 The research councils look at impact as a demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes the society and the economy. When David Willits was in charge, David Willits said impact is what you want to make of it, but just tell us what it is. And I think we have to deal with some of that conundrum when we're thinking about impact within the ESRC investments. Large investments like those funded by the ESRC had the opportunity of bidding for funding for impact officers. And we have one, Victoria Moody, who's sitting here somewhere, who's the lynchpin behind this event. And she's really helped make sure that we had a really exciting panel of speakers to talk to you about the effect of the data infrastructure. So for those of you who don't know, the nearest analogy to a data service is a library. There are lots of differences, but we provide an end-to-end service benefiting all the players in the data lifecycle. And sometimes we have difficulty in articulating those benefits, and so that's one of the reasons why we're having this discussion so we can understand better about how people outside of the service understand the impact that we have on them. So what do we do? In a nutshell, we acquire data from a wide range of data creators, national government, researchers, international governmental organizations being the main three, but we also deal with the third sector, with local government and commercial organizations. And we benefit the researchers in these organizations by curating their data and making it available to the right researchers. I'm using the word researcher very liberally here. I mean research, whatever it is, not just within higher education. And all these organizations need to do is to provide us with data and sort out the legal side with us, and we can make it available for reuse. There's no real cost to the data owner. We also ingest data into our preservation systems, ensuring that it can be used in the future. And for some data we provide online interfaces and others can just be downloaded and some can be used in a secure room. And we tailor the access mechanisms to suit the needs of the researchers and the owners of the data. Eligible researchers access data freely. There's no cost to them. And with more than 7,000 data collections, we really have to invest in metadata for discovery and we invest in metadata for harmonization. Our question bank provides access to the full text of over 700,000 questions asked in surveys over the last 40 years or so. And we versioned DOI all of our data sets, providing easy to use citations. And having more than 7,000 high quality data collections in one place means serious researchers don't have to search for long. So we're also one of the pioneers of secure access, access to data which has a risk of disclosure, a data which can't be made open within secure environments. And we train the researchers to use these systems and we manually check their outputs. And we provide comprehensive user support to the users of these data. So all of our activities, and I've just given a really brief flavor, occur in order for researchers to do better research. Thus our primary impact is to facilitate the impact of others. And that's the focus of this discussion. And you can read more on what I think about this. I've just had a post on the LSE impact blog and it goes into this area in a lot more detail. Have a look at that and have a look at the annual reports for the UK data service that are outside on the tables. But I think there are huge and demonstrable benefits associated with having a robust end-to-end data service infrastructure. And the primary value is the influence across the whole of the life cycle of the data. Planning surveys and other data collection exercises can be enhanced by understanding how data might be accessed in the future. And knowing about robust and assured methods for secure data access allows us to confidently be consulted about secure access and so on. All of our activities, even what seems to be the lowliest, contribute to a trusted and world-class data infrastructure and also provides a significant and quantifiable return on investment. So in our briefing to the five speakers that we have here today, we asked them to give their perspectives on the use of data in their work to discuss how data made available through the data service supports the aims of their stakeholders and also to give us an opportunity to make more of an impact as a world-class data infrastructure.