a tonne of data journalism now happening in other countries around the world that I work on supporting the Sigma Data Journalism Awards. And over half of those entries come from small one or two people units, you know, practising their data journalism in countries in the world where it's a lot more difficult than it is to do it in the UK. For example, Texty in Ukraine, which is a Ukrainian data journalism site, really, and they're in the middle of a war zone right now and they're producing data journalism. In fact, Anatoly Barranco, their data editor, is literally in the army and on the frontline, but he's also producing data journalism and they produce incredible visualisations. They've used AI in interesting ways to analyse propaganda and social media posts and stuff. And the stuff happening everywhere is not just limited to those big partners behind paywalls. And what you do find also, often around big stories like what's happened with COVID, people will put their work outside of the paywall. But um, yeah, data is like an attraction. I think visualisation is an attraction for readers. I'm not surprised people try and monetize that, but there is enough going on out there in the world.    MF  And all that acknowledged, could the producers of statistics like the ONS, and system bodies around the world, could we be doing more to make sure that people using this data in this way have it in forms have it available to be interpreted? Is there more than we can do?     SR  I mean, there was the JC survey that I mentioned earlier, it's definitely worth checking out because one thing it shows is that 57% of data journalists say that getting access to data is still their biggest challenge. And then followed by kind of like lack of resources, time pressure, things like that. PDFs are still an issue out there in the world. There's two things to this for me, on one side it's like, how do I use the data, help me understand what I'm looking at. On the other side is that access, so you know, having more kind of API's and easy downloads, things that are not formatted to look pretty but formatted for use. Those kinds of things are still really important. I would say the ONS has made tremendous strides, certainly since I was working in the UK, on accessibility to data and that's a notable way, and I've seen the same thing with gov.us here in the States.    MF  Well it's good to hear the way the ONS has been moving in the right direction. Certainly I think we've been tough on PDFs.   SR Yes and to me it's noticeable. It's noticeable and you've obviously made a deliberate decision to do that, which is great. That makes the data more useful, right, and makes it more and more helpful for people.     MF  Yes, and at the other end of the chain, what about storing publishers and web platforms, particularly well you're at Google currently, but generally, what can these big platforms do to promote good data journalism and combat misinformation? I mean, big question there.    SR  Obviously, I work with Google Trends data, which is probably the world's biggest publicly available data set. I think a big company like Google has a responsibility to make this data public, and the fact that it is, you can download reusable datasets, is incredibly powerful. I'm very proud to work on that. I think that all companies have a responsibility to be transparent, especially when you have a unique data set. That didn't exist 20 years earlier, and it's there now and it can tell you something about how the world works. I mean, for instance, when we look at something like I mean, I've mentioned COVID before, but it's such a big event in our recent history. How people were searching around COVID is incredibly fascinating and it was important information to get out there. Especially at a time when the official data is always going to be behind what's actually happening out there. And is there a way you can use that data to predict stuff, predict where cases are going to come up... We work with this data every day and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible with it.    MF   And when it comes to combating misinformation we stand, so we're told, on the threshold of another revolution from artificial intelligence, large language models, and so forth. How do you see that future? Is AI friend, foe, or both?     SR  I work for a company that is a significant player in the AI area, so I give you that background. But I think in the field of data, we've seen a lot of data users use AI to really help produce incredible work, where instead of having to read through a million documents, they can get the system to do it for them and pull out stories. Yeah, like any other tool, it can be anything but the potential to help journalists do their jobs better, and for good, I think is pretty high. I'm going to be optimistic and hope that that's the way things go.    MF  Looking optimistically to the future then, thank you very much Simon for joining us. And thanks also to my other guests, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Ed Humpherson. Taking their advice on board then, when we hear or read about data through the news or experience it on social media, perhaps we should first always ask ourselves – do we trust the source? Good advice indeed.     You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also get more information, or ask us a question, by following the @ONSFocus on X, or Twitter, take your pick. I'm Miles Fletcher, from myself and our producer Steve Milne, thanks for listening.   ENDS 

In this episode we chat to members of the ONS Social Survey Collection Division about the importance, and challenges, of getting the general public to take part in crucial surveys that help paint a picture of what life is like across Britain.   Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking', the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher.   Now I don't know about you - but it seems hardly a moment passes these days when we are not being asked to feed back. How was our service today? Are you satisfied with this product?  Please fill in this short survey. Your responses matter.  Well, forgive the natural bias, but today we're talking about surveys that really do matter.   ONS surveys – some of which are the very largest conducted regularly in the UK – don't just inform economic and social policy, though they are hugely important to it. The data they gathered also represent a public resource of immense and unique value.   But persuading people – some unaware, some sceptical and even hostile, others just very busy – to take part in them is a growing challenge for statistical institutions worldwide.       In this episode then we'll be discussing how the ONS gathers often personal data from members of the public right up and down the country.   Taking time out of their day to answer my questions, and to explain why it's absolutely crucial that you participate in our surveys if you get the opportunity to do so, are Emma Pendre and Beth Ferguson, who head up the ONS's face-to-face Field Operations;   and sharing their own personal experiences of life on other people's doorsteps we have two of the ONS's top Field Interviewers, Tammy Fullelove and Benjamin Land.  Welcome to you all.  Emma, if I come to you first – give us an idea of what exactly the field community in ONS is. Who are you and what do you do?   EMMA PENDRE  The Social Survey Collection Division is the largest division in ONS. We primarily collect data from households either online, face to face or by telephone using computer assisted interviewing, and also work at air, sea and rail ports collecting data from passengers. All the data collected is used to produce quite a number of our key ONS publications which help to paint a picture of what life is like in the UK. And these can include things like estimates of employment and unemployment, how we measure inflation, how we measure migration, and a key topic of interest at the moment is the cost of living. So while most of ONS relies on the data that we collect for our outputs and statistical bulletins, the statistics that we particularly generate also support research, policy development and decision making across government and other private sector businesses as well.   MF  Now Beth, bringing you in here, when it comes to household surveys, presumably someone's deciding which households are going to be approached to take part. Who makes those decisions and how is it done?   BETH FERGUSON So I'm not going to pretend to understand the clever people in the statistics team who work out how we get the right people to cover a broad spectrum of society. But yes, that's done by the sampling team and they choose a random sample for the surveys.   MF  And that's generated presumably from using the electoral roll.   BF  It's generated from something called PAF which is the Post Office Address Finder. I'll have to confirm exactly what that stands for. Yes, but essentially, it's a list of addresses across England, Scotland and Wales.   MF  And when it comes to the passenger survey, it's a question of stopping what we hope will be a representative random sample of people as they pass through those ports.   BF  Yes, it is. Yeah. But at the moment we're currently working on departures and arrivals. So yes, it's a random sample of individuals stopped and asked questions.   MF  But to make the data really representative and really valid, of course, we've got to be covering the whole of the country. The country in this case being Great Britain.  How do we ensure that that coverage is working day in day out?   BF  That's our role as the kind of management of the face-to-face field interviewers. Different surveys are done over different frequencies. So we've got the Labour Force Survey and the transformed Labour Force Survey which addresses are issued for on a weekly basis and those surveys are delivered on a weekly basis. And then we've also got our other longer, more detailed financial surveys that we're issued with a quota for on a monthly basis. So our job is to make sure we've got the right people, in the right places, to knock on the right doors, to get hold of those members of the public and, you know, encourage them to agree to complete surveys for us.   MF  And luckily for us we're joined by two of those “right people” here today. Tammy and Benjamin, welcome to our humble podcast. Now you are both at the sharp end of our survey data collection, working as field interviewers.  I'm obviously really interested in what you do day to day, but first off tell us how you got into this line of work. What was the attraction for you Tammy, how did you become a field interviewer?   TAMMY FULLELOVE  So prior to working for the ONS - I've never worked in public sector before, I've always worked in the private sector - and I've actually got a finance background. But then after being on maternity leave, having a young family, seeing the job advertised and the flexibility working with people in a very, varied job sort of pulled me to it to apply to be honest. And that was seven years ago, and I can honestly say I enjoy every single day I'm out in the field. It's great.   MF  And Benjamin how about you, what was your background?   BENJAMIN LAND  Well, I've done a variety of hospitality jobs in the past. I then applied to work on the Census at the start of 2021. And my manager at the time she had worked previously for the ONS on the basket of goods figures, and she recommended it as a really great place to work. It's funny how timing happened I saw a vacancy for a field interviewer, which I applied. And then I started in May 2021. So almost two and a half years ago now.   MF  Okay, so you've both got quite a bit of experience already under your belt. I was wondering of both of you, is there such a thing as a typical day for a field interviewer?   TF  I can honestly say no, every day is completely different. Depending on the area where you go into, where you may be working, streets apart, houses apart. You never know what door you knock on who can be behind that door, which makes every day completely varied, especially with the studies that you may be interviewing for, that they can be very different with the content. So yeah, two days are never the same.   BL  I totally agree with Tammy. It varies. My week has a sort of flow to it. So I tend to get out quite a lot at the start of the week to visit various addresses. If it's LFS they change every week. On the financial surveys it's monthly so you've got longer to familiarise yourself with the area. We tend to have a team meeting most Tuesday mornings just to check in and see how we're doing. And then obviously interviews are scheduled around respondents' timetable so that can be any time up to sort of eight, nine o'clock at night and sometimes Saturdays, if that's when they're available.   MF  Going out to people's houses on a daily basis, you no doubt encounter a wide variety of people. That must have led to one or two amusing episodes.   TF I've had occasion where people will answer the door in not the most suitable attire, shall we say, for public viewing. I don't know how much further to go into this, but yeah, definitely opening the door in towels which have fallen off and dressing gowns which haven't been completely covered. It definitely happened a couple of times over the past few years.    MF  Perhaps that's what they mean by “raw data”. Beth, if I can come back to you, are there particular surveys which are considered to be especially important for us to be speaking to people in their homes in the way we've just been talking about? Ones that perhaps can't be carried out in other ways.  BETH FERGUSON  It's the more detailed financial surveys. So we've got the Family Resources Survey, the Living Costs and Food Survey, the Survey of Living Conditions, and the Household and Assets survey. They are quite long, more detailed surveys. The living costs and food survey, that requires the respondent to complete an interview, but then they also have to get hold of all their receipts of any expenditure for a two week period and annotate them and hand those over to the interviewer. So it's quite a detailed, involved survey. The Household and Assets survey, again it's dependent on how many people in the household can, you know, take up to two hours to complete and ask lots of detailed financial questions around savings and pensions and other things. If you're in the home, you can ask them to get the documents, support them to review the documents, make sure that they're actually giving the right information which, if they were to go online and do it themselves, there's no guarantee that they would get the right detail that we're actually looking for.   MF  So it's quite an intensive experience really, isn't it compared with simply asking someone to tick the boxes on a webpage? And I guess it very much depends on building a personal rapport with the survey participants?  BF  Absolutely. And that's the key. That's the key to a really successful interviewer is that ability to build rapport in a snapshot on the doorstep. You know, before they've had the opportunity to give a polite no, no thank you or sorry, not today. They reckon it is approximately 10 seconds on the doorstep to get that engagement and build that rapport, and then maintain that through what can sometimes be quite a lengthy interview. Keep that friendliness, that rapport going so that the person being interviewed remains engaged and keen to do it.   MF  Now Tammy, you've already told us about your previous financial background. Do you find that helps you when you're collecting data on economics or topics around money?   TAMMY FULLELOVE  Yes, I do. Like Beth's already mentioned, a couple of our financial studies go into people's income and expenditure. So having that sort of background I feel does help me, especially when they're speaking about what benefits they receive, what sort of things they pay out. It definitely does sort of give me the edge I do feel.    MF  That's great, because it's no secret is it Beth that the ONS, like other statistical organisations around the world, are finding it increasingly challenging to get people to take part in surveys.   BETH FERGUSON  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's got more and more challenging. Pre-pandemic it was getting more challenging, but the shift during and post-pandemic has been quite significant in terms of the number of willing people to do surveys for us.  MF  A shift in what direction?  BF  Fewer members of the public are willing to actually do surveys for us. Now whether that's because there's less trust in the government or actually, because of the pandemic, everybody's working from home and time is more limited. But no, it's definitely harder to get a response now.   MF  What techniques do we use then to try and change people's minds to get them to take part?  BF  At the moment we're doing a lot of work, certainly with the face-to-face field community - we're calling it a Respondent Engagement Programme. So looking out for clues and signs from, you know, when you approach the doorstep in the area, identifying the kind of things that may be key to them. Our statistics on things like CPI and RPI and, you know, the change in cost of food - that being constantly in the news gives us, kind of like, a lever to start an open conversation on the doorstep, particularly when we're looking at the financial surveys.   EMMA PENDRE  And also Miles. It's worth noting that all the surveys are voluntary, so the offer of incentives such as vouchers in exchange for the time taken to complete a survey will also continue to be significantly influential in maintaining our response rates.   MF  Absolutely Emma - offering people a small incentive has actually been proven to work hasn't it, and I guess in cost terms, it's better to spend some money on that rather than wasting it on chasing people who are never going to take part.   EP  Yes, that's right. The vouchers are very significant. They do help maintain our response rates. And again, being in a cost of living crisis at the moment. Our respondents see them as very helpful.   MF  But even with incentives, and as Beth has suggested, there's still a reluctance by some people to be involved in our surveys. Coming to you Tammy and Benjamin, as our people on the front line every day - upon your shoulders falls the responsibility for persuading people in many cases to actually take part. Do you have a standard approach, or do you tailor what you do according to particular circumstances?  TAMMY FULLELOVE  We definitely have a doorstep introduction, which has to cover a few different points to obviously make sure respondents are aware of the confidentialness of obviously the answers that that will be providing. But I do believe having a smile as soon as they open the door is the biggest thing - you're obviously trying to get them on board and trying to get them to either go online to complete the study or to make an appointment if they can't do it there and then to do the interview. It definitely has to be tailored I think, compared to who answers the door and obviously what reasoning they would like to help complete the study. Whereas some people as soon as you knock on the door, they've had the letters, they're waiting for you. They really want to help. So yeah, it definitely does depend on who's behind that door and obviously why they would like to help the Office for National Statistics.   MF  We live in a suspicious age and some people might think that there's something fishy afoot.   BENJAMIN LAND  That's the challenge Miles is people often initially they think it's a scam. I turn up with my badge and they're like, “Oh, you are real”. And taking the time to explain to people once we've done the doorstep introduction that it's not a scam and it is legitimate, valuable research that we're carrying out and it certainly impacts everyone.     MF  I can imagine how tricky it must be to convince people sometimes, but you strike me as someone who isn't likely to be put off by that.   BL Yes, yeah, I love a challenge. There was one lady last summer and every time she was like, “Oh, I'm busy. I've just come back from holiday, can you pop round the next week?” And it got to the point where she's like “I'm decorating my house.” I said, Ma'am, that's fine. I'll come and help you decorate your house if you complete this survey. And she's like, “Oh, you're so persistent.” I managed to get an interview and I was really pleased about that. So there's a little, you know, a little win in the bag.   MF  Well done, though I should point out that painting and decorating is not officially one of the ONS's services for getting people to take part in surveys.  Tammy have you got experiences like that?  TF  Yeah, I've never got into painting and decorating, I'm gonna admit that. But it is a great feeling when the first time you knock on the door people don't want to help they're too busy, especially now post-COVID, with the amount of people working at home. So like Benjamin said, you're interrupting a Teams call. You're interrupting them doing some work. So you have to get over that first hurdle. But, you know, making that appointment, and sometimes they will make the appointment but then they either won't answer the phone, or they won't be in when you turn up, which can be frustrating. But yeah, when you actually do complete that study and they do feel like, you know, they have helped and you've gone above and beyond to secure that interview, it is definitely a great feeling. So maybe I should be offering painting and decorating services, maybe that would help.   BL  Don't take my tricks. No, the sense of achievement or, like Tammy says, you do get people that break appointments, you know, due to personal circumstances, and you somehow have to chase people and encourage them, but when you do secure the interview, and you get the data. There's something about when something's hard won you value it more.   MF  Yes, indeed. But how many people have heard of the ONS would you say?  BL  A lot of people now, because we were quoted a lot during the COVID statistics, regularly on the news and is quoted... I read the newspaper I appreciate not everyone does. But a lot of the data in newspapers it will state that it's been sourced from ONS.   MF  That recognition factor has helped help you on the doorstep. Do people get that the ONS is an impartial organisation operating at arm's length, certainly from ministerial government?  BL  No, no, I think we're often tarnished with the same brush as the TV licencing people that come round, especially in certain areas where I knock on doors. You know that they were met sometimes with hostility, to put it politely.   MF  Clearly some persuading to be done in a wider sense there as well. But is that your experience too Tammy?   TF  Yeah, they do believe that we are a government body and that we are influenced by a particular minister, or by the government that's in power at the time. If people are very anti-government on the doorstep it does create that hostility as the first sort of part of your introduction.   MF  Do you try to talk them around on that?   TF  Yeah, exactly like Benjamin said that really, you know, we don't have a minister in control of us. We are separate to the government. Everything is private, confidential. We don't share the information. You know, there's different a few things that you have to try on the doorsteps to try and get that buy-in from the respondents.  MF  Those of us who live and breathe statistics, of course, we wouldn't need to be persuaded to the value of taking part, but the challenge is to convince the whole population, or at least a representative sample of the whole population. It seems well removed from everyday life for a lot of people, but how many people do you think “get it” in terms of the value of statistics, you know, particularly economic indicators and high-level population data?   TF  I think it's great if you can get to an area. And you know, that statistics, whether it's been from some sort of government funding, have helped in the area. So you can say to someone on the doorstep, well, the reason why this school was built or this doctor surgery, or this park, or some sort of local information, really does that help to sort of say why they are important to provide the information. But on the flip side, speaking to students who will obviously do research looking at the ONS data, they might be using, obviously, in their own work and people who work in sort of the public sector, I think, do understand to a degree how important it is. But then, I think the vast majority and I think Benjamin will help me with this, don't really understand why we're collecting this or what benefit the information could have to them and where they live.   BL  That's right. I think a lot of people they have a global sense of it, but they don't understand the impact it has on their life and I work quite a lot in Bournemouth. And there's a lot there's a big student population as we've got Bournemouth University and the Arts University College, and a lot of the students do actually know or use the ONS data. I was actually at a student house yesterday in Winton and that makes my life much easier if I can link it to their own studies.   MF  In covering the whole of the country, of course, that means covering areas, which in statistical language are “hard to reach communities” - that's the phrase that's used. And frankly, of course, that often means areas of considerable social deprivation.  Emma... How do we target those areas in particular, does that require extra attention or special techniques?   EMMA PENDRE  So our vision is to be fully inclusive by design. So that ensures that both the data and our workforce are fully representative of the population that we serve. The pandemic actually opened up opportunities and challenged how we have historically done things in the ONS. So to give a specific example here is around one of our key data sources, which is the Labour Force Survey. Before the pandemic we would write to addresses randomly, selected from our database of all UK households, and invite people to take part, and then knock on their doors to follow up if we didn't hear back from them. During the pandemic, when face to face interviews became impossible. We had to rely on people responding to the letter and taking part in the telephone interview. We saw pretty quickly that this was leading to bias in the responses, with particular demographics, such as the older population being more likely to respond where we were less likely to hear from people who sort of rented their properties. We knew we needed to speed up the work already underway to improve the survey. So fast forward two years and we now have transformed the Labour Force Survey and making it an online first survey which is now supported by telephone collection where needed. We've proven that to make the survey inclusive and reduce bias we also need to be knocking on doors. So for households invited to complete the survey from November 2022 They now might get a visit from a field interviewer who encourages them to complete the survey online or via a telephone interview, and we call this mode of field work “knock to nudge”.  MF  So in other words, it's not enough just to send somebody a letter inviting them to take part - that's likely to go unheeded. But a friendly face at the door and a little bit of gentle persuasion, can have a really useful effect.   EP  Absolutely. Right.   MF  And this is very important, because the ONS has committed with the Inclusive Data Task Force to make a special effort to ensure everybody is represented in official statistics, and field communities have been involved in that work.   Tammy, you operate in an area that's quite ethnically diverse. How do you bridge barriers in communities where English perhaps is not the first language for a significant number of people?   TAMMY FULLELOVE  So in the North West, we do have a number of regions where it's densely populated, very different cultural diversity, I suppose obviously, London would cover the same. And we do rely on interviewers who speak second languages, who can then translate the languages of the people on the doorstep to go through the interview, or even just to help on the actual doorstep to speak to people and advise what the study is about and to make the appointments.   MF  And Beth... when it comes to choosing field workers I guess it's very important as well that you've got people who are not only representative in the general sense of those communities, but actually have got some understanding, some feel, for the people they're dealing with.   BETH FERGUSON  That's part of the skill of a field interviewer. And I guess it comes from the fact that we've got interviewers from all different backgrounds, but it also comes as they learn the role, understanding which areas you know are going to be more challenging, where you're going to have to put a bit more effort in and understanding that actually... as an interviewer you can knock on a number of doors and, you know, you know who's going to be easy, you can get interviews relatively easy from various different sections of society. And you know that's going to be easy, but you also know that if you're going into an area that's more deprived, you're going to have to put more effort in, you know, and for some interviewers it comes immediately and, for others, it's learned over a period of time, where those more challenging areas are, what's actually going to work, what's going to resonate with the people behind the door that, you know, you're going to need to get that interview from to make sure the data is representative of everyone.   MF Now, Emma, let's talk a little about the future of the field community, because obviously we hear so much now about big data and the ability to discover and gather insights from that. A mountainous array of data sources that can now give us rapid, fast data, covering just about every topic you can think of. But, nevertheless, the ONS sees value in continuing to run these very large, and very personal surveys face-to-face and over the phone.   EMMA PENDRE  Yeah, social surveys will continue to have an essential role to play in ONS's future, but also as part of a joined up data acquisition approach as well. I don't feel it's any longer a competition between whether we use surveys or other data sources. We have now come to realise that we actually need to work together and complement each other. So surveys are still fundamental in collecting the data that other sources cannot provide. And whilst new types of data sources are allowing us to more rapidly take stock of what's happening in our society and economy, they can't tell us everything or provide insights on things like personal opinions, attitudes, or exactly how people might be feeling at a given point in time. That will only ever be possible from talking to people.   MF  And on that note, can I just say that it's been a pleasure talking to all of you today.  [OUTRO MUSIC]  That's it for another episode of Statistically Speaking.   Thanks once again for listening, and also thank you for taking part in our surveys. Without you all the incredibly valuable information we get from our surveys – which help to inform better decisions by your local council, for instance – would simply not exist.  If you haven't yet had the opportunity to take part, and you get a knock on the door in future from one of our field interviewers, please do answer and take the time to respond.   And if you happen to be in the Bournemouth area of course, and need some painting and decorating doing, then Benjamin's your man!   You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all the other major platforms. You can also get more information by following the @ONSfocus feed on Twitter.   Special thanks to producers Steve Milne and Julia Short.   I'm Miles Fletcher and until next time... goodbye.   ENDS   

