 Okay, so today this webinar will be split into three sections. I will be doing the first bit. I'm James Scott. I've seen a user support officer who does the training in Secure Lab. I'll be doing the initial parts. Then I'll hand over to my colleague Christine, and she will be talking about how our datasets are structured and how to apply and that kind of thing. And finally, in the last section, I'll be handing over to Beata who will be talking about some new stuff that we haven't actually had in this webinar before. Okay. Okay, so broadly what we're going to cover today are business survey areas and the data available. I will also have a quick look at some examples of research. And then, as I kind of intimated earlier, how to apply to access these data and then how to access international business data as well. In terms of general terms, really, I suppose, for business microdata, just some general aspects of it. I mean, ONS conducts a range of business surveys. The majority of them are collected under statute and are compulsory. Some data really is available for most business organisations in the UK, and these are divided into reporting units, enterprises and local units. And Chris will explain more about the structuring of those later on. Many of these datasets, you'll have low level geographies such as postcode, which is obviously very useful. And many of these business datasets can be linked together and again, there'll be a little bit more about this later on. Generally, what happens is with these surveys is the large businesses will receive a long form and small businesses will receive a shorter form. You know, in this case, they're the burden on a smaller company, really. Okay, so for ease, really, today, what we've done is we've kind of split some of these business datasets into sort of specific areas. So we look at, you know, broad areas that some of them fit into. So you can see here that we have innovation, research and development, earnings and skills, productivity and employment relations, international trade and foreign direct investment and the environment. So these are five broad areas that you may be interested in. So we're looking at those in fairly broad terms. Let's start with innovation, research and development. We can have a look at a few datasets that fall into this sort of bracket, if you like. Firstly, we have the e-commerce survey. Now that's the only survey to measure ICT activity and e-commerce within the UK businesses, including foreign-owned examples of UK businesses for most SIC codes, though there are a few excluded. And it covers approximately 5,000 to 10,000 businesses. Next, we have the IIA, the Investment and Intentual Assets Survey. This looks at UK businesses' introduction and service sectors with ten or more employees that are registered for that and or PAYE. It covers approximately 840 to 1180 businesses. As well as R&D, they're also a wider range of intangibles such as training, software, branding, design and business process, all those things are covered, as amongst other things. Next, we have a fairly widely used dataset, the burn of the business expenditure on research and development. This supplies data for policy purposes on science and technology and is used by the OECD and Eurostat for international comparisons. It covers approximately 3,500 to 26,000 organisations and it looks at in-house expenditure on research and development and how much is bought in. Last one in this list is the UKIS, the UK Innovation Survey. This is quite widely used, so we'll have a closer look at this one. The UKIS is a Europewide Community Innovation Survey and it's actually the main source of information on business innovation in the UK. It looks at general business information, good services and process innovation, the context for innovation and it's based on firms with more than ten employees. It covers approximately 16,000 enterprises. Also, what it does is it represents the UK's contribution to the Europewide Community Innovation Survey, the CIS, and it's purpose, really the purpose of the survey is to collect information about business innovation in the UK and an enterprise is defined as being active in innovation. If it has A, introduced a new or significantly improved good service or process, B, engaged in innovation projects that are not yet complete, C, engaged in longer-term innovation activities such as basic research and development or technology watch, D, had innovation-related expenditure or E, formally cooperated with other enterprises or institutions on innovation. It covers quite a lot, really. Some of the things that it does cover, some types of activity, we can see here, this is a snapshot really, internal and external R&D, computer hardware and software, training, changes to product service and design, market research, launch advertising, advanced machinery, acquisition of external knowledge, changes to product or service design. You can see it covers a fairly wide range of things. A little snapshot here of some of the research that's come off the back of using these data. This is really the tip of the iceberg, really, there's an awful lot more than this, just to give a sense of the range of things that can be covered here. I mean, we're looking really topic-wise here, immigration, persistence and change, financing versus knowledge, intangible assets, universities, and even within that stack five, you can see there's a fair range of things that can be done. As I say, that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, let's have a look at the next