Recipient organisationOffice for National StatisticsSource-published name: Office for National Statistics
Funding£5.2M
PeriodJul 2021 — Mar 2022
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
The UK government is linking together its own administrative records—tax filings, benefit claims, school records, and health data—and letting accredited researchers access the combined datasets in a secure, de-identified form. This matters because government departments currently hold vast amounts of data in separate silos, making it nearly impossible to answer questions that cut across policy areas. For example, understanding how changes to housing benefit affect children’s school attendance requires linking data from two different departments. Without that link, policymakers rely on guesswork or expensive bespoke surveys. If ADR UK succeeds, researchers will be able to produce robust evidence on how social and economic policies actually play out in people’s lives. This could improve decisions on everything from unemployment support to public health interventions. The infrastructure itself—the secure data linkage and access system—will quietly underpin better policy design for decades, much as census data has done for two centuries. The project is not fundamental science; it is an applied data infrastructure that aims to make government smarter and more responsive.
View original technical description
ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) is a partnership transforming the way researchers access the UK’s wealth of public sector data, to enable better informed policy decisions that improve people’s lives. By linking together data held by different parts of government, and by facilitating safe and secure access for accredited researchers to these newly joined-up data sets, ADR UK is creating a sustainable body of knowledge about how our society and economy function – tailored to give decision makers the answers they need to solve important policy questions. ADR UK is made up of three national partnerships (ADR Scotland, ADR Wales, and ADR NI) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which ensures data provided by UK government bodies is accessed by researchers in a safe and secure form with minimal risk to data holders or the public. The partnership is coordinated by a UK-wide Strategic Hub, which also promotes the benefits of administrative data research to the public and the wider research community, engages with UK government to secure access to data, and manages a dedicated research budget. ADR UK is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), part of UK Research and Innovation. To find out more, visit adruk.org or follow @ADR_UK on Twitter. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) plays a crucial role in sourcing, linking and curating public sector data for ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK), ensuring that all data is accessed by researchers in a safe and secure form. To support the ADR UK partnership, ONS is expanding and improving its established Secure Research Service (SRS) – the organisation’s facility for providing secure access to de-identified public sector data for research – and significantly increasing the range of administrative data available. ONS will focus on increased data reuse to deliver efficiencies to government departments (who only need to provide data once), and maximise the use of this data by identifying shared priorities and objectives with government departments.
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