    In this episode we discuss how the ONS has been working to transform the way we count the population, using new datasets to give more accurate, timely, and detailed measurements.  On 29 June 2023, the ONS will be launching a public consultation on its proposals for a transformed population and migration statistics system. Understanding user needs will be essential evidence in making its recommendations to Government on the future of population statistics.    More detail available at: www.ons.gov.uk   To explain more about the public consultation, and answer your questions, the ONS is holding a series of free events in July 2023:   National Statistician's launch event, London, 4 July 2023. (Online attendance also available)   National Statistician's launch event, Cardiff, 6 July 2023. (Online attendance also available)   Launch webinar, 13 July 2023. (Online only)  You can also watch our transformation journey video, which is also available with British Sign Language (BSL), and in Welsh, with BSL.    TRANSCRIPT    MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to ‘Statistically Speaking', the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher and this time we're looking at the future of our population statistics. How best to count all of the people, all of the time, and provide the most valuable information on changing characteristics that can drive excellent research and sound public policy. All of that is the subject of a major consultation exercise that's running during the summer of 2023. It's all about the Office for National Statistics proposals to create what's described as a sustainable and future proof system for producing essential statistics on the population.   Joining me to unpack all that and explain how you can get involved in the consultation process is Jen Woolford, Director of population statistics here at the ONS. And we're joined once again by Pete Benton, Deputy National Statistician.   Pete in a previous episode, you described how the once in a decade census has been the bedrock of our population statistics for a very long time, but now it looks like some pretty fundamental change could be on the way?   PETE BENTON Well, that's the question. What's the future hold? We've been doing a census for over 200 years now once a decade, and it paints a beautiful, rich picture of our population that's fundamental to planning all of our services that we use: health care, education, transport, they all depend on the number and type of people living in a given area. But the question is, can we get more detail from other data sources every year, and might that mean that we don't need a census in 2031? Because we've got enough and that's the question that we are now talking about.   MF Okay, so before we go into the detail of how we might achieve that, then paint a picture for our listeners. When we talk about population statistics, what are they exactly? And why are they so important and to whom?   PB Well in between a census, we estimate the total population, by age and by sex and we do it nationally and we do it for local authorities. We estimate migration, how many people have moved into the country and how many people have moved out and also how people move around the country because that affects the population at any given area. And of course, we also do surveys that give us top level national level statistics about all kinds of things whether it's the labour market, or our health, things that the census asks and gives us detailed information for small areas, surveys, kind of paint a top level picture in between times.   MF So to date, how have we gone about getting those numbers, and how good has that information been?   PB So the census gives us the baseline once every 10 years. And we take that and we add births, we subtract deaths, we make an estimate of international migration. And we use that to adjust the data and we make an estimate of migration around the country, and that gives us those population estimates and those migration statistics.   MF So to do that you need, or you'd have had to have drawn on something like the census, that universal survey of the whole population.   PB That's right. The census is the benchmark by which we reset the system once a decade. But of course, after nine years, that information is getting more out of date and we do a census again, 10 years on to reset those statistics. And again, give us that rich picture. The question we're looking at now is how much can we get in between times? And how much do we then still need all the detail that a census would give us once a decade?   MF So Jen, the world has moved on in those decades since the census in its present form has been going. You would think there's an opportunity out there to transform how we go about counting the nation. Give us the background to that.   JEN WOOLFORD So we've been looking over decades to bring more and more data together to improve our population statistics. So Pete talked about how we look at the movement of people between censuses both in and out of the country and between different areas. And for some time now, we've been using what we call administrative data to understand those movements in the population. But now we have access to lots more data than we have in the past, and it gives us lots of opportunities to change how we're producing population statistics. So back in 2014, government first set out its ambition for us to build a population and migration Statistics System with administrative data at its heart. In 2018, we published a white paper, which set out our plans for a digital first census in 2021. But also that we should be making a recommendation to government about what the future of Population Statistics looks like, and that that recommendation should be based on a public consultation. And that's the consultation that we are going to be launching at the end of June.   MF The challenge therefore, is to come up with something as least as good if not, preferably better, but without using a census.   JW Absolutely. And people's needs are changing. So whatever we do has to respond to whatever the user needs are of the day. So in the past, where maybe populations didn't change so much at a local level so quickly, then having a census once a decade that gave you that detail, that detail would still be quite relevant 10 years later. But the population is changing so rapidly now that that decade old data can quite quickly become out of date. And an example of where this could be a problem for us and for policymakers is if we look at the COVID pandemic. During the pandemic, we saw really localised outbreaks of COVID infections, and we really wanted to understand what was going on in those areas and what the characteristics of people in those areas was to try and understand what might be leading to those outbreaks. But we didn't have census data, the 2021 census data then, we were having to go back to what those areas look like in 2011. So by transforming what we do, and having more up to date information about those local populations, it would have given us a much better idea of what might have been driving those local outbreaks.   MF And there was another example perhaps during the pandemic when the government was trying to work out what proportion of the population had been vaccinated at local level relying on population statistics that because they were backed up by the census was subject to quite significant margins of error.   JW That's right. So if you want to know what proportion of people in an area have been vaccinated, you need to know how many people are in that area in the first place. And if you're looking at a vaccination rate that's really high say kind of 90% that 10% is what's important, the 10% that aren't vaccinated. Now, you might only have a 5% error in your population estimates. But that could mean that you're thinking you've got 15% of the population to look at rather than the 10%.   MF Pete, we've heard this term admin data (administrative data) already. And in that we're talking about all the information that gets collected whenever someone engages with public services, tax bills, benefits, going to the dentist, that kind of thing. Now, presumably that information has been collected for quite some time. So why is it only in the last few years that we're really starting to see and begin to use the potential of that data?   PETE BENTON It takes time to develop the methods for doing it. So we've put a lot of effort into understanding the data sources and understanding the quality of the statistics that result so that we can be clear what we can and can't do, and that we can show that to the people that use the data to make decisions in order to understand the quality of what they're getting and give us their views of that.   MF Can you think of some examples of administrative data as already being used effectively in official statistics, the sort of things that the ONS produces.   PB Well we've always used them actually, when we produce our population statistics. We estimate the local population using the number of people registered with a GP and how that changes over time. So it's not new, it's just that we're expanding what we might be able to do here to try and get so much greater benefit every year, to improve decision making every year for all of our public service planning.   MF And the opportunity, as Jen has already suggested, to link that data to understand how different groups, down to really quite small groups and local level and by different characteristics, are being affected by certain issues.   PB That's right. Different datasets tell us different things. So there are datasets that tell us about educational achievement and there are datasets that tell us about household income, for example. And by bringing those together, we can understand the implications of education per outcomes of household earnings so we can really start to tie together the kind of public services that we get and the outcomes that we get as households.   MF Now the possibilities of all this, of course, of being able to bring all this data into one place is a very exciting one from an analytical point of view, but from the point of view of the public and individual citizens at the same time, you could see why some people might be concerned about this, both from an ethical and a secure point of view.   PB Well, when you think about it, this is nothing new for ONS. We've been doing a census for over 200 years and we keep those data safe we always have done, and we also do surveys every year of households on very sensitive topics. Some of them are people's experiences of crime or their health for example, and we do surveys of businesses to understand the economy and produce our statistics about GDP and inflation. Those data are all sensitive, and we keep them all very securely. So in one sense, there's nothing new here. We are good at this. We know how to keep data secure. It's all anonymized. So there is never anything published that identifies an individual and even within ONS, the analysts only get to see anonymous data.    MF And very important to state, is it not, that it's not a question of building up pictures of individuals. It's always from a statistical point of view. It's the numbers we're interested in and not the people.   PB Absolutely! We don't care about Peter Benton or Miles Fletcher, we care about the picture it paints of the nation. It's the statistics that come from it. And we are absolutely strict about confidentiality.   MF Jen, other countries of course are wrestling with this as well and adopting and trying new kinds of systems. What's been the experience internationally?   JEN WOOLFORD So you're right, lots of countries are looking at new and innovative ways to create the population statistics bringing lots of different sources together. We all operate in slightly different contexts. So in Scandinavia, for example, they've been producing population statistics like this for a long time. But those are countries that have population registers, which means their context is very different from ours. And to be absolutely clear here, we're not looking at building a Population Register. We're looking at creating statistics from bringing together different data sources. And there are a number of countries who are in the same position as us. So for example, Australia and New Zealand, and they are looking to try and develop similar systems for producing population statistics as we are and we're working very closely with those countries to share our learning and to share the methods as we're developing them so that we're all learning from each other.   MF So talking about the potential of these new data sources, including all the administrative data, can you give us some examples of what we're not doing that we might be able to do much better in future?   JW There are a number of advantages and improvements we can make for greater use of data. Firstly, in the existing system, we use the census to benchmark our population estimates. So in between censuses, we estimate population change with births and deaths and migration, but we tend to get a bit of a drift in those population estimates. So we use the census then to benchmark it and bring those estimates back in line. With this new system, we're looking at not just estimating the change but also estimating the number of people at a point in time, so that hopefully will reduce that drift that we get in population estimates and mean that over the 10 year period, our estimates are more accurate. The other thing that can happen between censuses is you can get quite a lot of change in local areas and the data we have doesn't reflect that change, because it's based on the previous census. So an example here could be that the conflict in Ukraine has led to a number of Ukrainian refugees moving to England and Wales since we conducted the census. So in some areas, the makeup of the population there will have changed significantly since we conducted the census. And in our existing system, we wouldn't be able to pick that up. With our new system, we'd be able to pick up that localised population change much more quickly than we can at the moment.   MF And presumably that would be of enormous benefit for local authorities, where everyone would be trying to provide services down to local level, because you've got a much more up to date picture of how many people are there, and we saw recently when the census results were published, some local authority areas have experienced big changes in population.   JW Absolutely. The other thing to be aware of with the census is that it was conducted during the pandemic and it was conducted during a period of lockdown. What we saw was that people moved out of some of the metropolitan areas during that period of lockdown, back to whether that's the kind of parental homes for students or for young members of the workforce. So the populations in those metropolitan areas will have changed quite rapidly as the country opens back up and as people move back into those metropolitan centres. The approach that we're taking now should be able to pick up that change much more quickly, not just the numbers of people, but also the characteristics of people who are moving within the UK.   MF And how does this benefit individual citizens? What's this going to mean for the public generally?   JW So better data means better decisions. It means that better planning can be made for things like school places, better planning for public transport, where to put hospitals, where to put sports centres. All of these decisions are based on our data about the population and by having better data, you'll have better decisions.   MF And you'll be able to target services and be able to target spending as well on a much more short term basis, rather than having to make decisions coming along into the future when circumstances could be changing.   JW Absolutely. Or the decisions might still be long term, but you'll be able to monitor the impact that those decisions are having much more closely than you can at the moment.   MF So Jen, is there anything we won't be able to get from such a system? And we've heard some people suggest, for example, that we wouldn't be able to get that very small level data, the street level data that's so useful from a census, and survey purists point, of the census as a great way of capturing social history.   JW We're always faced with trade offs when we make decisions about things like our methods, or anything in life, and there are likely to be trade offs here. What we've done to date is we've done lots of research that shows that there's bags of potential here with what we can do with administrative data and the understanding of the population we can get from administrative data. There are still outstanding questions for us. So there are some characteristics, for example, people who provide unpaid care, that isn't available from administrative data and we still need to work out how we will provide that level of data. The census gives such a wealth of information about things like ethnicity where we get down to really granular classifications of ethnicity, it may not be possible to do that with administrative data. However, on the flip side, we can produce statistics that we didn't get from the census using administrative data. So on the 2021 census, we didn't collect information about income. But we've published research that shows that we can get down to small area estimates of household income using a combination of administrative data. We've also published research which shows that we can produce the kind of variables that we do get from the census. So we've published research on ethnic group and also on housing stock, types of housing, and we've also managed to get to linking different admin data together so that we can look at income by ethnic group, and housing type by ethnic group. So producing what we call multivariate statistics through linked administrative data. We still have a programme of research to really understand how far we can replicate what we get out of the census. But the consultation that we're about to launch is really about understanding whether what we can demonstrate and deliver with administrative data answers user needs. And if it doesn't answer some of our user needs, what are those needs, and so we can then plan our future research to make sure we're focused on the right things.    MF And of course, it's genealogists - people who love to trace family trees - who find the census data so valuable.   JW Absolutely. And in the existing system census data is archived for 100 years and then made available to genealogists and others to really explore their family history. In the new system we have a wealth of data that we could be using to understand the population and we need to work with genealogists to understand exactly what it is that would be useful for us to archive for future posterity. So although that's not the focus of the consultation, genealogists are very welcome to respond to the consultation and let us know more about their needs, or we'll have future conversations to make sure that we're clear on what the need is here and how we can best answer it.   MF And that's what the consultation is, to a large extent, all about.   JW  Absolutely.   MF  And it's important to understand that these proposals haven't just been whipped out of thin air, a considerable amount of work has already gone on getting us to this point in time hasn't it. Can you talk through some of the research that's already happened and some of the evidence that has been provided to suggest that a new and transformed system might well be the way forward?   JW Yes, this has been a long programme of work where we have focused on two different types of research. One is around improving our estimates of the population and being able to get to small area population estimates more frequently than we can at the moment. And the other is around the characteristics of the population. So what can we say about ethnicity or employment down to local areas. On the first of those, we've done a lot of work talking to local authorities about the estimates that we've produced and their understanding of our outputs and whether they match with what they see on the ground. We have compared what we get through administrative data to the figures that we got from the 2021 census. So lots of work comparing the outputs and talking to our users about how credible those outputs are. We're also looking at how can we improve our estimates of migration, in particular international migration, and we've been working very closely with the Home Office and the data that they hold to understand more about the flows of people in and out of the country and the reasons for those flows. So people coming as international students, people coming to work, people coming along humanitarian routes, and we've built already lots of improvements into our migration statistics using administrative data and we've got lots of plans going forward for even more improvements that we can deliver there. We also have an expert panel, the methodological assurance review panel, who quality assure our methods. So these are people who are real experts in statistics and methodology, who have looked at the detail of the methods that we're using to produce those outputs and check that those are sensible and the best methods that we could be using.   MF So to sum up then Jen, how far ultimately could this new system take us?   JW Well, the sky's the limit, really. As more and more data become available, there's more and more we can do, as our methods improve. As our computing power improves, there's more and more we can do to really understand the population, its characteristics, how it moves around. So this is going to be an ongoing programme of work for years to come.   MF So Pete, tell us then about the specifics of the consultation. Who is it for and what do we hope to get out of it?   PETE BENTON Well, it's for anybody who would like to respond. We in particular, want to hear from people who use the statistics to get their view on the balance between all that detail that the census gives us once a decade compared with the frequency of having more information every year, and we want to understand people's perspectives on those trade offs, but anybody is welcome to respond to it. And of course, this is just the continuation of a conversation that we've been having for years. We're continually talking to the big stakeholders, the big users of our statistics across government, in local government, in the commercial sector to understand their needs for statistics. So this is a culmination of a conversation that's been going on for years.   MF Okay, so when does the consultation start? And how exactly do people go about taking part?   PB  Well, it'll be an online consultation. It'll start in June and it will end in October.    MF Okay. So the consultation completes in the autumn. Big question - what happens then?   PB So we will take a good look at all those responses we will understand what people have told us and then 12 weeks later, we will put out our response to that consultation summarising what we've heard. Following this, the National Statistician will make recommendations to government based on all of ONS' research and the findings of the consultation to put administrative data at the core of a transformed population and social statistics system, and that recommendation will also consider the future of the census arrangements.   MF  So there you have it, a one in a million opportunity – or more pedantically, one in 59.6 million, given that's the accurate population of England and Wales according to the last census - to share your views on an incredibly important piece of work.   Consultation opens on June 29th and runs through to the end of October. If you'd like to find out more about it and all of our transformation plans for population and migration statistics, you can do so by visiting the ONS website: www.ons.gov.uk  Or you can attend one of the free in person and online consultation events that the ONS has organised in July, details for which you can find on this episode's podcast page, as well as online through our social media channels, and the ONS website.  Thanks to Jen Woolford and Pete Benton for taking us through everything today. And thanks as always to you for listening.   You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all the other major platforms. You can also get more information by following the @ONSfocus feed on Twitter.   I'm Miles Fletcher and from myself, and our producer Steve Milne, thanks for listening.   ENDS 

