It was with great sadness that the Authority Board and its staff learned of the death, on 26 December 2011, of Professor Sir Roger Jowell, CBE, the UK Statistics Authority’s Deputy Chair (Statistical System).

Sir Roger made an enormous contribution to all aspects of the work of the Statistics Authority, in particular the Authority’s independent scrutiny of UK official statistics. Sir Roger will be greatly missed by all of us.

Between November 2008 and December 2011, Sir Roger occupied the Authority’s Deputy Chair post, advising and supervising the Authority’s regulatory work, in monitoring, promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of all official statistics across the UK.

In 1969 Sir Roger co-founded Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR), which is now the London-based National Centre for Social Research. He was Research Professor at City University London and was the Founder Director of its Centre for Comparative Social Surveys.

In 2005 he and his team won the Descartes Prize “for excellence in collaborative scientific research”, and he was knighted for services to social sciences in 2008.