 Good afternoon, Ollie. Thank you for joining us for this podcast about the senses today to start with Would you be so kind as to tell us about how you first got involved with the senses and how long you've been worth from it at the UK data service? Yeah, good afternoon, and thank you for having me on the podcast my background in the census I start with the 1991 census that's the first one I was involved in With as ever a searcher Earlier censuses. I'd used the data as a student for example He was involved with the team working on this special migration statistics from the 1991 census. I Worked as a research assistant in Leeds wrote some programs for Doing Q&A of the data and then for doing bespoke extracts of the data And then a little later on that led me to work in preparing some interface systems for outputs from both the 1991 census and the 2001 census Again working on the special migration statistics and the special workplace statistics That was done as part of the ESRZ census program and that went through various phases through the 2000s and then We joined up As part of a value-added part of the UK data service So as a value-added part of the UK data service We worked as a group of institutions providing census data for researchers for students for people outside the UK and again I was working on the interfaces for the special migration statistics and special workplace statistics providing access both to the 2011 results as they came out and also to the earlier results from 2001 1991 and 1981 and What is it different that the UK data service provides to researchers with access in census data that's different from other Organisations such as the O&S. Yeah, well in the part of UK data service I work on which is Origin destination or flow data We occupy quite an important niche position and that we make those data sets available to users In a way that users can extract particular subsets of the data they want The data aren't directly available from O&S. O&S Provide sort of onward instructions for users to come to us or to go to NOMIS and our colleagues in NOMIS provide single downloadable files of data rather than Queryable files. So we provide a opportunity for users to generate extracts of data We also provide extracts to safeguarded data so unlike most of the census which is Open license the safeguarded origin destination data you have to be a Academic or someone else within the UK public sector in order to be allowed to use them And there are some further restrictions on what you can do with the data So we provide access to those. We've also collaborated with three great London authority and users of SASPAC, which is a commercial package used by local authorities And we've assisted their users in downloading and installing safeguarded data For their use so that's a useful collaboration that we've done I think What sort of difference does this kind of access make to Researchers and how important is it to their work? The access we provide I believe and hope is really useful to Researchers one of the things across the whole of UK data service that we specialise in with census data is providing access to UK versions of data The census agencies the office for national statistics in England and Wales Nisra in Northern Ireland NRS in Scotland they publish their own data and statistics about their own territories Which is great, but they don't publish data on the whole about the whole of the UK Which is where we come in we're able to provide our expertise and value-added To bring in data from those three agencies assemble them together into UK level data sets that researchers can use as Well as joining up for the UK We also provide a historical perspective that as well as data from the most recent census At the moment 2011. We also provide data from older censuses 2001 1991 etc back to 1971 for area statistics and back to 1961 for Anonymised samples of microdata So really the service that the UK data service provides is very specialist and unique and quite essential to the worker researchers Yeah, I think we're a very unique proposition I don't think there's anywhere else that provides direct interactive access to the long sort of history of Recent and when I say re-stomping kind of post-war census data as I said we've got data from 1961 onwards Very few other Organisations if any have that easily available to users to researchers We also have good connections with other colleagues Essex who provide access to anonymised extracts anonymised records from historical censuses And what kind of insights into societal challenges can be gained using the census data can you provide any examples of where that's be put into practice Yeah, the census provides obviously a unique picture of the makeup of the nation And that's used All the time anytime you look at a survey Or use a look at a small-scale data set that underlying it will Utilize the census not necessarily directly, but it will utilize the census and Projections based on the census estimates based on the census in order for them to determine whether their sensor that whether their survey is representative or not So the census underlines a huge amount of social science and under on other surveys in the UK if we're looking at recent Activity recent research even though the current data that we've got are now quite old they're from 2011 They're still in many cases very much the best data we've got and still Entirely relevant for lots of research. So if we look at analysis of COVID-19 infections for example We need data from the census or from estimates based on the census in order to provide the denominators for all those calculations one of the things we Made available quite recently With data given to us by ONS for provision through UK data service Was a really detailed table produced newly from the 2011 census on makeup within households who lives With who in households if we look at the narrative of students going back to school school children going back to school for example, we know that there are More potential risks from spread within schools that appears thankfully not to be as As significant as other sectors of the population We also know that some school children live with elderly and other vulnerable people but Nationally, we don't really have a very good idea of how many children live with say, you know 70 year old plus people But this table from the 2011 census provides us with inset with insight Of how many households are involved and whereabouts in the country there's more school children living with older adults So that's a good example of how we can still make use of the 2011 census And does that has that helped with a lot of the kind of work research done? um During the COVID-19 crisis to help kind of address some of the problems and issues that we're facing I certainly hope so I'd say Yeah, our our understanding is that these population data Based on estimates from the 2011 census are actively being used in COVID-19 modeling scenarios