Technological changes have economic impact. It's not just that technology allows more goods and services to be produced more efficiently and at greater scale. It's also that these changes disrupt previous assumptions about the conduct of human lives, human relationships, and the methods to save money to buy goods and services. A society in which people expect to die around the age of 100, or even older, needs to make different plans than a society in which people expect to die in their 70s.Some politicians, in unguarded moments, have even occasionally expressed a desire for retired people to "hurry up and die", on account of the ballooning costs of pension payments and healthcare costs for the elderly. These politicians worry about the negative consequences of longer lives. In their viewpoint, longer lives would be bad for the economy.But not everyone thinks that way. Indeed, a distinguished professor of economics, from the London Business School, Andrew J Scott, has studied a variety of different future scenarios about the economic consequences of longer lives. He is our guest in this episode.In addition to his role at the London Business School, Andrew is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a consulting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Longevity.His research has been widely published in leading journals in economics and health. His book, "The 100-Year Life", has been published in 15 languages, is an Amazon bestseller and was runner up in both the FT/McKinsey and Japanese Business Book of the Year Awards.Andrew has been an advisor on policy to a range of governments. He is currently on the advisory board of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility, the Cabinet Office Honours Committee (Science and Technology), co-founder of The Longevity Forum, a member of the National Academy of Medicine's International Commission on Health Longevity, and the WEF council on Healthy Ageing and Longevity.Follow-up reading:https://profandrewjscott.com/https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00080-0Topics addressed in this episode include:*) Why Andrew wrote the book "The 100-Year Life" (co-authored with Lynda Gratton)*) Shortcomings of the conventional narrative of "the aging society"*) The profound significance of aging being malleable*) Joint research with David Sinclair (Harvard) and Martin Ellison (Oxford): Economic modelling of the future of healthspan and lifespan*) Four different scenarios: Struldbruggs, Dorian Gray, Peter Pan, and Wolverine*) The multi-trillion dollar economic value of everyone in the USA gaining one additional year of life in good health*) The first and second longevity revolutions*) The virtuous circle around aging research*) Options for lives that are significantly longer even than 100 years*) The ill-preparedness of our social structures for extensions in longevity - and, especially, for the attainment of longevity escape velocity*) The possibility of rapid changes in society's expectations*) The three-dimensional longevity dividend*) Developments in Singapore and the UAE*) Two important political initiatives: supporting the return to the workforce of people who are aged over 50, and paying greater attention to national statistics on expected healthspan*) Themes from Andrew's forthcoming new book "Evergreen"*) Why 57 isn't the new 40: it's the new 57*) Making a friend of your future selfMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