sort of crawled area. We're going to have a look at earnings and skills. So, firstly, we have the new earnings survey. There are various years available for this. They're not all secure access. There are panel data sets available by Secure Access for 1986 to 2002 and 1975 to 2016. There's also the Occupational Pension Scheme Survey. This is a detailed view of occupational pension provision in the UK by organisation, and it covers membership, contributions, transfers, increases, that kind of thing. Next, we have the monthly wages and salaries survey. This is the main source of information for three key indicators of short-term earnings generated by the Office for National Statistics, and these three are average earnings index, average weekly earnings, and the index of labour costs per hour. This is distributed monthly to approximately 8,800 businesses and covers about 12.8 million employees. Next, we have the National Employer Skills Survey. This much includes information about skills, deficiencies, and workforce development to inform government policy. Then, we have the Scottish Employer Skills Survey, which as the name would imply, really is just focusing on the same as the previous one, but just focusing on Scotland. Okay, one that's very widely used, which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail, is the annual survey of hours and earnings, also generally known as the ASH. Let's have a closer look at that one. Okay, so the ASH has a 1% sample of individuals, approximately 140,000 to 185,000, and that's from national insurance records. You can finish up the panel data set. The employer completes this, so it's considered sometimes to be more accurate than some surveys. It will include data on wages, paid hours at work, age, pension arrangements, occupation, industrial classification, that kind of thing. It also includes information on bonuses over time, pensions, gender, industry, occupation, all these kind of things. The low pay commission use ASH to provide evidence on the impact of the minimum wage, which is crucial for evidence-based recommendations. The official published data is not available at sufficient level of detail, so access to the micro data is essential. Okay, so here are some examples of some research that's come out of use of the ASH data. We can see here that, again, even within just a handful of examples, we're covering quite a range of things, so effects of road construction on wages, industry knowledge spillovers, productivity investments and profits, and the effects of incentive pay. So yeah, there's quite a wide range of things that can be done with the ASH. Let's have a look at our next broad area, which is productivity and employment relations, and we'll start with the annual respondents database and your business survey. So the ARDS, well, no, we've got the business structure of the database. We also have the monthly production inquiry as well, and the workplace and employment relations survey. Okay, so we're going to go through these and look at these in more detail. So let's firstly have a look at the ARDS, the annual respondents database. So this is a census of large businesses and a stratified sample of smaller ones. It's created out of other surveys, the ABI 1 and 2, which are converted into a single consistent format linked by IDBR references over time, and the data on two parts, employment and financial. You'll be able to see the differences in productivity between firms with different organizational structures when it will cover employment, turnover, purchases, capital and other expenditure in chemical sectors. It has over 100 key economic variables, and as I said, the data are in two parts. The ABS, the annual business survey replaced ARDS in 2008, although it only collects financial data. Employment data at this point was collected by the Business Registry and Employment Survey. Now let's have a look at the related data set, the ARD-X. I should have said obviously various geographies down to postcode, and that applies to many of the business data sets. So the annual respondents database, the ARD-X, was deposited in the summer of 2016. This was created by researchers at the OMS Virtual Microdata Laboratory, as was, which is now the SRS, and also staff at the University of West of England. And what this does is it allows users of ARD to continue their analysis, even though the annual business inquiry, which was used to create ARD, ceased in 2008, and it contains harmonized variables from 1998 to 2014. So it's essentially created from two OMS surveys, the annual business inquiry and the annual business survey. The ABI has an employment survey, ABI 1 and second survey for financial information, the ABI 2. Okay, so let's have a look at what have we had out of payout in terms of research. Again, there are some examples of publications that have come out, and there's a wide range of topics, even within this tiny snapshot. So we can look at this stuff on outward foreign direct investment strategies, regional selective assistance, migration of productivity, the effects of national minimum wage. And obviously there's an awful lot more you can do with it as well. This is merely a small snapshot, a small example. Okay, looking then at the business structure database, the BSD. This covers employment turnover, standard industrial classification codes, legal status, foreign ownership, and as birth and death codes. The data is divided into enterprises and local units, and as I said earlier, Christine will talk more about that and the structure of these datasets a