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.
Vanessa Cuthill has been reappointed for the duration of three years. She is currently Director of Research and Enterprise at the University of Sussex, having taken up this post in September 2022. Previously, Vanessa has been Director of Research at The British Academy, 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.
Colin Godbold is a lay member of the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory committee and has been appointed for the duration of five 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 previously held a number of advisory appointments, including Vice Chair of the DWP’s Social Security Advisory Committee and a 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.
Monica Magadi is a Professor of Social Research and Population Health at the University of Hull. Her academic background is in Demography and Social Statistics. She has more than 30 years of international research experience in global public health and serves in various international advisory roles, including for the WHO, and currently co-Chairs the Research Projects Review Panel (RP2) of the WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research (RHR). Her research largely involves statistical modelling of large-scale complex demographic and health datasets (global and UK-based), including linked survey/administrative datasets. Besides statistical modelling, her methodological research expertise includes research design, especially surveys and evaluation/intervention research. She has experience in qualitative and mixed methods research as well. Monica’s long-standing career in UK academia has involved serving in various leadership roles, including Research Directorship, with significant research ethics and data protection responsibilities.
Isabel Nisbet has been appointed to the National Statistician’s Data Ethics Advisory Committee for the duration of five years. 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. In October 2021 Isabel was appointed by Northern Ireland Ministers to a panel reviewing education in Northern Ireland. Her academic background is in philosophy and she has engaged throughout her career in ethical issues, particularly medical ethics. She is co-opted to the Home Office’s Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group.
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.