Roger Halliday, Chief Statistician for The Scottish Government, shares how public service organizations across Scotland are ‘joining the dots’ between their datasets to help the most vulnerable members of society



In the UK today, much of the data public sector organizations collect about British citizens lives in silos. But as pioneering countries such as Estonia have shown in recent years, governments can greatly improve the quality and efficiency of the services they provide by breaking down those silos and working toward a 360-degree view of their citizens.



In this week’s Business of Data podcast episode, Roger Halliday, Chief Statistician for The Scottish Government, talks about the work he’s doing to help Scotland provide better services to its citizens with data.



“I’m responsible for whatever numbers come out of public bodies across Scotland,” Halliday explains. “There are 40 or so organizations, from schools to prisons to the health service and so on.”



“I’m [here] to tell the story of a nation in an objective way and in an open and transparent way,” he continues. “I’m responsible for making sure that the numbers are trusted, that they’re high quality and that they’re actually used to improve the lives of people and improve decisions that are taken.”



Two Ways Scotland is Improving Society with Data



The COVID-19 pandemic is one obvious example of how curating and sharing valuable datasets can help governments provide better services and make more informed policy decisions. Indeed, Halliday says this has been a significant focus for him over the past 18 months.



“[For] the last year, for example, I was leading up the COVID-19 analysis team for the Scottish government,” he says. So, we were modelling the epidemic, getting evidence together for the difficult decisions that governments around the UK [and] the world have had to make.”



But Halliday also highlights an initiative geared toward providing essential services to homeless people to illustrate some of the more strategic ways Scotland’s government is harnessing the power of data.



“We’ve been collecting data on homelessness for many years,” he says. “When [we] put it together, we found that 8% of people in Scotland have been homeless at one time or another over the last 15 years.”



“We thought, if you put that data together with other bits of information, then maybe we’ll be able to better help people who are in that situation,” he continues. “So, they’re able to link that data on homelessness with data on the health services that people that are homeless receive and, not surprisingly, found that [these] people have difficulty accessing health services and that their health is a lot poorer.”



Through analyzing these connected datasets, Scotland’s public service organizations have developed new ways for people to access key services they might otherwise have struggled to access if they were homeless.



Perhaps more interestingly, they have also identified ‘trigger events’ that frequently cause people to become homeless. This is helping them develop ways to predict which citizens are at risk