Prepared by: Phyllis Macfarlane, Director BSC
Summary
The Lievesley Independent Review of UKSA had emphasised the importance of User Engagement to ensure delivery of statistics for the public good and had highlighted the manner in which some users had felt the existing engagement strategy to be unhelpful. Professor Lievesley had therefore recommended the introduction of a tri-annual Statistics Assembly to provide a more user focus to UKSA’s engagement activities.
This document provides Better Statistics’ suggestions as to the future of User Engagement, following the successful Assembly on the 22nd January and the subsequent Independent Report[1] on the Assembly. To formulate our contributions to the topics reviewed at the Assembly we had conducted a public consultation amongst our associates involving an online survey, followed by a video meeting to discuss the survey results. This had led to 8 suggestions which we put to the delivery group and it is pleasing to note that these were all considered and that the agenda was very largely driven by user preference as expressed through the Call for Contributions. It should be noted, however, that there was no user input into the decision as to when to hold the Assembly, nor as to the decision to confine it to one day. Both of which decisions may have limited its overall potential value.
Meanwhile we consider that the attention to “user preference” applied to determine the topics for discussion, was the primary reason for the success of the Assembly and Better Statistics recommends that these words should be at the heart of a new UKSA Strategy for User Engagement to be developed to address all the issues raised in the Independent Report. To this end we recommend that the NSEUAC should be reconstituted as the genuinely independent Statistics User Council identified by UNECE and EU guidance on national statistical systems and as originally proposed by the users discussing the future for User Engagement with UKSA during 2021and 2022. Such a body could then contribute directly to the new strategy, providing the public with the confidence of an independence not presently conveyed by the title “National Statistician’s Expert User Advisory Committee”.
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