National data infrastructure
Frances Ruane, Director of economic think tank ESRI, highlights the importance of good data in measuring the effectiveness of the reform of public services and the need to build a cross-departmental national data infrastructure.
Government departments and agencies are engaged in major reforms at present, in line with the Government’s reform agenda. It is expected that the implementation of this agenda will have a major bearing on how departments and agencies work in the future.
A major focus of the reform agenda is increased efficiency in the delivery of public sector services. We will need to measure the progress that is made or not made. The same type of data that would allow such measurement can also provide the evidence base to support better policy-making. As the public discourse calls for more open and transparent government, ministers and policy-makers need evidence, both to demonstrate achievements and to provide arguments for planned policy changes. Indeed, they are increasingly exposed to criticism for promoting service changes or claiming service improvements if they cannot provide the supporting evidence.
So the question now is how to get the evidence to measure improvements in service delivery and to support good policy-making. The evidence requires both data and analysis. Let me concentrate here on data quality.
Over the past two decades, there has been a great increase in the volume of survey data collected by the CSO. However, there has been much less progress in the CSO’s development of data sets from administrative records within departments and agencies. Ireland now needs cross departmental commitment to build a national data infrastructure (NDI). In fact, failure to do so will leave Ireland’s ministers and public servants at a severe disadvantage when compared with their EU colleagues.
The National Statistics Board has promoted the NDI in recent years, most specifically in two documents: The Irish Statistical System: The Way Forward and Joined Up Government needs Joined Up Data. NDI involves public bodies agreeing and implementing a consistent code of practice and standards for the gathering, use and dissemination of statistical data. The active engagement of the key departments that deal with individuals and families (Health, Education and Social Protection) is vital, as their exceptionally large sets of administrative records can be used to evaluate progress in service delivery and generate data needed for policy-making.
To make this happen, all Irish administrative data must make systematic use of ‘unique identifiers’ (that is, a unique code for each individual, business and building), in recording engagements with individuals and businesses.
The creation of unique identifiers has been discussed in Ireland for decades. Data protection arguments have been used to delay this development. However, other countries have clearly demonstrated that these data protection issues are surmountable. And this can be done very quickly and cost effectively. Unique identifiers for businesses can be built from existing registers. Geo-coding of all locations is possible. For individuals, it would seem to make sense to extend systematically the use of the Personal Public Service Number (PPSN), which is currently used only sporadically as an individual identifier in the public sector.
With individual identifiers, government can target resources efficiently to meet national and local demands for, say, health and education, while building identifiers are essential for a household register (e.g. for property taxation). In fact, the NDI is essential if we are to measure accurately the extent and impact of the whole reform agenda.
With a proper NDI in place, we can use analytical tools to exploit these data. They can be simple mapping and descriptive tools, which would be very helpful for generalists within departments. They can also be more sophisticated tools, used by specialists and researchers, to explore behavioural responses to complex policy interventions and schemes. The full potential of the NDI for progress awaits us.
