In its majority the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee (NSDEC) consists of independent members. The relevant expertise of members allows for independent challenge and scrutiny ensuring advice is impartial and credible.
Dame Moira Gibb was a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority Board between 2008 and early 2018 and has had a distinguished career in local government and social services. Until December 2011 she was Chief Executive of the London Borough of Camden and chaired the Government Taskforce on the Social Work Profession in 2009. She is a non-executive member of the Board of NHS England and a former Civil Service Commissioner, and chaired an independent Church of England review into child sexual abuse.
Robert Bumpstead is Deputy Director with responsibility for the UK Statistics Authority’s policy secretariat and Deputy Chair of the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee. Rob has worked in official statistics for more than 15 years, including spells in social survey research, analysis and statistics. Topics he has worked on include statistics and research about mental health, ethnicity and identity, housing, labour market and population. Rob’s current role includes supporting the Authority Chair, the National Statistician and his three deputies and developing policy around access, use and sharing of data for statistics and research purposes.
Stephen Balchin is Head Workforce Information and Analysis at the Department of Health and Social Care where he’s responsible for analytical support in decision making around how we make sure we have the right number of people to run the health and social care systems. He was previously Head of Profession for Statistics at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) where he was responsible for a range of statistical outputs including Family Resources Survey, estimates of Fraud and Error in the benefit system and the wide range of statistics based on DWP’s benefit system. He’s had a range of posts in DWP including leading a team providing analytical support to Finance and Human Resources, Lead Analyst for Social Justice looking at most disadvantaged in the Labour Market and developing analysis on older workers. Before working in DWP he worked in No 10, HM Treasury providing distributional analysis on taxes and benefits and in ONS.
Marion Oswald is the Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Fellow in Law at the University of Northumbria, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute. She is a solicitor (non-practicing), with previous experience in legal management roles within private practice, international companies and UK central government including national security. She has worked extensively in the fields of data protection, freedom of information and information technology, having advised on a number of information technology implementations, data sharing projects and statutory reforms. She researches the interaction between law and digital technology and has a particular interest in the use of information and innovative technology by criminal justice bodies and the wider public sector. Marion chairs the West Midlands Police & Crime Commissioner and West Midlands Police data ethics committee, and is an executive member of the British & Irish Law, Education & Technology Association.
Isabel Nisbet has been appointed to National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee for the duration of one year. Isabel has had a career in senior roles in government and regulation, particularly of medicine and education. She was the first CEO of Ofqual, the regulator of examinations and qualifications in England. She is an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and serves on a number of boards, including that of Qualifications Wales and the Board of Governors of the University of Hertfordshire. Her academic background is in philosophy and she has engaged throughout her career in ethical issues, particularly medical ethics. She also holds a ministerial appointment to the Home Office’s National DNA Database Ethics Advisory Group.
Colin Godbold is a lay member of the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory committee and has been appointed for the duration of two years.
Colin is an independent consultant specialising in delivery of large scale information technology and organisational change programmes. Formerly a partner in IBM’s consultancy and services practice, Colin has had a successful business career spanning over 30 years, during which he has led the delivery of many complex programmes in both public and private sectors. He has worked closely with a wide variety of UK government departments and currently holds a number of advisory appointments, including vice chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee and lay member of the Administrative Data Research Network Board. He was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Durham and is a Chartered and European Engineer and a fellow of the British Computer Society. Colin has a particular interest in the security and privacy of personal data stored in digital systems.
Vanessa Cuthill has been reappointed for the duration of three years. She is currently Director of Research at The British Academy, having previously held senior roles in research councils and universities. From 2016 until 2019 Vanessa was Director of Research and Enterprise at the University of Essex, and immediately prior at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). During her time at the ESRC she has commissioned and led projects establishing social sciences data resources including the Administrative Data Research Network and longitudinal surveys; and advised on health and social data legislation developments and policy, working closely with a wide range of government departments and other research funders. Vanessa has also worked at the University of Bath, during which time she established their social sciences ethics committee.
Dr. Emma Uprichard is Reader at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. She is co-editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology and board member of the journal Complexity, Governance and Networks. Her work is driven by the methodological challenge of studying complex social systems across time and space and developing methods suitable for policy planning. She led the University of Warwick’s Nuffield/ESRC/HEFCE Q-Step bid (£1.3mil) and subsequently set up what is now the Warwick Q-Step Centre, part of a trail-blazing initiative designed to promote a step-change in quantitative social science training in the UK. She is recipient of the IBM Faculty Award for a project on ‘Big Data and Real Time Analytics: Ethics and Data Linkage’ and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in which she is exploring the use data science for government policy planning and practice. She is also co-investigator of CECAN – the ‘Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus’ (led by Prof. Nigel Gilbert), a £3m national research centre funded and supported by the ESRC, Defra, BEIS, NERC, EA, and FSA which is tasked with, among other things, developing a range of cutting-edge methods for complex evaluation. She is currently writing a monograph on Time and Method (Routledge), which reflects on the methodological im/possibilities of capturing social change empirically.