Recommendation 20

HM Government Accepted

The Spatial Data Unit (SDU) was established under the Levelling Up White Paper to transform data use to inform place-based decision-making across central and local government, and support Levelling Up delivery. The SDU is making more data available at a granular level to support Levelling Up policy and delivery by national and local partners. This includes leading the subnational expenditure project and data publication (outlined in question 1 above) and working in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to strengthen local statistics through the transformation of economic and social indicators. Published outputs from the SDU-ONS partnership include neighbourhood (‘Lower Super Output Area’, or LSOA) time series estimates of Gross Value Added (GVA) published in January 2023, providing the most detailed data available to date on local economies. The SDU-ONS collaboration has also improved regional estimates of government expenditure on R&D published in April 2023, and work in progress includes improvements to the granularity of Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) and Household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) statistics. SDU is also working with ONS to expand the use and availability of new data sources and data science methodology, including publishing ‘isochrone’ data on the accessibility of local areas by public transport. The SDU will continue to make available information on its planned publications, and those through its partnership with the ONS, as these are confirmed. These outputs will take the form of quality assured statistics and management information data and reports. New statistical outputs will initially be labelled as ‘Experimental Official Statistics’, with assessment under the Code of Practice for Statistics carried out before the unqualified ’Official Statistics’ label is applied. The remit of the SDU extends beyond the external publication of data, working closely with teams to address data gaps, generate spatial insights, and produce innovative data visualisations and modelling. More recently, this includes collaborative work on Levelling Up partnerships and wider support for ministers. The SDU role also includes supporting department and MCA data capability – the skills, infrastructure & tools – needed for a deep focus on placed-based working. The SDU also plays an important role in collaborating and ensuring join up with partners inside and outside government at local to national level, including the ONS, Treasury, No.10 Data Science, other government departments and local authorities. The SDU is also supporting interactive tools to inform place-based decisions, including the ONS’ development of the Explore Subnational Statistics service, as set out in the Government Statistical Service Subnational Data Strategy. The first iteration of this is the Subnational Indicators Explorer, a publicly available tool that enables users to find out more about local areas across the UK. It provides transparent access to a range of subnational indicators available at local authority level in one place and supports local decision and policy making and is updated on a quarterly basis.