little bit further on. It covers up to 4 million enterprises and up to 5.5 million local units. The geography is very, very wide on this. Everything from government office regions down to postcode level. Also the BSD contains a small number of variables for almost all business organizations in the UK, derived from an IDBL snapshot complemented with ONS business surveys. Let's now have a look at the monthly production inquiry. And this has information on turnover, export turnover, employees. And it provides 75.5% of the current price turnover data used in the compilation of the index of production. It also provides over 90% of the data used to estimate the number of employees in the production industries. The monthly production inquiry is designed really to meet the government need for the production of a monthly index of production, and it's used to estimate the change in the total number of employee jobs in the production industries each month. It also provides 16.5% of the output measure of GDP. So, yeah, again, very useful. Okay, so let's have a look at employment relations. So within this sort of category we already have the workplace and employment relations survey. This has a cross-section survey of managers, a cross-section survey of employee representatives, and another of employees. Now, within the first, the cross-section survey of managers, this really has information on recruitment and training, consultation and communication, employee representation, pay determination and payment systems, grievance and discipline, equal opportunities, and also things like work-life balance, health and safety, flexibility, establishment performance, change, attitudes to work. So it's quite far-reaching, really. Then we have the cross-section survey of employee representatives, and this has information on the structure of that representation at the workplace, the time spent on representative duties, means of communication with employees, incidence of negotiation and consultation over pay and other matters, involvement in redundancies, discipline and grievance matters, incidence of collective dispute and industrial action, union recruitment, that kind of thing. In the final cross-section survey, this one of employees, we're looking at things like working hours, job influence, job satisfaction and working arrangements, training and skills, information and consultation, employee representation and pay. So, yeah, again, quite a lot of information here. Some research topics, some research that's come out of using these. We have things here on multi-skilling, disability and earnings, workplace performance and loyalty in the gender pay gap, just within this small amount of examples. Okay, let's look at the international trade of foreign direct investment. In that broad area, we have a couple of examples, really. We have the annual inquiries of foreign direct investment, the AFDI, and the international trade in services. Let's have a better look at the AFDI. Okay, so that's the annual inquiries of foreign direct investment. So, what we have here is info on UK companies and their foreign affiliates. Inward FDI relates to foreign direct investment into the UK. As you might imagine, Outward FDI relates to investment by UK-based companies overseas. It covers approximately 8,000 to 21,000 enterprises for Outward and 2,000 to 35,000 for Inward. It's really the information on UK companies and their foreign affiliates includes country of operation, their industry, the percent of equity held, their operating profits, transactions, flows of equity capital, acquisitions and disposals of equity capital, the levels of investment. Surveys are sent to enterprise group heads. So, really, that means they're headquarters of a company which in turn may own a number of smaller companies based in the UK. The register from which the firms are sampled comes from a number of sources including HM, Customs and Revenue and O&S inquiries on acquisitions and mergers. Finally, let's have a look at the last board area, which is the environment. And here are a couple of examples of data sets in this area. We have the Low Emissions R&D Survey and we also have the Quarterly Fuel Inquiries. So, the Low Emissions R&D Survey looks at business research and development aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It also looks at expenditure on low emissions R&D, trialling and deploying the material, product or process in a working environment on a pre-commercial basis. It also looks at support from government incentives and lower energy consumption and renewable energy. Okay, so let's have a look at the Quarterly Fuel Inquiry. So, really, this is, as the name suggests, it's a Quarterly Survey among a panel of manufacturing plants where data are widely used both within government and industry and considered a vital source. And you can see here that the data are collected on a number of different fuel types coal, coke, gas oil, vibratory and electricity, et cetera. This, there's normally about 1,000 to 3,000 cases. And ultimately, it's a statutory inquiry that is conducted under section one of the Statistics and Trade Act of 1947. Okay, so having had a reasonable overview, I think, although fairly truncated to keep you manageable, an overview really of some broad areas that the business data sets fall into, we really now need to have a look and see how those data sets are structured. So, I will now hand you over to my colleague, Christine, and she will talk you through the next section. Thanks very much, James, and hello to you all. So, in this next