With news headlines proclaiming the UK has ‘narrowly avoided a recession', we decode the ‘r' word and explain why this sometimes misleading term is one the ONS is often cautious to avoid. We get the lowdown on GDP (Gross Domestic Product); discuss whether its time as the yardstick for measuring the success or failure of the world's economies is coming to an end; and hear how the ONS is already looking well ‘Beyond GDP' and introducing broader measures of social wellbeing and the environment to provide us with a more holistic view of how society is faring.  Joining Miles is ONS Director of Economic Statistics, Darren Morgan, Chief Economist, Grant Fitzner; and Director of Public Policy Analysis, Liz McKeown.  Links Latest GDP data Measures of National Well-being Beyond GDP   Transcript  MILES FLETCHER  Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the official podcast of the UK's Office for National Statistics. I'm Miles Fletcher, and this time, we're going to talk about a very famous and long running statistic that's still regarded as the single most important economic indicator of them all. I'm talking of course about GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the expansion or contraction of which is the yardstick against which the success or failure of the world's economies is measured. It's been around a long time, since around the time of the Second World War, in fact, but is its pre-eminence now coming to an end? GDP misses some things out - that which matters, as was once memorably claimed. So we'll be talking about how the ONS has been updating GDP to keep it relevant and developing new complementary measures of economic and social wellbeing that could perhaps, in future, supplant GDP itself. And in the current economic climate, we cannot avoid the “R” word. What exactly is a recession? How much does it actually matter, if it's only a technical one? Is it the difference between economic disaster and salvation? Spoiler alert, it really isn't.   Anyway, we have a panel of top ONS folk to explain it all: Darren Morgan is director of economic statistics production and analysis, Grant Fitzner is Chief Economist and director of macro-economic statistics and analysis, and also with us is Liz McKeown, Director of Public Policy Analysis, who is leading the drive towards these broader measures on social and economic welfare.   Welcome, everyone.   Darren to start with you. You are responsible for the production of the UK's GDP estimates. So let's start by reminding ourselves what precisely it measures, it's basically seeking to put a value on all economic activity over a given period.     DARREN MORGAN  Yeah, so we look at GDP and we measure the economy in three different ways. First of all, we do it via what you call the output approach, and most simply, that's everything that's produced in the economy, and that can be cars rolling off the production line, that can be a lawyer providing advice as a service, and it can be public services as well. So surgeries, GP appointments and so on. So everything we produce in the economy. We also look at measuring the economy, everything that is spent, so that could be you and I in household, spending money in the shops or on leisure activities. It can be businesses spending money on goods and services. And it can also mean the government spending money, so everything we spend as well. And the third way we measure GDP is the income approach, which is basically everything that's earned in the economy. So for us in terms of households that's wages and salaries, for businesses it's profit, for example. So we measure everything we produce, everything we spend and everything we earn, and in principle, they should all add up.    MF  And you're boiling it down then, a vast amount of data flowing into the ONS, boiling it all down to one single indicator.   DM  We do, and we do that by approaching thousands and thousands of businesses asking them about their performance. We speak to thousands of households about their behaviour. And we also use a lot of data already available withing government, so what we call administrative data - data that already exists. And we bring all those different data sources into the building, we look at it and we confront it, and we come up with ultimately, as you suggest, a single number on the growth of the economy.   MF What's changed in the in the collection of data now? How timely a process is this?     DM  So in the UK, we've got one of the timeliest measures of the economy in the world. And we only have one of two countries who produce a monthly measure the economy, so we do it much more quickly, and obviously it is completely different to how we did it say, even 10 or 15 years ago. We collect most of our data now from businesses online. Whereas previously we used to send a questionnaire to them, used to write the questionnaire and they would send it back to us, and that could take a week or weeks to do that. Businesses can fill the form in now sat at their desk online, do it very quickly and it reaches us straightaway.   MF  And you mentioned administrative data as well. So that's coming from other parts of government. What are the main sources there? How is that gathered?   DM  So that's correct. So what we try to do is minimise the burden on businesses and households, so some businesses may have to complete a tax return to HMRC for example. So we are able to use that information and bring it in, so that's one example. Pay As You Earn, people who use pay as you earn systems, will be well aware that we use that in our labour market numbers. But we use lots of different sources that are already available across government, and we reuse them for statistical purposes, like I said, to provide better estimates, because that data tends to be very good, but also to minimise the burden, as I said on households and businesses at the same time.   MF  And what is the coverage, in terms of what's included, how has that evolved in recent years?  DM  So in a way, in terms of what we call the boundary, the economic boundary, that has actually stayed very similar over a long period of time. It is very traditional in terms of the boundary we measure. So, like I said, it's sort of business activities, household activity and government activity. But it is along those lines about how much is produced, how much is spent, how much is earned, but the boundary for the economy has been very similar for 50 years.   MF  Nevertheless, there are some things included in GDP which might surprise some people. For example, in the most recent GDP release we talked about the fall in the number of pupils in classrooms in the last quarter of 2022.  DM  The public services was actually a really key indicator for the number that we published for December, and we saw a fall in the number of GP appointments, a fall in the number of operations, less vaccinations being given because the autumn booster campaign tailed off. And we also saw lower attendance in schools, because in the lead up to Christmas not so many pupils will go into school as we normally see. And the reason why we measure that, as you can imagine we measure teacher salaries, doctor salaries, we measure how much is invested in the health service, how much is invested in schools, and obviously those schools and hospitals buy goods and services. So, it's a really important part of the economy. So of course we measure the goods and services that they produce as well. It's a really important part of the economic measurement for GDP.  MF  And I think I'm going to use it to motivate my children in the mornings as well. When they go off to school I'll be reminding them of their contribution to our economic performance.  DM  They certainly are. So it's a really good way to get them through the school day, Miles.   MF  But there's a serious point underlying this, and there's a bit of a propaganda point for the ONS here as well, as it because we are actually taking real measurements of public sector activity, and it's been said that some countries just make broad assumptions about that activity. What do we do that other countries don't?   DM  You're absolutely right, Miles. And that became most marked during the lockdowns during, the COVID pandemic. So we measured, if I can give schools and education as an example, we actually measured how much education was being provided to pupils during a lockdown, whether that was face-to-face in schools, or whether it was remote learning, or whether unfortunately, in some cases, there was no learning at all. We measured that directly, whereas perhaps some other countries basically measured the number of pupils. So as you can imagine, the number of pupils is the same whether they are getting taught or not. So in the pandemic we showed a sharp fall in education during some of the lock downs, but we've seen a faster recovery in the years that followed. Whereas if you look at other countries, their measurement of education has been far more stable over the most recent years because the numbers of pupils doesn't really change.  MF   They are pretending that the schools were open, when in fact, they weren't. Anyway, that's just part of this enormous data gathering operation, bringing in all this data, and it takes around about six weeks to produce the preliminary estimate, which you say is among the quickest of the estimates, but of course that's only part of the story, isn't it?   DM  That's pretty quick, six weeks, but we do produce an estimate for all three measures, we produce a measurement how much is produced, how much is spent, and how much is earned at that point in time. So we do that, but obviously, we only have so much data at that point. You know, we have quite a lot of data to actually because those surveys are very timely, but not everything.  MF  As a percentage, it's about 40% isn't it?  DM  That's correct. But obviously our data collection doesn't stop at that point. We continue to bring new data in. And that's why we publish the latest estimate, which covers more detail, more granularity, different parts of the economy. And that additional data that's brought in allows us to do that at a later stage.   MF  You have a couple more months to produce that one, and that's based on pretty much all of the data we're going to get.   DM  Yeah, it's over 90% of that stage, it's about 90%. So yes, we have between the first estimate and the second estimate, we do get a lot more data in.  MF  And therein lies, what some people might say is one of the weaknesses of GDP, and particularly when making quick assumptions about the economy. There's a trade-off here isn't there, about wanting to know broadly where the economy is going, and making really, really hard and fast assumptions about what's happening. And therein lies the whole issue of revisions, revising GDP. Now, it's important for everyone to understand that when the ONS revises GDP, it's not correcting its mistakes is it.  DM  What you're describing there Miles is a classic tension in statistical production. So we could say to everybody, our users, no, we're not going to publish anything until we get all that data, all that 90% of data. But to do that, you're going to have to wait about 80 days. Or what we could do is drag an earlier estimate based on less data, but still not a really good estimate, but you could have that 40 days quicker, 50 days quicker. So you know, there's that tension between timeliness and quality. And I think the way we do it, I think it's brilliant. We published two estimates initially, and that's for the quarter. The one that's a bit quicker based on less data, and the one later based on more data content. But what we do to help our users is we have a really detailed revisions analysis between those estimates, so people can look and judge typically, how often and how much is that data revised when we publish. So they have the full information in front of them to make judgments if they have to. And I think we strike the right balance taking that approach.   MF  What is the ONS' track record in doing this? Because have there been occasions perhaps, as has been suggested, sometimes that the early data can be misleading, and in fact, the economy might be heading in the opposite direction.   DM  So if you're looking at revisions analysis, it's pretty good, you know, within the first estimate, and that second estimate, and so revisions are typically very small, and importantly, unbiased, they're equally likely to be a revision up or a revision down, and that's really, really important. I think when a real spotlight is shone on revisions, that's when the economy is around zero, you know if you have a 0.1 revision, which is a small revision if your economy is going along at 0.8, 0.7%. You know, whether it's 0.7, 0.6 and so on, people go ‘Ah, so what?'. But if the economy is going around zero, or 0.1 or –0.1, that 0.1 revision can change the sign, and people get very excited about that. But actually, it's a 0.1 revision, and that's when the spotlight is really, like I said, is shone on the revisions performance  MF  As it was in our most recent estimate of quarterly GDP, the final quarter of 2022 when there was a big fat zero in terms of growth. Now, that led to headlines in some very respectable media organisations that went “UK narrowly avoided recession”. Well, did we?  DM  So we did technically yes, we did. Absolutely. Because it wasn't negative. That was our Q3 estimate of the economy was for a four, so if Q4 fell for economic growth, a technical recession, which is widely recognised as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Yes, we would have been in a technical recession. But I think you've just highlighted how it makes sense to look more broadly at the economy because whether it was 0, or –0.1, 0.1, how different really was the economy at that point in time? I would say the economy was broadly flat.  MF  Because if you're beholden to this idea of a technical recession, a couple of months down the line we might say hang on, our better estimate based on 95% of the data says actually it was just slightly down, and therefore the headline writers say, “Oh, we were in recession after all.”  DM  Exactly. I think that just highlights, again, being sensible in terms of how you look at the economy overall, because really the economy, if it's a 0.1 revision ,if that's what happens in it in a few weeks time, is the economy fundamentally different to what it is at that moment? I would suggest not, but you're right, I would imagine that it would get splashed that the UK is now in recession, and coverage will be significant because of that.   MF  And it's fair to say that in the past these technical recessions, there was a double-dip recession wasn't there about 10 years ago, that made a lot of headlines at the time. It's not in the figures anymore.   DM  No, it's not. It's been revised and that period of our economic history when we were around that flat period for the economy. So the revisions have been relatively small in that period, but you're right, we were in recession and because we had revisions from later data, we no longer were. And as you suggested people got very excited about that. But really, Miles, the economy was in exactly the same position as it was in our first estimate.   MF  So a strong message there listeners, when you hear people talk about a technical recession, bear in mind, that may not be what it sounds like. In fact, it probably almost certainly isn't.  DM  Good advice, Miles.   MF   Grant, to bring you in on this then, from an economist's perspective, it's fair to say then that in fact, there's no definition of a recession that's really official or formally accepted anywhere. It's certainly not something that the ONS talks about.   GRANT FITZNER  No, I mean, ultimately, it's a matter of judgement. And of course, economists spend a lot of time arguing about these things. In fact, it was so bad in the US that academic economists, as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research set up a committee to discuss and agree on when business cycles were, well when recessions started and when they ended, so that when they were comparing their research they were all working off a common framework. Now, that sounds great, but the problem of course is with this being academics, they looked at a wide range of data, and they typically took several years after a recession had occurred before they would put definitive data out of it. Now, that's fine if you're publishing economic history, but if you're a journalist or indeed if you're working at the Office for National Statistics and you want to have an idea of what's going on now, you need something that's a bit closer to real time, and that does, as Darren said, involve a degree of judgement. But I think it's fair to say that the common sense understanding of a recession is a prolonged and significant downturn in economic activity. So not just one or two quarters, and not just a 0.1, but actually something a bit more substantial, as indeed we've seen in the 70s and the 80s, and of course, in the global financial crisis that kicked off in 2008. So they typically last for a while, and they do have quite a significant impact on the economy, households and business.   MF  In fact, that's a lot more serious isn't it, than the definition that's used as a sort of working rule of thumb, which is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. In fact the origins of that are very murky, really, nobody actually seems to know precisely where it came from. One of President Nixon's speech writers seems to be the main suspect.   GF  Well, possibly, but it has been more widely used. I think journalists need something quick and simple to understand, and I guess this meets the bill. But imagine if you had a –0.1 in one quarter and then a –0.1 in the next, and then they were subsequently revised away, I don't think anyone would seriously call that a recession. And just the point about the length as well, if you look at the 70s, 80s, or 90s, recessions typically last about three years. That's how long it took for the level of economic activity to get back to the pre-recession levels, and indeed for the global financial crisis that kicked off in 2008, it took four and a half years before growth was back at pre-recession levels, so an incredibly long time. And I think just looking at the pandemic and the impact that that had in 2020, it's a very different set of events. We had two negative quarters and then the economy started to recover after of course, a very large fall. Now that's unusual. And of course that was because of this shock of the pandemic and lockdowns. Whereas typically, these things take quite a bit longer to kind of work their way through the system.   MF  And if you look at the path of GDP on the time-series graphic on the ONS website, it really goes off a ski slope doesn't it, really quite dramatically as the pandemic starts and then kind of sharply recovers, and then it's kind of clawing its way back now.   GF  That's right. And so things are often slower than we may be used to in recent years. And to give you an example of that, at the moment, we have the Bank of England raising rates quite aggressively so interest rates have gone up, mortgages have gone up, businesses are facing higher costs of borrowing, but the labour market still looks pretty robust. Now historically, if you look at past recessions, there's always a bit of a lag between, for example, central bank tightening or some sort of supply shock and for that to work its way through in terms of employment, business, profitability, and so forth. So these things often take longer than people expect. Now, I'm not saying of course, that that means we're in a prolonged economic downturn. I mean forecasters differ as to how severe and how long the current period of economic weakness is likely to be and indeed, people disagree on whether we may even enter recession this year. It's that close.   MF  But we'll know if we're in a significant downturn, a genuine recession or whatever label we want to apply, when it happens, but at the moment we seem to be in sort of somewhere in between. Disappointing though that might be for headline writers.  GF  And the sort of things that you would typically look at would be more businesses going out of business, so business liquidations, weak retail spending, which of course we have seen, driven by the big increase in the cost of living over the past six months, and significant increases in the level of unemployment. Those are three of the things that you would typically look at. Possibly also weaker industrial production is often associated with recessions as well.   MF  So does that suggest then, talking about the action being in those other indicators, does that period for the economy, perhaps an economy on the cusp of growth and contraction, does that highlight one of the major limitations of GDP as a measure? How seriously do economists regard it now? Does it remain that big, totemic bellwether of economic success or failure?   GF  Well it is a broad and pretty comprehensive measure, so it does include income, expenditure and output. So a lot of what you would typically consider economic activity, but of course it doesn't cover everything. It doesn't cover anything produced in households, at the moment it doesn't properly capture what's going on in the natural environment. So it's certainly not broad enough to cover every kind of activity that produces something of value. And it typically focuses on things that can be measured or quantified, or have a value ascribed to them. So the market sector is the largest part of the economy that we measure through gross domestic product, because there's also the non-market sector, public sector charities, etc. They are a bit harder to measure. One of the interesting differences between the UK approach and some other countries is that we spent quite a bit of time trying to measure not just how much we spend on health and education, but as Darren said, what actual activity, what outputs, are we getting from that investment?   MF  Yeah, I mentioned at the top of the podcast, there's this famous quote from Robert Kennedy, of course, famously US Attorney General and then presidential candidate. He actually said the problem with GDP is it does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It doesn't include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials, etcetera, etcetera. It seems to me that the demand then for more holistic measures of well-being or progress, in fact goes well beyond economics, but is there more that economics can contribute? And what is the ONS doing towards that?   GF  Yes, there is more that we can do. And indeed, we have been doing that. So we've created a series of what we call satellite accounts, which measure either different parts of the economy or activity, or indeed measure things that are currently outside of what we call the national accounts. So for example, we've been publishing at the ONS for quite some time now an annual series of natural capital accounts, which tried to convey you what's been produced out there in the environment. Clean air, for example, is an output of trees and vegetation and parks. We try and put estimates around those. Now, of course, there's some challenging methodological issues about how you measure some of these things, but I think we've had quite some success in actually putting some values around those. And at the international level, the current system of national accounts was devised back in 2010, there's quite a lively, if indeed statisticians can have a lively debate, around what the next system of national accounts will look like, which is due to come in 2025. And one of those very issues is do we start to bring the environment more into those measurements.  MF  So not quite the beauty of our poetry but certainly the landscape, the value of our environment.   GF  Exactly. And I suppose the other misconception about GDP is people often see it as a measure of well-being. It was never really designed to play that role. It's a measure of economic activity. Now, of course, there's a clear link between economic activity, prosperity, and well-being, but they're not the same concept.   MF   So in order to be more inclusive, and to fully reflect activity in its broadest sense, we're having to go much further than that. And a bold initiative in that direction, started more than a decade ago now, was the national well-being programme launched by the then Prime Minister David Cameron.   Liz McKeown, the National well-being programme was, it was not taken wholly seriously. I recall at the time it was dubbed as Cameron's Happiness Index, and the idea that we could dump GDP and inflation and so forth was taken with some mirth. Ten years on, how far have we come to developing alternative measures like that, and how seriously have they been taken?  LIZ MCKEOWN  I think we've come a long way, but perhaps it's worth us looking back to those days of 2010 and what we did then, we wanted to know what matters most to people. And we went out and asked them and we had over 34,000 responses to that debate. And that allowed us to start measuring well-being for the first time as a national statistical Institute, that debate, understanding what really mattered to the public, getting those responses allowed us to develop 10 domains of well-being. These are the things that people were saying really mattered to how they felt as individuals, as a community, and you know, ultimately as a nation. And the domains that we developed there were personal well-being, they were our relationships, our health, what we do, where we live, our personal finances, our education and skills, the economy, governance, and the environment. And under those 10 domains, we developed a number of measures, both objective and subjective, which allowed us to begin to get to that question of how are we doing as the UK in a more holistic way than economic measures can do alone.   MF  And what story has that told over the years? How were we doing? How are we doing?   LM  I think it opens a new lens and allows us to think about that quite differently. Perhaps I could take an example of how we thought about well-being during the pandemic, there we were wanting to understand what's the impact of lockdowns more broadly, and we could use wellbeing measures to help us understand that. We could see how personal well-being and levels of loneliness were, you know, really negatively impacted during the lockdown, and then we could see the improvements as we came out of them. We could see how that differed by how men and women were doing. We saw during the pandemic women's well-being falling below men's for the first time, and so we could understand a different dimension of how society was reacting to one of the big issues of our time.   MF  And when we ask people how happy they are, they tend to give quite a positive response, don't they?   LM  Well, I think it's important to say that wellbeing goes beyond just asking people how happy they are. So personal well-being does look at people's happiness, it looks at their levels of anxiety, and it looks at how satisfied they are with their life and how worthwhile they think the things in their life are. But the broader concept of wellbeing is understanding how people are doing across these domains that I mentioned earlier.   MF  Now this isn't just suddenly what's been going on in the UK, there's something of a global movement to broaden out our approach to measuring not just personal well-being, but economic well-being as well. And an important part of that is the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. And put quite simply, it's a global initiative to find out if the world is becoming a better place, and to set targets and then policies from that.  LM  Yeah, absolutely Miles. And I think it reflects doesn't it that people do want to understand progress in that multi-dimensional way. They want to understand not just how we're doing economically, but actually what the impact on our environment is, what the impact on our society is. And those indicator-based approaches, be they the well-being measures that we've developed here in the UK, be they the Sustainable Development Goals, they're allowing us to take that broader check on progress or sort of multi-dimensional check on progress and allows us to see things that we couldn't see if we were only looking at the core economic statistics that you were discussing with colleagues earlier.   MF  Now on GDP day when the ONS produces its quarterly estimates of economic performance in that traditional sense that we talked about with Darren, there are two important publications that do get slightly overlooked on the day but are well worth highlighting now. And the first of those is one entitled quality of life in the UK. Sounds intriguing. Tell us about that.   LM  These two publications we added to the mix on GDP day last year, and why did we do that? I think it really wanted to reflect how important it is that we look at progress in that multi-dimensional way that I was talking about earlier. That we give people the chance to see not just what the latest economic data is telling us, but we are also looking at how life is going for people in the UK, and that's where the quality of life in the UK publication comes in.  MF  Break down the elements for that if you would, tell us what sort of narrative it's providing at the moment about our quality of life.   LM  Yeah, so this is a publication that every quarter looks across those 10 domains of national well-being, personal well-being, relationships, health what we do where we live personal finance, economy, education skills governance in the environment. It looks at the measures we have under those domains and says well, what news have we got from the last quarter. And I won't go through all that here, I encourage you to go and have a read of it, it makes interesting reading. But for example, on the personal well-being side, we have seen in the last quarter a drop in the percentage of adults who've seen very high levels of life satisfaction and happiness. There's been a decrease in that. So that's one to watch, and one to keep an eye out for. But the publication goes across the 10 domains and yeah, as I said Miles, well worth a read   MF  An interesting alternative view as well at a time when the classic economic data was showing a big zero reading. In fact, there's another aspect in which an awful lot is going on, and obviously a downward trend there in some respects, at least.   LM  Absolutely. And users are telling us that they want to understand what's going on across the country in a more holistic sense and understand a bit more about our societal measures, but also about our environmental measures. And I guess that sort of takes us on to the other publication that we put out on GDP day on climate change insights. And if you take all those three publications as a whole, so the quarterly GDP figures, the quality of life in the UK and the climate change insights publication, you're basically allowing the public policymakers to look and understand, okay, what's the latest developments in the economy? What's the latest developments in society and people's well-being and what's the latest environmental developments? And it's allowing us to begin to answer that question, how is the UK doing in a much more holistic way than we've been able to before.  MF  So I guess what I'm taking away from this lightning tour of a fascinating and extremely diverse environment, is that when you see headlines saying the economy is neither growing nor contracting, there's a much, much bigger story out there and there's a much bigger story to be learned by looking at the ONS data.   LM  That's exactly right. And we're not standing still either as an office as well. We want to make sure that what we're measuring is still what matters most to people. As I said, that's how we started the well-being programme in the first place by going out to the nation and asking them what matters most. That was over a decade ago, and obviously, a lot has changed over the last 10 years. So it felt like a good time to take that step back and think, are we still measuring the best things to measure in our well-being programme, and the National Statistician kicked off a review of those measures back in October. So we're working through that at the moment and in the spring we'll be presenting some recommendations for how we can do this even better in the future.   MF   And where do you think is going to lead? Do you think GDP might be toppled off its perch and we'll be able to produce one big comprehensive indicator that would bring in all that economic activity as well? Is that Is that where we're headed?   LM  I think GDP will always be an influential statistic. As a measure of the productive economy there are huge strengths to it. And strengths are continuing to increase as it becomes, as I think Darren mentioned earlier, more timely, better quality. So GDP is important and will remain important for ONS. But we also know that looking at progress more broadly than GDP is more important than ever to members of the public who want to understand how we're doing, but also to policymakers who are looking at future policies and providing statistics and insights that help both the public and policymakers to make the best possible decisions. That is what we are, as a national statistical institute all, about. So GDP, important, but actually having a full range of data and statistics and insights that go beyond that. That's where the future is.  MF  Darren, as the person responsible for producing GDP, that's a challenge for the future then?  DARREN MORGAN  That's right and I think Liz summed it up really well. I think GDP is important, but it's not everything.   MF   Well thanks very much to all our guests for a fascinating discussion there, and we'll put links to some of the ONS publications we discussed in the programme notes for further reading.   I'm Miles Fletcher. And thanks for listening to Statistically Speaking. You can subscribe to new episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and all the other major podcast platforms. With thanks to our producer Steve Milne, it's time to say, until next time, goodbye. 

The UK's Office for National Statistics recently published some dramatically incorrect data - all because of a spreadsheet slip-up. But that's just the most recent in a long list of times when spreadsheets have gone wrong, often with costly consequences Stand-up mathematician Matt Parker takes us through a short history of spreadsheet mistakes.

Find out more about this event on our website: https://bit.ly/3FRtNpD We live in a world where business, Government and media extol the virtues of being data led, of using and exploiting data, of regarding data, in a slightly imperfect analogy, as the new oil. Ed Humpherson, head of the UK's Office for Statistics Regulation, is in the front line of these debates. He focuses on how the UK Government collects and presents statistics to serve the public good. He will argue that there are different motivations that lead people to place data at the heart of discourse. They include the weaponisation of data, in which data are used as a resource in debate, isolated factoids dropped in as a rhetorical device; data as a programmatic comfort blanket – data which confer an illusion of control and delivery mastery; and data as knowledge and learning, where data are used to find out about the world, in all its messiness, and appreciate the limitations and caveats. His talk will bring out how to thrive in a world of data everywhere. Speaker: Ed Humpherson is Director General for Regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, and head of its Office for Statistics Regulation. He is responsible for the development and implementation of the UK's Code of Practice for Statistics; for assessing compliance with this Code by Government departments and the Office for National Statistics; and highlighting concerns about the misuse of statistics in public debate. Between July 2009 and December 2014, Ed was a Board Member and Executive Leader for Economic Affairs at the National Audit Office. This role included responsibility for the overall strategic direction of NAO's work on economic affairs. Amongst other previous responsibilities, Ed oversaw the NAO's response to the 2007-09 financial crisis. Ed is also Vice Chair of the charity Motability; a trustee of Pro Bono Economics; a trustee of the Regulatory Policy Institute; and co-chair of the Royal Society's data community of practice. Ed is a chartered accountant and was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he obtained a first-class MA honours degree in Politics and Economic History.

The number of Irish people in Britain has dropped by 20% - the biggest drop of any nationality - according to the latest statistics from the UK's Office for National Statistics What are the reasons for this drop? Speaking to Ciara this morning was Finn McRedmond, Irish Times Columnist living in London.

The number of Irish people in Britain has dropped by 20% - the biggest drop of any nationality - according to the latest statistics from the UK's Office for National Statistics What are the reasons for this drop? Speaking to Ciara this morning was Finn McRedmond, Irish Times Columnist living in London.

Alison Oldfield and Katlyn Wild from our education team discuss what's next for the UK's Office for Students (OfS) and what priorities the OfS has set for the next academic year and beyond in its Annual Report and Strategy 2022 to 2025.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (September 2, 2022) – Comprised of more than four hundred professional staff and faculty across more than two dozen units, the University of Kentucky Office for Student Success is committed to engaging students from the time of early college outreach to graduation and beyond. With programs ranging from the Center for Academic Resources and Enrichment Service (CARES), the Center for Support and Intervention, Campus Recreation, the Disability Resource Center, the Stuckert Career Center, Violence Intervention and Prevention, the Office of LGBTQ* Resources, University Admissions and beyond, the Office for Student Success facilitates a broad range of programs and resources designed to assist with student development and well-being in some of the most critical areas of the university experience. Dr. Kirsten Turner is UK's Vice President for Student Success and chief student affairs officer. A leader with a long tenure at the University of Kentucky, she transitioned to her current position after serving in multiple associate provost roles and as an architect of the institution's strategies to improve retention and graduation rates. On this episode of ‘Behind the Blue', Turner talks about the overall goals for the Office for Student Success, the challenges in scaling services to match ever-growing enrollment numbers, new services like Integrated Success Coaches that assist students in all areas of wellness and more. "Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university. For questions or comments about this or any other episode of "Behind the Blue," email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show's blog page. sTo discover what's wildly possible at the University of Kentucky, click here.

The UK's Office of Communications reports, young adults spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television. We examine how well Netflix's gaming push is working out, and we check out the story of Nathan Copeland who has spent the past 7 plus years with a brain computer interface, the longest on record.Starring Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Scott Johnson, Roger Chang, Joe.Link to the Show Notes. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/dtns.

