CPC researcher awarded funding for government data project

Professor Peter Smith, CPC researcher and Director of the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute, is leading a consortium that has been awarded £7.6 million to help launch and run a project to give access to government data for academic research.

The Administrative Data Research Centre for England (ADRC) will enable information routinely collected by government departments and other agencies, such as tax, education and health data, to be shared with researchers. The centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will be for approved academic projects and use anonymised data, accessed in a secure environment.

The ADRC for England will be led by the University of Southampton and run in collaboration with University College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the University of London's Institute of Education. It will be one of four such centres for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which with the newly formed Administrative Data Service (ADS) acting as a 'gatekeepers' to the research data, will form the Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN).

"Our vision is to see these data transformed into knowledge and evidence which can be used to inform public and economic policy - helping to tackle some of the major issues facing society, in an innovative and efficient way," says Project Lead Professor Peter Smith.

"We will manage and maximise the use of new data linkages across Government departments and sectors to give safe, secure and strictly managed access to anonymised data for research purposes."

The four ADRCs and the ADS will benefit from a grants package totalling approximately £34 million from the ESRC. This represents the first phase of £64 million of ESRC funding of investment in Big Data, to support the development of a network of innovative centres to strengthen the UKs competitive advantage in this field.

Read more about the role of the Centre at the University of Southampton.

Find out more about the project on the ESRC website.

Posted 14/10/2013 11:00