section, as James mentioned, we're going to look at how these business data sets are structured. And the diagram you'll see on screen here just provides an overview of this. So, all of the business data sets that we hold are sampled from a file that the O&S hold, which is called the Interdepartmental Business Register. Now, this is really great because it means all of the data sets contain consistent identifiers, which enables you to link a range of different data sets. And this obviously provides a lot more opportunity for what you can research. The file itself, so the IDBR, is a list of all UK businesses with the exception of very small businesses, such as the self-employed. Other exceptions include businesses that generate turnover below the VAT threshold, or which do not pay employees via the pay-as-you-earn scheme. So, it really includes the vast majority of businesses across the UK. Within the IDBR, businesses are structured according to the three main identifiers you can see on the screen. So, we've got the Enterprise Group, the Enterprise and the Local Unit. And I'll just say something about these three to start with. So, the Enterprise Group is a group which owns a number of companies and makes the legal and financial decisions about those companies. Now, not all companies will belong to an Enterprise Group. Typically, where you have a company existing by itself, it won't have an Enterprise Group, but when you have a large number of companies, then they will be owned by an Enterprise Group. The Enterprise can be thought of as the company, and then below that, you have what are called local units, or you may be familiar with the term plants. And these are the premises that belong to the company where some economic activity occurs. So, for example, a retail outlet or a factory would be considered a local unit. We also have what we term reporting units, and these are created by ONS for the purposes of sending surveys to collect data. So, this essentially holds the main address to which the survey questionnaires are sent. Now, within the business surveys, data is generally collected for the Enterprise, but in some cases, you'll also have local unit data, and this is good because it means you can kind of aggregate data up at different levels. Most of the surveys will contain these identifiers within them, so you can, as I've said, use them to aggregate data up. And just to show you how this works in practice now, so you can see on the left-hand side of the screen, we have quite a simple company structure, if you like. So, we have one enterprise, the Island Café, which is a company. It has one local unit, which is the Island Café on Mersey Island. It's just one operating location, so we don't have an enterprise group in this case. And then, on the right-hand side of your screen, you can see a slightly more complex organization. So, we have an Enterprise Group Restaurants PLC, which owns two enterprises or two companies. The first is Fast Food Company, and the second is Dining Company. And as you can see, Fast Food Company has two local units, Burger World and Chicken Express, whereas Dining Company just has the one, the Vine. So, in terms of how this would look in the dataset, obviously, Fast Food Company and Dining Company will share the same Enterprise Group code, but they'll have different Enterprise Codes. And likewise, the local units, Burger World and Chicken Express will have separate local unit codes, but will share the same Enterprise Code. The Vine will have its own local unit code, and that will share the same Enterprise Code as Dining Company. So, hopefully, that just gives you a bit of an overview of what these data look like. As I've mentioned, one of the really positive things is that we can link these datasets, and this is what our researchers are using these days to do. So, here on screen, you can see just some of our most common linkages. So, a lot of researchers link the annual Survey of Hours and Earnings to the Workplace Employment Relations Survey. The Business Structure Database is, typically, or quite often, linked to the UK Innovation Survey. The Annual Respondence Database, often linked to the Workplace Employments Relations Survey. And then, again, the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is often linked to the Employer Skills Survey. It's great that we can link these datasets, but it does require permission from the data owner. So, if you wish to link these datasets, we are required to gain permission from ONS to do this. This can be done through your application process, which I'll talk a little bit about shortly. Or, if you gain access to these data and decide at a later date you want to link datasets, then we can contact the data owner to request that permission on your behalf, making you aware that the permission is required. So, we have an opportunity for questions at the moment. So, if you have any questions at all about the studies that James has talked about, or anything about the data linkage or the structure, then feel free to add them in via the question box on the right-hand side of your screen. So, I'll just give you a few minutes and we'll just see if we have any questions. We've got a question in relation to ITISP, which we haven't talked about in great depth today, but if you do have any specific queries about that, then we're very happy to kind of take them outside of today's session. On our website, we have a set of online forms and there's a specific form for data queries. So, if you do have some specific questions about that or want to