每日英語跟讀 Ep.K398: Omicron less likely to cause long COVID — UK study   The Omicron variant of coronavirus is less likely to cause long COVID than previous variants, according to the first peer-reviewed study of its kind from the UK. 英國一項研究顯示，冠狀病毒之Omicron變異株跟之前的變種相比，較不易導致「長新冠」後遺症。這是首件經同儕審查的此類研究。 Researchers at King's College London, using data from the ZOE COVID Symptom study app, found the odds of developing long COVID after infection were 20 percent to 50 percent lower during the Omicron wave in the UK compared to Delta. The figure varied depending on the patient's age and the timing of their last vaccination. 倫敦大學國王學院研究人員分析應用程式「ZOE新型冠狀病毒疾病症狀研究」之資料，發現與Delta變異株相比，在英國這波Omicron疫情期間，感染後發生COVID後遺症的機率低了百分之二十至百分之五十，數字因患者之年齡及上一次接種疫苗的時間而異。 Long COVID, which includes prolonged symptoms ranging from fatigue to “brain fog,” can be debilitating and continue for weeks or months. It is increasingly being recognized as a public health problem, and researchers have been racing to find out if Omicron presents as big a risk of long COVID as previously dominant variants. COVID後遺症包括從疲倦到「腦霧」的長期症狀，可使人虛弱，並持續數週或數月。它越來越被認為是公共衛生問題，研究人員一直在努力找出Omicron的後遺症風險是否跟先前的主要變異株一樣高。 The study from King's is believed to be the first academic research to show Omicron does not present as great a risk of long COVID, but that does not mean long COVID patient numbers are dropping, the team said. 國王學院研究小組表示，此研究據信為第一項表明Omicron的COVID後遺症風險並不如此高的學術研究，但這不表示COVID後遺症患者的人數正在下降。 While the risk of long COVID was lower during Omicron, more people were infected, so the absolute number now suffering is higher. 雖然感染Omicron後導致COVID後遺症的風險較低，但因Omicron的感染人數更多，所以現在苦於此後遺症的絕對人數更高。 “It's good news, but please don't decommission any of your long COVID services,” lead researcher Dr Claire Steves told Reuters, appealing to health-service providers. 「這是個好消息，但請不要停止對COVID後遺症的任何治療」，研究計畫主持人克萊兒‧史帝芙斯博士在接受路透社訪問時，對醫療業提出此呼籲。 The UK's Office for National Statistics said in May that 438,000 people in the country have long COVID after Omicron infection, representing 24 percent of all long COVID patients. 英國國家統計局在五月表示，有四十三萬八千人在感染Omicron後患有COVID後遺症，佔英國所有COVID後遺症患者的百分之二十四。 It also said the risk of lingering symptoms after Omicron was lower than with Delta, but only for double-vaccinated people. It found no statistical difference for those who were triple vaccinated. 它還表示，感染Omicron後有持續症狀的風險低於感染Delta，但這只是對接種兩劑疫苗的人而言，而接種三劑疫苗的人在統計上並無差異。 In the King's research, 4.5 percent of the 56,003 people studied during Omicron's peak, December 2021-March 2022, reported long COVID. That compared to 10.8 percent of 41,361 people during the Delta wave, June-November 2021. It did not compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. 國王學院在二○二一年十二月至二○二二年三月Omicron疫情高峰期間所研究的五萬六千零三人中，有百分之四點五的人表示有COVID後遺症。而在二○二一年六月至十一月的Delta變異株疫情期間所研究的四萬一千三百六十一人，有COVID後遺症的比例則為百分之十點八。此研究並未對疫苗接種者及未接種者做比較。 While the study — published in The Lancet journal on Thursday last week — compared Delta and Omicron, Dr Steves said previous work had showed no substantial difference in long COVID risk between other variants.More work was needed to establish why Omicron may have a lower long COVID risk, the team added. 雖然這項上週四發表於《刺胳針》期刊的研究比較了Delta及Omicron變異株的情況，但史帝芙斯博士表示，先前的研究顯示，其他變異株之間的COVID後遺症風險並無實質差異。 該研究小組補充說，Omicron的COVID後遺症風險可能較低之原因，需要做更多研究才能確定。Source article: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/archives/2022/06/28/2003780674

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 21, 2022) – The Office of LGBTQ* Resources is the University of Kentucky's central hub for accessing information, groups and services related to diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. Located in the Dinkle Mas Suite in the Gatton Student Center, the resource center is a campus-wide office that works to make sure that our community is a welcoming, safe and supportive place for all students, faculty, staff and alumni. On May 9th, 2022, J'Lissabeth Faughn (she, her, hers) assumed the role of director of UK's Office of LGBTQ* Resources, a part of the Office for Student Success. An experienced leader with a passion for social justice and student development, Faughn brings a rich history of advocacy and community building from similar roles in California, Iowa and Missouri. She holds a graduate degree in higher education and social justice from Iowa State University and an undergraduate degree from Murray State University. On this episode of ‘Behind the Blue', Faughn talks about how her journey of providing support to students led her to the University of Kentucky, her plans to continue the Resource Center's legacy of creating a safe, open environment for all, and more. "Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university. For questions or comments about this or any other episode of "Behind the Blue," email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show's blog page. To discover what's wildly possible at the University of Kentucky, click here.

The Omicron variant of coronavirus is less likely to cause long COVID than previous variants, according to the first peer-reviewed study of its kind from the United Kingdom. Researchers at King's College London, using data from the ZOE COVID Symptom study app, found the odds of developing long COVID after infection were 20% to 50% lower during the Omicron wave in the UK compared to Delta. The figure varied depending on the patient's age and the timing of their last vaccination. Long COVID, which includes prolonged symptoms ranging from fatigue to 'brain fog', can be debilitating and continue for weeks or months. It is increasingly being recognised as a public health problem, and researchers have been racing to find out if Omicron presents as big a risk of long COVID as previously dominant variants. The study from King's is believed to be the first academic research to show Omicron does not present as great a risk of long COVID, but that does not mean long COVID patient numbers are dropping, the team said. While the risk of long COVID was lower during Omicron, more people were infected, so the absolute number now suffering is higher. "It's good news, but please don't decommission any of your long COVID services," lead researcher Dr Claire Steves told Reuters, appealing to health-service providers. The UK's Office for National Statistics said in May that 438,000 people in the country have long COVID after Omicron infection, representing 24% of all long COVID patients. It also said the risk of lingering symptoms after Omicron was lower than with Delta, but only for double-vaccinated people. It found no statistical difference for those who were triple vaccinated. In the King's research, 4.5% of the 56,003 people studied during Omicron's peak, December 2021-March 2022, reported long COVID. That compared to 10.8% of 41,361 people during the Delta wave, June-November 2021. It did not compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. While the study – published in The Lancet journal on Thursday – compared Delta and Omicron, Dr Steves said previous work had showed no substantial difference in long COVID risk between other variants. More work was needed to establish why Omicron may have a lower long COVID risk, the team added. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aziz-mustaphi/message

PETROL PRICES REACH NEW RECORDAverage petrol and diesel prices have increased, on a daily basis over the last week, to new heights. Consumer groups, as well as those of us who use a car, have called on the Government to do something to help in this extraordinary situation. To read more, click the Autocar story here. The UK is not alone in being hurt by fuel price rises, the French Government are aiding those who have to travel far due to work or to get to work. For more on this, click The Connexion article link here. SCOTLAND TO ‘DISCOURAGE CAR USE'Plans to be unveiled this week, from the governing SNP and Scottish Greens, on the transport side of their net-zero aims will be focused on discouraging car use. Being considered are such actions as charging drivers per mile, only allowing investment in road infrastructure if it meets very tight criteria and encouraging active travel. Click here for the MSM link explaining more. VOLVO ELECTRIC TIPPERS NOW IN UKThe first electric tipper trucks, in the UK, are already working for Fox Group to work locally from their Leyland base. They each have a 93 mile range, are plated to 27 tonnes and use two electric motors with a two-speed gearbox. Click this Move Electric link to learn more. FRANCE APPROVES ALLEGED SUPER-PRECISE SPEED CAMERASFrance has approved the use of supposedly super-accurate speed cameras that remove the need to allow a percentage of speed for error. After testing the company who make the cameras unsurprisingly hailed that they're 100% perfect. Equally unsurprising, motoring groups in France have not reacted well to this. Click on The Connexion link here for more. APPLE REVEALS NEW CAR PLAYApple, at their recent developer conference, revealed their new Apple CarPlay, to much oohing and aahhhing by many. In their presentation they showed what a car with it fitted could look like. They also announced several car companies could use the system, This version goes deeper and allows Apple more access to the car's systems outside the infotainment screen. For more about this, click the Motoring Research article here. JLR TO USE WHAT3WORDS NAVIGATIONJaguar Land Rover will utilise what3words navigation which enables some very misleading and silly reporting. what3words is not as accurate as the developers like to make out, added on to of which JLR will be paying for the privilege of using their “proprietary” system. To learn more about JLR's move, click ThisIsMoney article link here. To learn more about the issues with what3words, click this Cybergibbons article link here. If that isn't enough, click the second here. WESTFIELD IN RECEIVERSHIPThe UK kit car manufacturer, located in the West Midlands, has entered receivership after 39 years. Originally aping the Caterham Seven, so closely that it ended up losing a court case, they moved onto more outlandish versions. To read more, click here for the Hagerty article covering the history of this car maker. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-NEW MOTORSPORT SERIES ANNOUNCEDMotorsport UK, the governing body for motorsport in the UK, has announced a new series which it hopes will attract more to the racing. The StreetCar series is all about letting you use your daily driver across 12 series organised by participating clubs. You can pick from Autotest, Trials and Rallying, selecting how much you wish to get involved. To learn more, including all the entry criteria, click the Hagerty article link here. NEW NEW CAR NEWS:Plasan WIlder - Plasan has revealed their latest military vehicle, which has been designed by friend of the show Nir Kahn. This is a vehicle for up to four personnel, with a central driver seating position. The footprint is small, about the same as a Jeep Wrangler, yet offers a great deal of protection to occupants and flexibility to those using it. To read more, whilst Andrew waits for the civilian version to test on the family, click here for the Autocar article. TO watch it in action click the Plasan YouTube video link here. Porsche 928 by Nardone Automotive - Nardone Automotive has revealed a modern interpretation of the original Porsche 928 with their restored and it looks tremendous. The exterior has been tweaked, with the use of composite materials allowing for some interesting emphasis of certain aspects of the design. No confirmation of prices, expect it to be “if you have to ask you cannot afford it” as well as no stated production date. For more information, including stunning pictures, click the EVO link here. LUNCHTIME READ: THE SURGE (I)This week we take another article from Design Field Trip, this time about the Renault Mégane Mk2. The article explains the importance of it and how it fitted in with the overarching design work of Renault. To read this fascinating insight, click the link here. LIST OF THE WEEK: 10 STRANGE SEATING ARRANGEMENTSMajor Gav has compiled a list of his Top 10 odd seating arrangements. Gone is the two up front with three in the back layout, these all play around with that format. Click the link to the Hagerty article and then let the chaps know if you agree with the selection. AND FINALLY: SCULPTING CARSJonny Ambrose is an artist who sculpts cars in a wide variety of materials and styles. Except he always has some wood somewhere within his work. Click the Hagerty link here to read about and see his stunning work.

FOLLOW UP: EU ADVISOR APPROVES PURSUING DEFEAT DEVICE DAMAGES CLAIMSAn EU court advisor has stated that owners of vehicles fitted with defeat devices should be allowed to pursue damages. This is not a final ruling but very rarely do the judges not follow such advice. This case is against Mercedes-Benz. If this is ruled upon, it will be up to individual countries to calculate damages that align with loss and damages caused by such devices. For more, click the Automotive News story here. NEW CAR REGISTRATION FIGURES MAY 2022The weakest May, in three decades outside of 2020's lockdown situation, meant that there was a 20.6% drop in registrations. Supply chain issues, including Covid lockdowns and the war in Ukraine are all contributing factors. You can learn more by clicking the SMMT link here. MERCEDES TO RECALL 1M CARS Mercedes-Benz is recalling nearly one million cars that could have faulty brakes. Owners of some R-Class, ML and GL models, built between 2004 and 2015, are being advised not to drive their cars until they have been inspected. To read more, click here for the Autocar article link. HMRC NOT KEEPING PACE WITH ENERGY PRICE RISESHMRC has now brought in their new mileage rates, which company car drivers can claim, however they do not match the rise in energy prices. They, in fact, do not rise at all, unlike petrol and diesel rates. This has caused much frustration from those who may well be out of pocket as prices continue to rise. More can be read on this, just click here for the Autocar article. FUEL PRICE SURGE IN MAYPetrol and diesel prices surged in May, rising on average 10p per litre. The war in Ukraine is being blamed for the 17% increase in wholesale costs. For more, click this Autocar article link. CARZAM CLOSES DIGITAL DOORSCarzam, one of the new breed of online only car purchasing sites has gone into voluntary receivership. Unlike Cazoo and Cinch, this entity was created by people from within the car retail industry and therefore thought of as one of the better prospects. For more on this story, click the Car Dealership Magazine link here. MERCEDES DITCHES MOST B-CLASS VARIANTSPrior to the facelift of the B-Class, later this year, Mercedes-Benz has cut all but two model options from the range. Only the 200 and 200d, a petrol and diesel respectively, versions will still be available to buy. Trim levels are also, well, trimmed down to now only give four options. More can be found out about this by clicking here for the Autocar link. FORD CUTTING FOCUS PRODUCTIONIn a move that likely indicates the demise of the Focus mode according to somel, the Saarlouis plant in Germany will reduce production of the model at the end of August. Ford has been vocal about prioritising more profitable models, therefore this does imply that the Puma is more favoured by management. To read more, click here for the Autocar article. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-WRC: RALLY ITALYSardinia once again proved to be very tough, with an unlikely winner in the form of Tanak, who has shown no hint of his talent nor an appearance of being a leader this season, until now. He drove with purpose and intelligence to bring home a win for himself and Hyundai. Second was Criag Breen in the M-Sport Puma and Sordo rounding out the podium for Hyundai with another impressive drive. Championship leader Rovanperä was fifth, whilst Evans had a rally to forget, or is that a season to forget? For a review of the event, click the DirtFish article here. For the DirtFish What We Learned article, click this link. For the Colin Clark Driver Ratings article, click here for the link. DESIGNERS MOOD BOARD: MELVILLE LEAVES MCLARENRob Melville, McLaren's design director, has announced he will step down from his role. He is credited with giving McLaren their distinctive style. There is no indication of who will replace him yet. For more, click here for the EVO article. NEW NEW CAR NEWS:Hyundai i30N Drive-N - A very limited run, of just 75 examples coming to our shores, plus improved interior and design cues along with a £1535 premium on the “normal” i30N marks this out. Mechanically it stays the same. For more info, click this EVO link here. Mercedes-AMG One - The much anticipated mega Mercedes-AMG hypercar has now been revealed. Power comes from a combination of the F1 engine, a V6, being mated to four electric motors, to produce 1049bhp. Only 275 examples are being built, with them all snapped up already at £2.2 million. To read more about this car, click the Autocar link here. LUNCHTIME READ: MERCEDES-AMG ONE OR NOTHINGMichael Banovsky gives us his take on the Mercedes-AMG, well that and Mercedes the company. As ever, very enjoyable read, click here for the Speedster News article. LIST OF THE WEEK: 10 CARS THAT MASTERED AERODYNAMICSHagerty has a list, thanks to Antony Ingram, of some of the most aero efficient vehicles sold, through history. Run through the list, and see if you would pick the same as Andrew. Don't forget to tell the podcast Twitter account your choice! Click here for the list's link. AND FINALLY: US CAR SO BAD A DICTATOR SAID NOSaddam Hussein was so disappointed by the quality of specially-built 1981 Chevrolet Malibus, that he cancelled the second part of the deal with GM, meaning 12,500 cars did not end up in Iraq. How bad was US car quality at that time? Shockingly so, it would appear. Click here for The Drive article explaining how this all happened.

Super short this week as Andrew was plagued by microphone issues. As a result, there are many more stories here in the notes than were covered in the show.FOLLOW UP: VW SETTLE UK CONSUMER LITIGATIONVolkswagen has agreed to pay UK consumers £193 million in compensation for fitting defeat devices to their diesel cars. Around 70,000 people will benefit from this payment. To read more, click here for the Automotive Management article. FOLLOW UP: STELLANTIS REACH PLEA DEAL OVER EMISSIONS PROBEStellantis, via their FCA unit, has reached a plea deal with the US Justice Department over a probe into emissions from their vehicles. FCA has pleaded guilty and will pay in the region of $300 million. Three FCA employees are also to be charged. More on this story can be found by clicking this Reuters link here. JLR LOOKING ABROAD FOR EV PRODUCTIONJLR is in talks over building EV models abroad in Slovakia, which is a blow to UK production. This also raises the issue that there are not enough battery plants in the UK now nor, as some fear, probably in the future, so other manufacturers will look aboard too. To read more, click the Bloomberg link here. AUTOCAR AND WHATCAR? GET AUTOTRADER ADSAutotrader will power the used car adverts on Autocar and WhatCar? sites, in a deal announced last Tuesday. Autotrader will now get access to more consumers and Autocar will be able to show readers possible options for the cars they are researching at that moment. You can read more on this by clicking here for the Autocar link. WASHINGTON TO CHARGE CARS ON WEIGHTIn the first move, of what could be a new way for cities to control the vehicles on their roads, Washington DC is to charge an extra levy on vehicles over 6000lbs (2722 kgs) of $500 per year. There is an extra 1000lb waiver for EVs, apparently to prevent discouragement of adoption. For more, click the Green Car Reports article link here. REE TO BUILD EUROPEAN EV VANS IN MIDLANDSThe Israeli start up REE is using its base in Warwickshire to build EU electric vehicle units, for commercial, buses and recreational vehicles. The aim is to produce 10,000 vehicles, which equates to 40,000 units as their system is a moor at each wheel. To learn more about their plans, click this MoveElectric article link. BAC AND VIRITECH HYDROGEN FEASIBILITY STUDYBAC and Viritech are undertaking a feasibility study of a hydrogen powertrain for sports cars. They are establishing if it is possible to make a Mono with this alternative power source. One of the problems they need to overcome is the potential for extra weight, if it were an electric battery powered car. Viritech are working on lightweight fuel cell drivetrains. More can be found out by clicking this article from BAC. FIAT AXING ALL NON ELECTRIFIED MODELS FROM JULYFiat has announced that it will no longer sell any non electrified vehicles, in the UK, from July. Now that the Tipo and 500X have hybrid versions, Fiat can stop selling ICE only models. To read about this, click the Autocar link here. PUBLIC ULTRA-RAPID CHARGERS COSTS RISEThe cost to use a public ultra-rapid charging station has increased dramatically, over the last eight months. The 50% rise is still less than petrol price rise over the same time period, which stands at 88%. For more about this, click here for the Autocar link. To learn more about the RAC Charge Watch click here. JLR RELAUNCHES ONLINE BUYING SERVICESJaguarLandRover has relaunched their online buying, subscription and hiring services. Called “Own. Subscribe. Rent.” they have simplified their previous offering, making it easier and quicker for a potential customer to get to the point of actually parting with their cash. You can find out more, by clicking the Automotive Management article link here. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-NEW NEW CAR NEWS:Ora Funky Cat - Ora has renamed the Cat to help it take on rivals such as the ID.3 by now calling it the Ora Funky Cat, ready for an autumn launch in the UK. Prices will start at £30, 495 (including Government grant). The range will be 193 miles for entry level, 209 miles for mid range (when it becomes available) and 261 miles for the top of the range, again when available. To learn more, click the Autocar article here. Land Rover Defender 130 - Land Rover is launching an eight seater version of the Defender, titled 130, later this year. Prices start at £73, 895. The seating is a two, three, three layout, from the front to the rear. Land Rover claim three adults can travel in comfort in the back row, as well as access the seats simply, thanks to clever folding and sliding mechanism on the middle row. More can be found out by clicking this Autocar link here. LUNCHTIME READ: MATT FARAH HAS NEVER WORKED A DAY IN HIS LIFEMatt Farah, the host of The Smoking Tire, is the focus of this fascinating article. We learn about his past and how he really got started, the pivots along the way and the sense of responsibility he feels when he reviews vehicles. To read this excellent piece, click the link to the Avants article here. LIST OF THE WEEK: 11 CONCEPTS THAT DEFINED THE 1970SHagerty provides our List of the Week, with a selection of 11 concept cars they feel defined the 70s. After hearing what the chaps select, click this link here, then run through and let them know if you would pick the same. AND FINALLY: CANADA FIXES PROBLEM FOR IDIOTS WITHOUT LIGHTSCanada has come up with a plan to solve the problem of idiots driving along with their daytime running lights but not their proper lights as they're oblivious to the issue. Click here for the answer, by reading The Autopian article.

