 Hi, my name is Ben Bamberg-Geiger and I'm here to talk to you about the Welfare at Social Distance data, which you can use as part of the data dive. So Welfare at Social Distance is funded by the ESRC and is part of the research council's sort of collective efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the data dive was actually something that we thought of at an early stage of putting the bid together, when we were trying to think about how everyone could best work together to make use of the emerging data to understand a rapidly changing situation, where there's a real need for us to quickly understand what's going on to feed into policy before the moment has passed and it's too late. So it's been fantastic to see how the UK data service and the other different data providers have sort of come together and set up this fantastic event, and we're really excited to be part of it. So as I said, Welfare at Social Distance is a rapid response project, and it's focused on the benefit system. So whereas some of the other data sets have incredible breadth and enable you to look at a wide variety of different domains at the same time, we're really focused on the benefit system and things that are related to that. So the data that you have available that you can access today is a UGUFF survey of over 7000 benefit claimants, about 3,500 new claimants during the pandemic and 4,000 pre-existing claimants, and the data was collected in May, June of this year. And we cover a lot of different things to do with their claim, so some of them are specific things around their claim like advances or having money deducted from their benefit payment for one reason or another, including things like the benefits cap. Other things that we cover are the problems that people encountered when applying and the support they received, the attitudes that people have towards claiming benefits and how they feel about claiming, and then also some sort of broader things that are relevant to their benefits claim. So whether or not they're attached to the world of work or not, because benefits now includes traditional out-of-work benefits, but also in-work benefits that used to be called tax credits. And we cover things around their financial situation, so what strategies they're using for getting by, and a few indicators of financial strain. Finally, we have quite a few different sort of background, socio-demographic factors that you can look at, like age, gender and disability, and sort of particularly emphasise ethnicity here, because there's very little publicly available data on ethnicity in the benefit system now. So this data is a really good opportunity to try and interrogate that a little bit more. So we have sort of a comprehensive report on how the benefit system did during the pandemic coming out later in the year. And we've also got a few things that are out already, including one report on how far benefit claimants were still connected to jobs, another on how old and new benefit claimants compare to each other, and a report that should be coming out today, touch wood, on unsuccessful benefit claimants. But it's really worth emphasising how much there is left to explore in this. You know, even with our focus on the benefit system in the pandemic, there are so many different angles to this that we're not able to cover, including the inequalities ones, but a whole range of other things besides. So if this is something you're interested in, we may well not be covering it in our reports, and we really encourage you to look at it yourselves if you can. This is also just the start of multiple different data deposits that we're making. So if there's something that interests you, then please do keep an eye out on these things that we'll be adding over the coming months. So that includes the survey of non-claimants that will be released before the end of the year, future waves of our claimant survey, adding in new people that have claimed benefits, but also following up the people we spoke to back in May and June, and also surveys of the general population to compare benefit claimants to in terms of their attitudes or financial situation. Finally, we're a mixed methods research project, and we're going to deposit as much of our qualitative data as we can, including, for example, 75 interviews with claimants, some done over the summer, some done in the first quarter next year. So do keep an eye on that if you're interested, or let me know, or sign up for our mailing list. There's a few links here that you may find useful if you're interested in this sort of area, so our existing publications, the data archive entry, the user guide that explains a bit more about how we collected the data and how to use it, and the questionnaire that explains in a bit more detail exactly what we did and where these questions come from. And Rob De Vries, who's part of the project, will be with you in the data dive for the two days if there's anything you want to ask, and I will hopefully be around for most of the two days as well. Otherwise, it's great to be part of the data dive. I hope you have a really good two days, and I'm really excited to see what you produce.