find out more, then do feel free to get in touch. And we also have quite a lot of useful information on our website, so you can search for the study on our website and have a look at, you know, there's an abstract there, documentation, et cetera. So, there is some additional information there and, as I say, very happy to answer any specific questions you have about it. I have a comment just to say it's a helpful overview, so that's great. Yeah, and just another question about sharing slides. So, following the webinar, we will put a copy of the webinar on our website. We can send a link around as well, or if you have a look on our website, it's actually a section for webinars, then we can put them up and, yeah, you can have a look through the slides. Okay, great. There's a bit more opportunity for questions at the end as well. So, if we keep moving through now, and then we can come back after some more questions. So, I'm just going to go through now the application process for applying to access any of these business datasets. It's a four-step application process. So, the first step is finding the dataset you wish to use. The second step is applying to use it via the UK Data Service. And then the next, the final kind of two steps are completing an accredited researcher application form. And then once your application is approved, you would attend a training course and pass the associated test. So, let's have a look now at this in a bit more depth. So, your first step, finding the data, if you go to our website, which is www.ukdataservice.ac.uk, and you can see that there is a search box just at the top of the screen. The best thing is to go to this page and enter your search terms. So, you can see here that we have entered the term business innovation, and we have quite a lot of results here. We have 124 results. Fortunately, we're able to kind of narrow down the search a little bit more. So, you can see on the left-hand side of your screen, there are a number of different facets you can use. So, you have the date. We have some data that goes way back. So, we have some data on markets and fares in England and Wales to 15, 16. I don't think there's quite as much on the business data going back that far, but, yeah, certainly we've got some very old data and then lots more recent stuff. So, you can use these facets to select the date. We also have topics. So, in relation to the business data, there's economics, labor and employment. And then we have data types. So, UK survey data, for example, historical data, cohort and longitudinal studies. And then there is access. Three main options here, safeguarded, controlled or open. I will say that all of the business data is controlled data. So, that kind of, that classic will be automatically selected as it were. And then we have country. So, we have data from all over the world and you can select the data that you would like to look at. You can see in our next slide here we have narrowed down our search a little bit using the date, data type, access and country. And the first study we have is the UK Innovation Survey. So, let's have a bit of a closer look at that. Once you select the study, you'll come through to what's called a catalog record for the data set. And here you can see we have information on the principal investigators and also citation details that you can use when you're citing this study. Just scrolling down a little bit further. There's an overview of the topics covered by the study. There's an abstract which gives a summary of the study, including the geographical data available within it and how you can link it to other business studies. And then there's main topics as well. Just scrolling a little bit further down is information on coverage and methodology. So you can see information on time period, the country, spatial units, observation units and lots more. So, I guess when you're searching for these studies it's really useful to have a good look at the catalog record. It gives you a good overview of the study, the sampling process, that type of thing. So, yeah, have a look on our website for this information. And then just scrolling a little bit further down, you'll see there's a range of documentation really. And this is really useful as it gives you a list of all the variables included in the study, the sample sizes, user guides, questionnaires and other related files. This documentation should answer any questions you may have when you start to access the data as well. So it's always worth having a really good look through the documentation. Once you've found the data set or data sets you'd like to access, then if you click on the access data tab on there, which you can see at the moment on the top right-hand side of the screen, and then you'll be provided with instructions on registering your project, ordering any additional data sets if you wish to order more than one. And you'll also be asked to add any project colleagues. Once you've done this, the third step is becoming an ONS accredited researcher. And for this, you're completing the accredited researcher form and your project colleagues should do this as well. So everyone on the project completes one of these forms. The lead researcher should also complete the research proposal form. And then once the UK Data Service has these three, these sets of forms, then we will send them to the data owner for approval. Remember to include as much detail as possible. So on the accredited researcher form, you'll see that you're asked for information on your professional background. So it's