FOLLOW UP: AN EXPERT RESPONDS - CIRCULAR ECONOMYThank you to Tom Lipscomb, from PriestmanGoode who are a design company who's purpose "lies in designing a better, more sustainable. He got in touch with the show, to help us understand what Circular Economy actually is. As explained its one of the key pillars of good design and relates heavily to the way products are made in that individual components should be easily disassembled into their constituent parts. GERMANY SALES BAN FOR FORD DUE TO COURT ORDERFord has been taken to court by Japan's IP Bridge Inc, as their patented technology was being sold in Ford cars without the US car company paying for it, according to the German court. Ford can appeal, but if IP Bridge puts down a €227 million security payment this ruling becomes enforceable. For more on this, click here for the Reuters article link. LONDON ULEZ EXPANSION CONSULTATION OPENEDLondon has opened the public consultation regarding the expansion of the ULEZ to cover most of the capital. To set date for any change is 29 August 2023, where a fee of £12.50 would be levied on any car, van or motorcycle that does not meet the requirements. Views are also being sought on introducing road pricing, which previously the Mayor said would not be considered. To learn more about this, click the BusinessCar article link here. SMART MOTORWAYS GET UPGRADED SAFETY TECH BY SEPTEMBERBy September this year, Smart Motorways will get new safety cameras and radar detection upgrades to improve the network of the already installed sections of digital motorways. More can be read by clicking this link to the Motoring Research article here. NEW CAR AND TRAILER LEARNING SYLLABUSThe DVLA has released the new training syllabus for car and trailer for drivers wishing to become safer with their vehicle. The rules are still that there is a reduction in the threshold of who should do this though. For more, click the DVLA article link here. NOISE CAMERA TRIAL BEGINSA new trial has begun to tackle the plague of noisy road users. This is the next stage in trialling the technology. Those exceeding the 72dB limit, the UK uses, will be fined between £100-£400 for their anti-social behaviour. More can be read about this by clicking the Hagerty link here. TESLA OPENS CHARGING NETWORKS TO ANY VEHICLETesla has opened 15 of their charging hubs to any EV, in a move that is welcomed by many in the UK. However, they are currently breaking the public charging rules by demanding customers agree to a contract with them, which is what registering with their app is considered by regulators. They have stated that they will open more hubs soon. To learn more about that, click the Autocar link here. NEC CAMPUS GAINS PLANNING PERMISSION FOR EV CHARGERSNEC and The EV Network has received planning permission to install charging points for 32 vehicles that can use 300KW DC chargers. Additionally, in another car park, 150 7KW chargers will be installed for those attending the site. To learn more, click this ZapMap link here. TESLA 3 AND Y MODELS EASILY ACCESSED AND DRIVEN OFFNaughty people can, very easily, gain access to Model 3 and Y Teslas, due to a security flaw that cannot be easily fixed thanks to the way they have decided to utilise bluetooth for easy unlocking. Tesla were informed in April, and the advice is to switch off Passive Entry. To read more, click The Register article here. TYRE WEAR EVEN WORSE THAN FIRST THOUGHTEmission Analytics, who previously investigated tyre degradation and pollutants, has returned to the subject to see what the results would be for real-world driving. The news is very grim, particularly for all the EV fanatics that screamed BEVs were falsely painted as bad. Tyre wear is 1850 times worse than tailpipe emissions. To read more, including the methodology and confirmation from independent evaluators, click their article here. GLIMMER OF HOPE FOR BLOODHOUNDA surprise announcement this week has cheered us up on the podcast, there is a glimmer of hope for the Bloodhound LSR project as there are conversations with sponsors starting up again, following the pandemic and mothballing of the car. To read more, click the Autocar article here. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-JIM MAGILL DRIVING ACROSS THE US FOR CHARITYFriend of the show, Jim Magill, is driving across the US in the prototype VW XL1, to raise money for Alzheimer's Research UK. To follow along with Jim you can click this YouTube link here and select The Car of the Future Past videos. To support the effort and donate, click the JustGiving link here. WRC: RALLY PORTUGALThe stunning and seemingly unstoppable Rovanperä secured another victory, this time on the gruelling Rally Portugal gravel roads. Many said he wasn't going to win and he just needed to keep his nose clean and bring the car home. The returning masters would have this one sorted. Rovanperä didn't read that memo. As cars and reputations fell out of contention he kept it clean but also was very quick. In the end leaving everyone trailing behind him. For more about the event, click the DirtFish article linked here. DESIGNERS MOOD BOARD: MILES NURNBERGER LEAVES DACIADacia have lost their design director, less than a year after he joined the company. David Durand will step up from vice president of design to run the team. No reason has been given for Nurnberger leaving. More information can be found at this Autocar link here. LUNCHTIME READ: MUD WRESTLINGYou know we like a good adventure story, well the 1993 Camel Trophy certainly qualifies. You can read about the atrociously hard event by clicking the Hagerty article here. LIST OF THE WEEK: ITS ALL IN A NAMEGraham Easton, from Great Driving Days, has put together a list of Italian car names that seem like they had forgotten this part of the process. Run through the list, after hearing which one Alan selects, and see if you agree. Don't forget to tell the chaps. Click here for the link. AND FINALLY: TRANSIT AN UNKNOWN PART OF THE FAMILY HOUSEA family in Germany found as they demolished one of their buildings, that a Ford Transit had in fact been the framework for a bathroom and pantry, without realising. For more, about this amazing story, click here to get to The Drive link.

FOLLOW UP: VED PRICES FROM LAST SPECIAL EDITION ERRORAs was kindly pointed out, by Tony Williams, the VED prices for the Toyota Yaris Cross, explained in the last Special Edition, were for the first year only. They change following that. Thank you Tony, for raising the point and the nice way you did it! GOVERNMENT INVEST £200M IN ZERO-EMISSION LORRY FLEETThe UK Government is investing £200 million to help accelerate the move to zero-emission HGV vehicles. The money will be used to create a demonstrator fleet to help businesses know what is possible for them and their work. To read more, click the MoveElectric story link here. NEWCASTLE CLEAN AIR ZONE POSTPONEDNewcastle transport chiefs have announced that they are postponing the introduction of the Clean Air Zone (CAZ), which would've meant a charge of £50 for lorries, buses and coaches, whilst vans and taxis would pay £12.50 a day if their vehicles did not meet the requirements. Private cars were not included in the proposal, at this time. For more on this, click here to read the Chronicle Live article. SMART MOTORWAYS GET UPGRADED SAFETY TECH BY SEPTEMBERBy September this year, Smart Motorways will get new safety cameras and radar detection upgrades to improve the network of the already installed sections of digital motorways. More can be read by clicking this link to the Motoring Research article here. ALISON JONES PROMOTED IN STELLANTISAlison Jones will move on from heading up the Stellantis team in the UK, to become senior vice president of circular economy. Whatever that means. Her replacement is Paul Willcox, who is Vauxhall's managing director. The changes come into effect on 1 June 2022. To learn more, click the Automotive Management article here. PLYMOUTH INSTALLS 20MPH SPEED CAMERAPlymouth has installed a 20mph speed camera, along Old Laira Road. During the test period of the camera 23, 500 offences were recorded, with 1,100 in just the first 24 hours. The camera was fully operational as of Monday 16 May, 2022. Click here to read more, on the BBC News website. TOYOTA CUTS PRODUCTION DUE TO CHINA COVID LOCKDOWNThe ongoing lockdown, in Shanghai, has caused Toyota to cut production thanks to parts not being able to be shipped out of the area to their factories. To learn more about the effects on Toyota, click this BBC News link here. RENAULT SELLS AVTOVAZ ASSESTSRenault has managed to extricate itself from Russia by selling their assets to a science institute, apparently for 1 rouble. However, they have retained the option of a six year buy-back option. You can read the Reuters article by clicking this link here. The Moskvitch brand is apparently being reborn and will take advantage of the production facilities. SHELL AIMING FOR 100,000 CHARGERS BY 2030Shell has pledged to install 100, 000 public chargers in the UK by 2030, with 11,000 being rapid versions. On top of this they will be installing chargers for private homes and workplaces taking their total up to an estimated 500,000 by 2030. Click this link to read more from ZapMap. VW REVIVES SCOUT BRAND FOR US MARKETVolkswagen is reviving the Scout brand name as it targets the US with EV SUVs and pick-ups. In the US, VW still is feeling the effects of #dieselgate and what that has done to their image. By using an unrelated name, which they purchased last year, they will be hoping to sidestep any negative problems. To learn more, click here for the Autocar article. UK GOVERNMENT TO LEGALISE PRIVATE E-SCOOTERSThe UK Government has announced that it will introduce legislation that legalises e-scooters on public roads. Ministers claim that safety is central to this and that they must be available to all. To learn more, click this MoveElectric article here. Then for information on opening e-scooters to all click the MoveElectric article here. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-JIM MAGILL DRIVING ACROSS THE US FOR CHARITYFriend of the show, Jim Magill, is driving across the US in the prototype VW XL1, to raise money for Alzheimer's Research UK. To follow along with Jim you can click this YouTube link here and select The Car of the Future Past videos. To support the effort and donate, click the JustGiving link here. NEW NEW CAR NEWS2023 Ford E-Transit Custom EV -Possibly the most important commercial EV for the UK, Ford has announced the details of the E-Transit Custom. With a 232 claimed milage and a similar capacity of the ICE version. The Transit Custom outsold the best selling car in 2021, by 25%, so it is no understatement that this is a vital vehicle for Ford. Details are yet to be revealed as to which battery will be used, but it is expected to offer the same 181bhp or 265bhp motors that the E-Transit will use. Whilst prices have not been announced either, the expectation is for them to start around £40,000. To learn more, click this link for the Autocar article. 2022 Genesis GV60 - Genesis has now, after much teasing of the car, revealed the details and specifications of the GV60, their first dedicated EV. All versions use the 73kWh battery, with the Premium model being a 225bhp RWD version offering 321 miles. Moving up to the Sport model you get four wheel drive, with a 99bhp electric motor for the front wheels, resulting in a total of 314bhp and 292 miles. The top of the range Sport Plus has a whopping 482bhp and 289 miles range. To read more, click the Autocar link here. Vauxhall Insignia - Vauxhall are no longer selling the Insignia in the UK. A new models, reported to be a SUV, will hit the streets in 2026. For more on this, click here to read the Autocar article. DESIGNERS MOOD BOARD: MILES NURNBERGER LEAVES DACIADacia have lost their design director, less than a year after he joined the company. David Durand will step up from vice president of design to run the team. No reason has been given for Nurnberger leaving. More information can be found at this Autocar link here. LUNCHTIME READ: IT WILL SOON BE EASY FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS TO HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHTFollowing the publication of a UK based survey into people's thoughts on self-driving cars, Jack Stilgoe has written an article about how AVs can not be easily distinguished from cars driven by humans and poses the question if we should allow that. To read this excellent piece, click the link to the MIT Technology Review article here. LIST OF THE WEEK: AUTOCAR AWARDS 2022Autocar held their annual awards last week, and we have a slide show for you to run through, to catch up on all the categories and winners. Thankfully, these are given to cars you can actually buy which doesn't always happen with some others. To run through the winners, click this link here. AND FINALLY: A GORGEOUS HOBBYMartin Aveyard creates stunning models and dioramas at 1:24 scale, just for the pleasure of doing so. His work is so good, that looking at the photos you'd think they were real cars from a fabulous tuning or modifying company. Click here for the Hager article link and then go find him on Instagram to follow.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 12, 2022) – Every year, the University of Kentucky celebrates thousands of graduating individuals who receive degrees and make their way into the workforce and the world. For many of these graduates, leaving the world of the university brings a whole new set of challenges as they ask themselves, “what's next?” Being prepared to live on their own, finding success in a new job, reaching out to new support networks and more can be a daunting set of obstacles for those departing UK. On this episode of ‘Behind the Blue', two members of UK's Office of Student Success talk about tips on facing the future as a UK alum, and also what current students can do during their college career to make the most of their time here and be ready to confidently move on after graduation. Kayla Gill is a Senior Program Advisor with Off-Campus Student Services. A native of Lexington, Kayla serves as an advocate and advisor with first year students residing off-campus and first-generation students living on and off campus. She works to implement diversity and inclusion program initiatives for marginalized students as well as foster a sense of belonging for students. Originally from Michigan, Mark Williams works as a Senior Program Specialist with UK's Community & Professional Development Programs. Williams spent time after college working as an accountant in both public accounting and insurance firms, but realized his passion was serving students and helping them transition from college into their careers. "Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university. For questions or comments about this or any other episode of "Behind the Blue," email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show's blog page. To discover what's wildly possible at the University of Kentucky, click here.

APRIL 2022 NEW CAR REGISTRATION FIGURESApril 2022 figures are down 15.8% on even last year's poor results, due mainly to supply issues with continued effects of the chip shortage, the Ukraine War and China's zero Covid policy that has shut down large amounts of the economic centres of the country. For more information, click here for the SMMT article. To get a bit more detail on the figures, click here for Auto Retail Network's Tristan Young's Twitter thread. TOBIAS MOERS LEAVES ASTON MARTINAston Martin's CEO, Tobias Moers, is set to leave the company, being replaced by the ex-CEO of Ferrari Amedeo Felisa. This comes not long after Stroll, the owner of Aston, said he wouldn't be going anywhere. However, rumours had grown increasingly loud that changes were coming. For more on the departure, click the EVO article here. To learn more about his replacement, click this link to the Top Gear article. LOTUS OPENS NEW MANUFACTURING FACILITY AT HETHELLotus has officially opened their new manufacturing facility at Hethel. Called the Chapman Production Centre, this is the latest moves in the £100 million investment in UK Lotus, to equip them for the aims they have as a company. You can read more, by clicking the link here to their own article. MINI HALTS MANUAL CAR PRODUCTIONDue to the impact of supply chain restraints, MINI has been forced to stop the production of manual cars, for the foreseeable future. Recently, they had to stop all production due to the effects of the war in Ukraine. For more, click here to read the Autocar story. DEFENDER ADVERTS BANNEDDue to the two viewers complaining about Land Rover adverts, that give the impression that reversing sensors would inform the occupants that a cliff edge was approaching, when they do not warn of an open space, the ads have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). To read more and wonder why you don't have that much time on your hands as some, click here for the Car Dealer Magazine article. ——————————————————————————-We are at the MOVE 2022 Conference at ExCel, London. Alan will be moderating a panel titled "All these EV targets, where's the charging infrastructure?" with Katie Black, head of the UK's Office for Zero-Emission Vehicles; Daniel Tibble, Director of Data Science and Analytics of the connected vehicle data company, Wejo; and Hui Zhang, the Vice President for Europe of EV company, NIO. More details on the conference can be found by clicking this link here. We have some complimentary tickets, which you can apply for, if you wish to attend the conference yourself. To do so, click this link here and fill out the details required. ——————————————————————————-If you like what we do, on this show, and think it is worth a £1.00, please consider supporting us via Patreon. Here is the link to that CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE PODCAST——————————————————————————-NEW NEW CAR NEWSMercedes-Benz T Class -Mercedes has revealed their replacement for the Citan, which was competent but jolly expensive. Again, using a shared platform, with the Renault Kangoo, they will look to tap into the increasing van-derived car market, that offers oodles of practicalities for the footprint. Prices have yet to be announced in the UK, but equivalent for those stated for Germany equate to starting at £24, 565. A variety of petrol and diesel engines will be offered, with a full EV option following. For more, click the Autocar link here. Isuzu D-Max Arctic Trucks AT35 - Order books have opened for the new Actic Trucks AT35 D-Max. Think expedition pick up and you'll be moving in the right direction when trying to imagine the AT35. Uprated suspension and tyres are very obvious indicators this is no normal D-Max. Prices start at £47, 999 (ex. VAT) for the manual, with you needing to add about £1500 for an auto. To find out more, click the link here to WhatVan?'s article. LUNCHTIME READ: INTERIOR EVOLUTION - JAGUAR MK2 XFDesign Field Trip has run down the history of the XF interior, running through what made it good, not so good and how it could've been executed. A fascinating view at someone who is not just knocking things for the sake of it, but because they want and know they can do better. To read, click the article link here. LIST OF THE WEEK: THE COOLEST CARS OF THE 1990SThis week we are recommending running through the Retro Motor's list of the coolest 1990s cars. You can see if you agree with the chaps, by clicking this link here. Don't forget to tell Alan and Andrew what you'd choose. AND FINALLY: DELIGHTS OF RUN-DOWN FRENCH CAR LOTPicking our jealousy baton once again, for Antony Ingram and his recent road trip through France, we are recommending that you read his account of going through a run-down car lot he spotted, as he was passing. Just the sort of place we could all loose hours in, poking around the parked up classics. To see some of what he did find, click here for the Hagerty article.

The cost of living continues to increase - we speak with the head of economic statistics at the UK's Office of National Statistics, Sam Beckett. Meanwhile, Chinese stocks plummet on Ukraine and Russia's war, and coronavirus, says US shares expert Peter Jankovskis in the US. Plus, we speak with Roman Waschuk, a businessman who fled Ukraine and is now residing in Poland, about how businesses are adapting to the invasion. Plus, the BBC's James Clayton updates us on the latest on the technology companies withdrawing operations from Russia. We discuss all this live with Patrick Barta, Asia Enterprise Editor for the Wall Street Journal in Asia and Alison Schrager, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. Produced by Nisha Patel and Faarea Masud. (Image: A pedestrian walks by an electronic screen displaying the Hang Seng Index on March 8, 2022 in Hong Kong. Photo by Chen Yongnuo/China News Service via Getty Images)

Since April 2020, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey has provided vital weekly snapshots of the level of SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating within the community. We're joined by three central figures in the project, Ruth Studley, Tina Thomas and Professor Sarah Walker, for the inside story on one of ONS's most ambitious surveys, set up in a matter of weeks as the pandemic took hold. (This episode was recorded in September 2021, before the emergence of the Omicron variant)   Transcript:  Miles Fletcher, Head of Media and Public Relations at the ONS Numbers, numbers everywhere, but here we'll take some time to think about where they come from what they mean, and where they're going. Welcome then to the first episode of statistically speaking the new official podcast from the UK's Office for National Statistics. In this series the nation's number crunchers, as some people still insist on calling them, chew the fat and spill the beans on the stories behind the stats. Lately, they've been making headlines, some would say ruling our lives, like never before. I'm Miles Fletcher and in this first episode we'll be looking at how millions of swab tests and finger prick blood tests allowed the Office for National Statistics and its partners to track the progress of COVID-19 across the UK. During the pandemic, the COVID infection survey has proved a vital source of regular data on Coronavirus infections, antibodies and symptoms. We'll hear why this huge study was needed in the first place, how it was set up in double quick time and what it's told us about the virus and its human impacts, and why it remains important now. Joining us are three central figures in the project: Tina Thomas, who runs the survey operation itself, leading a force of thousands of study workers out gathering data in the field; Ruth Studley Head of Analysis for the ONS, whose job it is to turn those test results into fast statistical estimates that we hear about in the news every week; and from the University of Oxford, the chief investigator and academic lead of the infection survey, Professor Sarah Walker. Sarah, to start with you first, how did this study get underway? And well, why was it needed in the first place? Professor Sarah Walker, Chief Investigator and Academic Lead for the COVID-19 Infection Survey So it was back in April 2020, when a lot of people had, you know, been sick with COVID in the first wave. But we really didn't know how many because at that point, we didn't have the PCR tests that are done in the laboratories, we didn't have the tests on a stick, the lateral flow test that lots of people do before going to school or work. And we really have no idea how many people had actually already had COVID. And at the time, there was actually a hope that we might even be close to herd immunity then. And so initially, in the middle of April, the infection survey was first of all a study looking for antibodies in the blood. And the initial plan was to sample just around a thousand households in the first month, then a further thousand households a month for a year to just find out how many people had had COVID already. But over literally the course of two or three days from the 17th to the 19th of April, we realized that actually, we didn't know so much more, in particular about how many people were infected without having any symptoms, how many people were passing it on to other people in their household, how many children were infected. And very rapidly, the survey increased to sampling over 11,000 households in the first month with an initial plan to then resample another 11,000 households a month for a year. Miles Fletcher  Quite simply, you needed to have that representative sample of the whole population, it wasn't enough just to rely on people coming forward who suspected they had COVID. Sarah Walker Well, exactly, because what we cared about was what was really going on in the community. And it's well known that people who come forward for testing tend not to represent their communities completely. And so this was why initially, just because we had to get going so fast, we did actually approach at random people who had been in previous ONS surveys and said they would be interested in taking part in future research. But very quickly, we moved to just sampling from addresses. So, to really get a completely random sample of people living in private households across the UK. Miles Fletcher  And how did that connection with the ONS come about? Because it's a new departure for the ONS, we normally measure the economy and migration and so forth, but not medical testing. So how did that partnership get started? Sarah Walker So, I really think it was a case of everybody just working as hard as they could together to make this happen fast. And what ONS do have huge experience with is these very large population representative sampling frames, and they also had access to this databank of people who had been randomly selected for previous surveys and who had said they would be interested in taking part. It's a huge field operation and obviously ONS has got huge expertise in that. So, I think they were in many ways, you know, the obvious partner to really take it on. And it was a huge collaborative effort between the Department for Health and Social Care as well as the University of Oxford and ONS. Miles Fletcher  And this all had to happen in a fraction of the time that's normally available to plan a big survey, for example a census, and it was almost on that sort of scale. You need every community, every age group or socio demographic group represented in that massive sample. All this had to happen in a matter of a few days to start with to get the first estimates. Sarah Walker We wrote the first draft of the protocol on Friday the 17th of April, we submitted it for ethical approval on Monday the 20th of April. So that's just four days later, during which time we had gone through three major changes in scope and size. It was approved on Tuesday the 21st of April, we recruited our first participant on Sunday, the 26th. So literally ten days after the first draft, and we published our first estimates two weeks later, on Sunday the 10th of May. And interestingly, the positivity rate was 0.24%, around 136,000 individuals in England which we thought was enormous. Miles Fletcher  Oh, well we'll have a lot to say about what we've actually found. But just thinking about those early days and having to achieve in a matter of just a few days, what would normally take months. Tina Thomas, what was your reaction? What was your reaction when you first heard about this project and what it was trying to achieve? Tina Thomas, Deputy Director for the COVID-19 Infection Survey My reaction! So, before COVID, I was running the ONS social survey field community, and that's about 1,200 people, 1,200 interviewers, so they were keeping me busy. I had a phone call from one of our deputy directors on a Sunday night. They said, they want us to run an infection survey and they need me for the operations. And to be honest with you Miles, last year was a little bit of a blur. Usually, when we do surveys like that we take our time in working out the actual survey model, how are we going to do it, what we need, what our end goal is. And like Sarah has just articulated, everything was needed within days and weeks. To submitting a protocol on a Friday to recruiting our participants and the field staff out in the field, collecting the swabs and asking the questions was just short of 10 days, I believe, which was just something that we had never, ever done before. Did we think we could do it? There was a lot of nervousness but there was also so much passion to get this out there because we knew how important this data was. And everybody who worked on this, as Sarah said before, a huge collaborative effort to get it started. But it was just something that none of us had ever tried to tackle before. And it just proves what you can do. At pace, under pressure – we did it. Miles Fletcher And it's a huge collaborative effort involving not just Sarah and her academic colleagues at Oxford, but also the University of Manchester, a whole fleet of specialist contractors helping us to run the field study and specialist providers of all sorts right across the country. And, of course, government partners, chiefly the Department of Health and Social Care in England and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This is a huge UK-wide effort. Now in those early days, of course, it's the start of the survey, it started in a relatively small scale. It was, as I recall, about 12,000 households to start with, but then it grew rapidly didn't it? Tina Thomas Yes, that's right. I think it was, it was changing hourly some days. But yes, it started off relatively small and then it was within a matter of days “we want 150,000 unique participants providing swab samples across the UK”. We started off in England, we didn't actually bring any of the devolved nations onboard until around about the summertime, so a couple of months after the study had been running. That involved Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, which really brought its own operational challenges. Scotland and Wales are obviously a bit more rural than England. They wanted us in Scotland to go to the highlands and the islands and of course, going into Wales everything had to be translated into Welsh. And we had to make sure that we had Welsh speakers who could answer the phones for queries and also study workers that could speak Welsh as well. So really what was going on in the background from an operational perspective was very, very much like the swan analogy. We seemed quite calm on the surface, but with so much going on underneath - it was just incredible. And it's not just about recruiting those participants and getting the study workers out there. There's all the logistics around it, like how do we get the swabs to the labs? How do we get the test results back? Who's going to do all our printing? Who's going to send all the letters out? I'd wake up in the morning and think okay, so what challenge are we going to have to deal with today and I was never disappointed. Miles Fletcher And meanwhile always this huge expectation, from government, from the media, from ordinary citizens wanting to know exactly where the infections were, where the path of the virus was going. And during those very hectic early days, just one operational upset could throw the whole schedule into disarray. Fifteen months on, the survey is settled into a regular, pretty steady pattern now of hundreds of thousands of enrolled participants. And from their number, a large group taking a regular finger prick blood or swab test. How is that? Has it become easy to run now or are there still huge challenges out there? How are people, how about the participants themselves? How have they responded? And what's been their role in keeping this study running and keeping its findings meaningful? Tina Thomas So yeah, I mean, at this moment in time, we've got just over 457,000 live participants in CIS, 5.5 million swab tests have been taken to date. And just under a million blood tests. A daily rate for swab test is around 14,000, there's about four and about 5,000 blood tests being taken as well. We couldn't do this without our participants. Last year, when we had lockdowns, we had a bit of a captive audience. So, the study workers could get through their appointments. As we've seen lockdown restrictions lifted, it started to make operations a little bit more difficult. So, we've had to kind of pivot and change the way our study workers operate. So that's maybe working more in the evenings, offering weekend appointments. But our participants are just absolutely critical to this. And we can't thank them enough. It takes a lot of their time. We're asking a lot of them, but they majority of our participants are just really willing to do this. And you know, actually quite enjoying being in surveys while really feeling like they're making a difference. Miles Fletcher Tina, talk us through - we've got this small army of people out there in the field, covering households up and down the UK, tell us how the process works. Tina Thomas It's not such a small army, there's just over 3,000 study workers that are contracted to work on CIS, as you said, spread all across the UK. They are given what we call an allocation each day. So that's about visiting households to keep within protocol. So, some are still on weekly visits, some households are on monthly visits, they have to think ahead and have all their kit together: barcodes, test tubes, the swabs, the blood kits, and their mobile devices. So, they ring a household, usually the night before and agree a date and a time for them to visit. When they arrive at the household it's a non-contact visit and they hand over the kits to the household members and scan the barcodes to make sure that we get the right test against the right person when they go to the labs. That's for swabs only. If the household is blood too then it's on to the fingerprick blood tests, which the participants usually take inside to do. And then they come back to the doorstep and there is a questionnaire that they'll need to answer, which Ruth touched on, which is about if they've had COVID, if they've had symptoms, what their social interaction has been like, and obviously that's more and more important now that lockdown restrictions are being lifted. Then the study worker completes the visit. And at some point during that evening they will drop the swabs off at a courier point where they'll go overnight to the labs. And the test results are usually back within two to three days. We've recently just introduced a new process, which saves quite a bit of money and also a lot of trees in that the test results now go out to our participants by email rather than by letter. If it's unfortunate to be positive, it gets notified to test and trace who then get in contact with the household. Miles Fletcher And of course, running something on this scale, it doesn't mean things always run entirely smoothly. We've had some quite colourful encounters on the doorsteps… Tina Thomas We have! So we have had a couple of study workers who've arrived at a pre-agreed date and time for the door to be opened by somebody who wasn't wearing any clothes. That's happened a couple of times and I think actually one study worker did ask the gentleman to go and put some clothes on and he came back with a T-shirt on, which just about covered his top half. And with the finger prick blood test as well, so it's quite a neat kit that comes in a cardboard box and it's got a plaster and a lancet and the test tube that we need them to collect the blood. The lancets are not needles, they're tiny, tiny blades because the actual volume of blood that we need to test is quite high. But we have had a couple of participants who I think were laborers on building sites, whose hands were very calloused from the job that they do, where the lancet just would not pierce the skin. And because they were so willing to provide that blood sample and wanted to provide that blood sample, I think we've had a couple of instances where they've come back with Stanley knives and actually managed to get blood out the finger with that. We wouldn't approve that or suggest that's the best way to do it. But what it does show, certainly the last one, is that people are just so keen and passionate to be included in this survey that they'll do what they can to help us. Miles Fletcher Made of sterner stuff than me, willing to take a stanley knife to yourself in the cause of science. And please, everybody don't try that yourselves. Some people haven't been quite so robust on the doorstep though. Tina Thomas No. Since we introduced the fingerprint blood test for antibodies, we have had a number of participants who have fainted whilst trying to get a blood sample for us. And unfortunately, a very high percentage of those are men. But we do have procedures in place with a study worker to help people when that happens. And obviously it remains a non-contact visit. But they have got a list of instructions if somebody does, unfortunately, pass out. And I think at this point as well, Miles, I'd really like to just say a massive, massive thank you to our study workers working on this who have been out doing this, during those early dark days of the pandemic, through every type of weather you can think of, to get us these samples and the data that we need. Miles Fletcher Thank you, Tina. So Ruth, this is where you come in – the field force have gone out, they've done their job, they've gathered in these thousands and thousands of samples, what do you do first? Ruth Studley, Head of Analysis for the COVID-19 Infection Survey So, what happens first is all of those swabs are sent to the different Lighthouse Laboratories to be tested using different PCR arrangements. That is part of the national testing programme and we use exactly the same process as the rest of the UK, that then gives us a set of data which we could use. And that is sent to us securely in ONS, where we process that data to understand exactly what is going on in the raw data before we use our modelling arrangements to produce our headline estimate. So, as part of looking at that data, we want to know things like what the different cycle threshold value is, for example. Now that is a bit of a technical term, and if I try and describe it very basically, it's the number of times, the number of cycles that each PCR test has to go through before a positive result is detectable, for example. And if there's a high quantity of the virus, you would expect that to be identified after a low number of cycles. So we would say that that was a low CT test, and it will be regarded as a high viral load. And so we look at things like that. And there's lots and lots of different things that we would look at in the raw data before then moving on to doing our modelling. The modelling that we use is a Bayesian multilevel regression post stratification model. And that's used to calculate breakdowns of positivity by region, and age across England. That all happens at breakneck speed. So the data arrives on day one, and we are virtually ready to produce information by day three, we publish by day five. It's very, very rapid. I'm not sure if any other official statistics are produced that rapidly. Miles Fletcher But such as the need for that data. Have the findings ever surprised you? Ruth Studley Yes and no. So, you wouldn't expect it to change very rapidly in the course of a few days. And usually, if there is something that you were surprised by, it would usually be an indicator that you want to do some further analysis. And there have been occasions where we've seen things and thought, does that make sense? And you dig a bit deeper, and you find that there's something going on in the data. But whilst, like Sarah was saying, you would never propose to predict what is going to happen, you would expect the changes to be relatively smooth. Miles Fletcher So, out on the doorstep every day, 12,000 swab and blood tests being taken, on average, at the moment nearly 6 million in all gathered under this survey. But what happens to those test results when they come in? Ruth, it's your job to make sense of them, and to turn them into statistics that can be relied upon. What's the secret to keeping those estimates reliable and trusted? Ruth Studley So that's a really great question Miles. I was thinking when I was listening to Sarah and to Tina then, what is it about this team that has allowed us to produce such fantastic results that have been so vitally important to the UK? And I think it's the three Ps you know, we've got people who are passionate, people who work at pace, and we work in partnership. And it's all about wanting to do the right thing for the country, actually. So, what do we do with all of that data? We have a plethora of information as you have all described. And we do collect information from every participant every time we visit them on their socio demographic characteristics: whether they are experiencing symptoms, whether they are self- isolating, what their occupations are, whether they're working at home, questions about long COVID and whether they've been vaccinated, social distancing, physical distancing, etc. We ask all sorts of different questions, because it's really important that we're able to provide as much information as we can, not only about the direction of the pandemic, but also what people's experiences are in the community. And it's probably worth just reflecting there about who it is that we are sampling and who we're representing. This is a survey of the community of the population at large. So we will be testing people who are both symptomatic, but also are not experiencing symptoms. And that's really important because we know that our data has shown us that over the last 12 plus months, that people very often have tested positive but not had symptoms. And so this is a real reflection of what people will experience at large. And every week, we use a number of modelling techniques to estimate the number of people who are testing positive for the virus. And we produce that every week. You will see it in the media and on our website every Friday lunchtime, where we provide estimates of the number of people that are testing positive for infection. But as I mentioned, we asked lots of questions. So we break that down by lots of different characteristics, so by age by region, we do it for the four countries in the UK, and so on. And we do that very much in partnership with our academic partners of which Sarah is a really, really key partner for us. Miles Fletcher So that every week when you produce the estimates, we can say not just what's going on in Scotland or England at that level, but how local can you make the data to make people aware of what's happening in, you know around the corner? Ruth Studley We're really mindful that people are interested in what's happening locally to them. So we've also been able, because we have quite a large sample, to do quite sub-regional estimates. And that has provided a granularity of information for both decision makers, but also for the general public who are interested in what's happening in their locality. The geographies that we're able to get into the detail of are, within England, about 100 sub regions to give you a feel for the size of it. Miles Fletcher Now, tell us then about the ongoing story the data have been telling us after the first wave. After that, not surprisingly, we found quite a low level of prevalence in those early readings. But what was the story from then on, what happened after that? And what have been the key moments from an analyst's point of view do you think in the path of this pandemic? Ruth Studley That's an interesting question. Over the course of the autumn last year, we did start to see a general steady rise, or just before Christmas with the identification of the Alpha variants as we now know it. And an awful lot of work went into that because as part of the swabs that we take and the analysis we do, we are able to do additional analyses to try to identify different variants and that is absolutely critical. There were some key points there obviously, because our information was part of the suite of information that government uses to help make their decisions around all the different interventions that they wanted to put in place, such as the different lockdowns across the UK. So the infection rate was steadily rising, and it peaked in January 2021. All of the days over the last 18 months have very much gone into one, but it peaked in January 2021. And then we started to see a steady decrease over the next couple of weeks and months with various different interventions occurring and then obviously we saw the arrival of Delta variant, and that has had an impact. And within certainly months, if not weeks of identification of that it became the dominant variant across the UK. And we are now seeing that the data has increased. Miles Fletcher And as you say, it's the Delta virus that really changed things suddenly midway, if you like, through the pandemic. Sarah, would you say that that's been the most important finding of the study so far? Professor Sarah Walker Well, I mean, I think it's easy to focus on Delta. But you know, frankly, Alpha was pretty terrible in December. I think it's actually been incredible to think that, frankly, in the space of only six months, the virus went through two such massive changes, which basically doubled transmissibility every time. So Alpha was twice as transmissible and Delta was twice as transmissible  again. Of course, what is different is that we now have vaccinations and I think that is somewhere where the survey is increasingly really making a major contribution, because linked data is really brilliant and we can do a lot of stuff with it. But we're not really able to adjust very well with the kind of large scale NHS linked data, for characteristics that do affect people's chance of testing positive, whereas in the survey, because as researchers we collect this detailed information every month, we're able to adjust for things like whether people are healthcare workers, when they work in care homes, smoking status. Things that actually do make a difference to your risk of testing positive: whether they have been to a hospital. And so we're able to get much better estimates of the impact of vaccines on infection rates, really in the community, than many of these other big studies. Of course, we can't do it all, we can't look at hospitalizations, because they're quite rare in our study, but we can actually make a really big contribution. Miles Fletcher And that's all because the study worker as well as taking the taking the test sample sits down and actually goes through the questions with gets a lot more information from them. Sarah Walker Absolutely.  And then also at the antibody testing, which we're now doing on around a half of our participants who are giving us finger prick blood every month, and that's  enormously valuable in tracking levels of antibody protection in the community as a whole and then trying to understand how that relates to infection rates in different age groups and different parts of society. Miles Fletcher And that's the particular value of testing the same group of people again, and again. Sarah Walker And actually also because it turns out that one of the really fascinating findings is that people who've had COVID before, if they get vaccinated they do even better. But in order to find that out, you need to know who's been infected before. And because we've been testing our participants every month, some people now for nearly 18 months, we have a really good history. We won't catch every single infection but for most people we have a really good idea about who's had COVID or not. And again, that allows us to make much better estimates of the impact of vaccination, the impact of natural infection, and then how the two work together. Miles Fletcher   And that's because the survey has covered the period right before the introduction of the of the vaccines right through their mass rollout. And according to the data you produce, towards the end of the summer, we're starting to actually see some of that vaccine induced positivity actually reducing once again, and new questions arise about booster jobs and so forth. What remains to be learned about the effect of those vaccines and about the longer-term impacts of COVID more generally? Sarah Walker There's a really huge emphasis on boosters at the moment, Miles, and I understand from the point of view of individual people, particularly if they are having their antibodies tested, and they see it go positive to negative, they may feel some concern, but it's really important to understand that the immune system has got memory. And actually you can have low levels of antibodies, but actually, the immune system remembers, and if you get exposed to COVID again, you get a burst of activity, and you are actually protected, particularly from hospitalization and death. And ultimately we've got to find a way to live with this virus, we aren't going to eliminate it and we can't keep vaccinating 50 million people a year. And so what we're trying to do as we move forward is to stop people ending up in hospital and stop them dying, whilst understanding that the virus is going to be with us. And I think the survey has really got a crucial role in answering some of the questions around what kind of levels of background infection can we live with. Are there thresholds of background infection, which then do trigger increases in hospitalizations, which obviously we can't live with? You know, who actually needs boosting in order to stop them ending up in hospital, as well as who maybe needs boosting in order to stop them getting infection, but infection that particularly leads to bad consequences. Obviously, antibodies are only part of the picture, we also have T cells and other things that help protect us from infection. I think over the next six months, the survey will really help us unpick some of those answers and really, it's about helping us learn how to live with this, because we aren't going to get rid of it. It's still a brand new virus. I mean, 18 months ago, we didn't know it existed. The beginning of March 2020, there was stuff in the papers about this virus in this Chinese city, but no one had any idea. And no, we still have a huge amount to learn. And the survey can really, really help.   Miles Fletcher Vital then, that it keeps going. It's one thing I've discovered in working on the media side of ONS, and like everything at ONS we try and show with numbers, it's interesting how media attention for our estimates goes up and down according to the level of infection. Is there a danger more broadly do you think then that people might think at this stage that we're seeing deaths and hospitalisations thankfully at fractional levels of what they were before, but people might still think that it's all over really, that we don't need to take this as seriously as we did, and Ruth how do we get the message out about the importance, the continuing importance of trusting the data?   Ruth Studley So Miles I think one of the key things, you talked about the benefits of the longitudinal aspects of the survey, going back to the same people week in, week out. One of the critical benefits of this survey has been our ability to respond and be relevant to what decision-makers need. Sarah's done some fantastic work and I'll let her talk about the work that she's done around vaccine effectiveness, but actually being able to understand and pre-empt and work with our users to understand what is critically needed is one of the real benefits of this survey. Because not only do you have that breadth of data and that wealth of data, but being able then to link it across ONS to some of our other data sources, whether that is the immunisation data or other data sources that we might hold within ONS, all adds a huge amount of value. Miles Fletcher Sarah, just looking at that international dimension again, are other countries running studies like this? Sarah Walker So, to my knowledge there isn't another study like this in the world, both in terms of its length and the fact that it has been going since April 2020, but also in particular its size and representativeness of the general population. Generally what other studies are doing is relying on testing data, so relying on linking information about people who come forward to be tested in national testing programmes, either because they have symptoms or other reasons like workplaces. And of course, whilst that data is very powerful and is very large, not everyone who has symptoms takes a test and certainly there are plenty of people who have Covid without symptoms who never know they need a test. So, you know there are some real limitations of using that data, so from that point of view the survey really has got huge benefit and that benefit is recognised by policy bodies including the WHO in terms of particularly informing questions around vaccine effectiveness where being able to do the kind of adjustments that we do is really so important. Miles Fletcher So the survey has established itself as well, what the Times no less calls the most reliable measure of infection rates provided by the UK government. That speaks loudly because the media in the UK don't hand out compliments for nothing: that's a powerful testimony to how this study has established itself and it remains central to the UK's research effort, and we're told is to some degree unique in the world. Thank you to all three of our guests Tina Thomas, Head of Survey Operations, Ruth Studley Head of Analysis and from Oxford Professor Sarah Walker. Next time we hear the inside story of the 2021 Census and hear about the challenge of getting responses from every household in England and Wales during a period of national lockdown. You can subscribe to new episodes of this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also get more information by following the @ONSfocus Twitter feed. The producers of Statistically Speaking are Elliot Cassley and Julia Short, I'm Miles Fletcher, goodbye.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (February 10, 2022) – In the fall of 2020, the University of Kentucky announced plans to establish a proposed Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies (CIBS) – a multidisciplinary program designed to highlight UK's growing research around issues of race and racism. The interdisciplinary institute establishes research clusters across the campus and promotes the university's growing research and scholarship on topics of importance in African history and African American history, such as slavery and the quest for freedom, racial discrimination and violence, and the long struggle for civil rights. This year, the university has announced continued annual funding of $200,000 through UK's Office for Institutional Diversity – an important step forward in helping the institute achieve its goals. On this episode of Behind the Blue, Dr. Anastasia Curwood, director of CIBS and African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) at UK, talks about the continued mission of the institute, the connections that present day issues have to Black studies, a student body hungry for this kind of information, and more. "Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university. For questions or comments about this or any other episode of "Behind the Blue," email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show's blog page. For more information about CIBS, including ways you can support, visit https://cibs.as.uky.edu/. To discover what's wildly possible at the University of Kentucky, click here.