worth including. All right, apologies for this. Pop up coming up. Yes, you'll be asked for information on any papers you've published, conference presentations, et cetera. And also your experience of using microdata, particularly confidential, sensitive, detailed microdata. So do include those details. And then on the research proposal form, which is the one completed by the lead researcher, you'll be asked for a description of your project, a justification of why you need these data in particular. You'll also be asked about whether you intend to link any data sets. And as I mentioned earlier, it is a requirement that the data owner gives you permission for any data linkage. So when you're completing your application, it's worth having to think about what linkage you might like to do and where possible, including all the details on your application form. If at a later date, once you've gained access to these data, you decide you want to carry out any linkage, then we can go back to the data owner to request permission. But obviously it's kind of more efficient if you put it on at the early stage. And then we'll also ask you for your research publications as well that you intend to create once you've had access to the data. The final step is the training. So once we've sent the forms to the data owner and we've gained approval, we will offer you a range of dates to attend a training course, which is normally run in London. It's a one-day training course. And at that training, we will cover five main areas, which you can see on the screen here. So we'll show you how to use the secure lab and how you can work safely and efficiently when you're using it. We'll also look at understanding data access and the importance of having good attitudes and engagement when you're using these data. And then our final module is around statistical disclosure control of outputs. So once you have completed the training and an associated online test, once you've passed that, we will issue you with your secure lab account credentials and then you then have access to these data sets. So that's a bit of an overview on the application process. There's lots of further information on our website, so you can have a look at that if you want to have a closer look. Are there any questions at this stage on the application process? I don't think there's anything further on the application process at the moment. I've mentioned lots of information on our website, so do have a look. And I think now I'm going to hand you over to my colleague Beata who is going to talk about access to international business data via the UK Data Service. Hello, good afternoon. I'm very glad to say that the UK Data Service is part of the International Data Access Network project, founded in 2018. The project is a collaboration between six research data centers from France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to facilitate research use of controlled access data between these research data centers and countries. At the moment, we have got two access points to international controlled data in our safe form here at the University of Essex. And that is one access point to facilitate on-site direct remote access to the German Institute for Employment Research Data. And I will refer to the German Institute for Employment Research short as IAB. And one data access point to facilitate on-site direct remote access to the French CASD data. For information regarding IAB data sets available via our safe form, please follow the link provided on this slide highlighted in blue. Data access information can be found at the IAB Data Access pages. Please follow those links. This is a screenshot of the overview of available IAB data. Please have a look at your own leisure. And here you can see a selection of central IAB data products, for example, LIAP. That is the linked employer employee data of the IAB. I'd like to draw your attention to the newest development regarding item in cooperation with the French Secure Access Data Center, CASD. The UK Data Service has now set up a secure data access point within the UK Data Service, safe from at the University of Essex to facilitate on-site direct remote access to the CASD data from the UK. To get an overview of all available CASD data, please follow the link. And to apply for the data, please contact the provided email address that would be service at casd.eu. This is a screenshot of the overview of available CASD data. It lists, for example, the financial links between Enterprise and Survey. But many more, so please have a look. And finally, I'd like to present you with a list of themes and data producers for your information. So you can see, for example, the Ministry of Labor is involved, the Ministry of Environment, there is data from the Central Agency for Social Security, and also from the Institute for Research and Information in Health, Economics, etc., etc. And also themes listed on the left-hand side. So it's a very rich data source. Please have a look. That's it from me. Are there any questions? No, I can't see any. Okay, then I'm handing back to my colleagues to rub up. Okay, thanks very much, Beata. I hope you've all found the webinar useful today. As I mentioned before, there is lots of information available on our website. So do take a look. And if you have any queries at all within these data, then do complete one of the online forms on our website, and then we can obviously help you and get back with some more information. So thanks again for your time today, and we'll speak to you again soon. Bye-bye.