Ian McClure is the Chair-Elect, AUTM; Associate Vice President for Research, Innovation and Economic Impact, and Executive Director, UK Innovate at the University of Kentucky (a mouthful, we know). Put simply, Ian leads the University of Kentucky's efforts to commercialize the research and technology that comes out of the university. UK's Office of Technology Commercialization has made great strides since Ian joined and is continuing to address some of this regions biggest needs, from access to venture capital, to support for entrepreneurs looking to leverage university research for their businesses. This episode is co-hosted by Lincoln Day, as Lincoln has gone through the process of commercializing university research for his company, Stalk Commodities. Our conversation covers how UKOTC does what they do, why it's so important for this region, and where Ian hopes to take it into the future. Learn more about UKOTC at Research.uky.edu/ukinnovate Visit us at MiddleTech.com Twitter Instagram Facebook LinkedIn Evan's Twitter Logan's Twitter Middle Tech is proud to be supported by: Our presenting sponsor, KY Innovation Bolt Marketing The Johnson Law Group Render Capital

Dr Jan Rosenow joins us on the first day of CoP26 to talk about the decarbonisation of our buildings and how we transition to zero carbon heating. The conversation includes the electrification of heat and how we ensure a just transition.As the director of European programmes, Dr. Jan Rosenow leads RAP's initiatives in Europe on power market design and Efficiency First. He is responsible for all aspects of leadership, management, and financial viability of RAP's work in Europe.Dr. Rosenow serves on the Executive Committee of the International Energy Agency's demand-side management program and sits on the board of the European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. He has also advised the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), government departments in a number of countries, and the UK's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, as well as serving as an expert witness on several occasions to the British Parliament. He was the lead author of the International Energy Agency's global assessment of market-based instruments for energy efficiency.Dr. Rosenow also has a strong track record in energy research. He is an honorary research associate at Oxford University's renowned Environmental Change Institute. He has authored more than 70 publications in the form of peer-reviewed papers, technical reports, and conference papers. He has also served as an expert witness to the House of Commons.In 2020, Dr. Rosenow was elected to be a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in light of his “longstanding dedication to moving the UK towards a more sustainable and resilient energy future.”Prior to his engagement with RAP, he worked closely with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Energy through his policy work for the global consultancy Ricardo. Dr. Rosenow earned several post-graduate qualifications, including a master's degree in environmental policy and regulation from the London School of Economics and a doctorate from Oxford University.

UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation published counter-terrorism legislation guidance to NGOs and those in the financial sector.  Tune in as the Kitchen highlights the main ingredients.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (September 16, 2021) – Making the transition to college can be an intimidating time not only for incoming undergraduate students, but also for families, as they seek to support their students from their earliest days on campus through graduation. Embracing a multidimensional concept of family and the diversity of family structures, including families of origin and families of choice, the UK Parent and Family Association invites parents, guardians, grandparents, spouses/partners, and any other supportive people in the lives of UK students to join for free. The Association strives to enhance student success by actively engaging parents and families as part of the larger university community through publications, programs, and services. Their goal is to offer the best way to stay informed, get connected and find support for families and their students. On this episode of Behind the Blue, two members from UK's Office for Student Success talk about their work with these families and students. Nancy Stephens is the head of the New Student and Family Programs team, working with programs such as the K Week fall welcome week and the UK Parent and Family Association. Nicki Jenkins is the Senior Program Specialist for the Parent and Family Association, overseeing all day-to-day functions and coordinating events and programs. Together they discuss the Parent and Family Association and the work they do, including UK's Family Weekend coming up this weekend, September 17-19th. "Behind the Blue" is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify. Become a subscriber to receive new episodes of “Behind the Blue” each week. UK's latest medical breakthroughs, research, artists and writers will be featured, along with the most important news impacting the university. For questions or comments about this or any other episode of "Behind the Blue," email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show's blog page. To discover what's wildly possible at the University of Kentucky, click here.

The UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Enforcement issued a guidance on the developing situation in Afghanistan. Listen in as The Kitchen takes a closer look.

The Kitchen looks into the UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation recent guidance around licenses to access frozen funds to cover legal fees and maintenance expenses.OFSI looks at one ingredient in particular: that of “reasonableness” and the Kitchen is there to see what goes into the recipe for a successful license grant.

In this episode the Rethink Energy Team discusses the investments which India is incentivizing from its fossil fuel sector into renewable manufacturing, the UAE openly expressing its impatience with the rest of the OPEC cartel's production limits, and a praiseworthy report from the UK's Office of Budget Responsibility which points out various severe threats to the economy from climate change - arguing that energy transition is the cheap option.

Divorce is something that is very prevalent in our society but also has a lot of negative connotations attached to it within the South Asian community. Data from the UK's Office of National Statistics for 2019 shows 107,599 opposite-sex divorces in 2019 in England and Wales, increase of 18.4% and 822 same-sex divorces, nearly twice the number (428) in 2018. The majority of divorces of opposite-sex couples in 2019 were petitioned by the wife (62%). In this episode I'm joined by Jigna who shares her journey with divorce. Jigna a full time finance professional and uses her weekends to create fashion content for her Instagram page. She also uses her platform to discuss a number of taboo topics such as is a divorce advocate. Love, Preeti x ———————————————————— Vote for It's Preeti Personal at the British Podcast Awards https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/vote ———————————————————— Don't forget to follow me on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/preetipersonal/ TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSvmbM63/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/preetipersonal  Clubhouse: @preetipersonal If you prefer, you can also email me: itspreetipersonal@gmail.com Don't forget to follow/ subscribe to Podcast and leave a review on Apple Podcasts ———————————————————— Jigna's Social Media: IG: https://www.instagram.com/jigna_madeup/ ———————————————————— Music: Upbeat-party by scottholmesmusic.com

Today on The Leaders' Brief - Last week, The US State Department approved the sale of $1.77 billion worth of defence equipment to Germany, including five P-8A Poseidon planes. The Poseidon is one of the “most advanced” weapon systems in the world. Other equipment included engines, sensors, radars, and communications equipment. The approval is of key strategic importance since, under the erstwhile Trump administration, the USA had withdrawn troops from Germany citing Berlin's failure to raise its defence budget to 2% of its GDP, as agreed by NATO members. The decision was also aimed at pressuring Berlin to heed American sanctions on the Russia-funded Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. The QUAD Group made up of the United States, India, Australia, and Japan vowed to work towards restoring democracy in coup-hit Myanmar. The QUAD, a key strategic alliance in the Asia Pacific recently discussed Myanmar's situation in their first meeting this year. However, barring the USA, the three QUAD countries have till now refrained from taking strong actions against Myanmar's military. Myanmar, which remains under a military-induced year-long emergency for the past one and a half months, has turned a blind eye towards international concerns and increasing sanctions. Trade between the EU and Britain in the first-month post Brexit decreased significantly. According to statistics released by the UK's Office for National Statistics last week, British goods exports to the EU, excluding non-monetary gold and other precious metals, fell by a record 40.7% in January compared to December and imports fell by 28.8%. While the COVID pandemic which continues to force several European countries to extend lockdowns and restrict trade can be blamed for a major part of this decrease, Brexit, too, made a significant impact. Britain's exit from the EU saw both the 27-member bloc and the UK stockpile essential goods, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector before the end of the Brexit transition period in December.  About egomonk: Website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedInegomonk is a global intelligence platform delivering asymmetric outcomes by bringing organizations closer to the communities they want to serve and the leaders they wish to influence. If you wish to collaborate with us then email us at contact@egomonk.com.

Today on The Leaders' Brief - According to a report published by the UK's Office for Budget responsibility or OBR, the world's sixth-largest economy is looking at an almost $37 billion spending gap by 2024. While OBR chairman Richard Hughes has said that extra measures have been announced since July totalling £86B or approximately a 114 billion dollars this year and £40B or approximately $53 billion next year that has prevented further deterioration of the country's economy, the UK would need to take strong economic measures to avert a catastrophe. The WHO is co-leading an initiative to distribute about 2 billion vaccine doses in a 'fair and equitable' manner next year. The COVAX initiative being co-developed with Gavi and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is expected to provide large scale infrastructural support in distributing COVID-19 vaccines globally.  Fintech startup Chipper Cash has secured $30 million in Series B funding from Ribbit Capital and Amazon CEO JEFF Bezos's venture capital fund Bezos Expeditions. With a three million-strong user base in Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya, the platform registers an average of 80,000 transactions daily. About egomonk: Website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedInegomonk is a global intelligence platform delivering asymmetric outcomes by bringing organizations closer to the communities they want to serve and the leaders they wish to influence. If you wish to collaborate with us then email us at contact@egomonk.com.

The ESRI has warned that its projected growth rate for the Irish economy this year could be slashed by more than two-thirds if Britain crashes out of the EU, derailing the Government's plan for tax cuts in the next budget. Lead author of that report, Dr Adele Bergin, joins Cliff Taylor and presenter Laura Slattery to discuss the gloomy analysis.Plus: The robots are coming, but for who? Eoin Burke-Kennedy has the details of a report by the UK's Office for National Statistics, showing waiters and shelf stackers are the most likely to be replaced by robots.But first, Peter Hamilton has a roundup of some of the other stories making the business news this week: PwC's review of Datalex's accounts, new EU copyright rules and Mike Ashley's Sports Direct eyeing Debenhams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.