The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has revealed it is working on a pilot in the use of a data trust to share information on the labour market.
It said this has already enabled its DWP Digital team to explore data accessibility with other government departments with an interest in the issue – the Department for Education, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy and HM Revenue and Customs.
The exercise is building on the work of the Open Data Institute (ODI) on data trusts and the Alan Turing Institute on data safe havens.
A data trust provides a legal structure for independent, third party stewardship of data for the benefit of a group of organisations or people.
The pilot project is focused on proving the legal, digital and data protection framework for a collective engagement between the government departments in sharing labour market data while rigorously protecting the privacy of people who own the data.
It is also aimed at helping government bodies to effectively learn from data to improve services and dynamically respond to changes in the labour market.
Maximising employment
Paul Lodge, chief data officer at DWP (pictured), said: “DWP is committed to maximising employment across the country to aid the economic recovery.
“It’s also the case that other government departments need granular insights into everyday labour market developments, especially those affecting local areas, specific sectors and disadvantaged groups. For example, the Department for Education’s National Skills Fund or the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s UK Innovation Strategy which seeks to enhance productivity across the economy, and in turn bring jobs, growth and prosperity.
“Based on the need to collaborate on shared outcomes, we are actively exploring whether thematic data trusts can help government as a way of sharing pertinent and timely data to enable better outcomes.”
Lodge added: “Currently data sharing arrangements between departments are lengthy to put in place or amend, and resource intensive. As a result, the subsequent insight is often well behind the pace of change, especially in something as dynamic as the UK labour market.
“Government analysts and service delivery teams seeking data are unable to easily understand what data is held by others or confidently navigate their governance processes. As a result, the department data silos across government make it hard to deliver joined up interventions at the speed needed for our ambitious policy agenda.
Accessibility and discoverability
“To be effective, a data trust requires the data to be accessible and discoverable, and the onward extraction of any results need to be monitored and governed. That means asking new technical, procedural and legal questions of our data to see whether a data trust can help to deliver greater collaboration or what changes would be needed.
“In line with Mission 1 of the National Data Strategy, we want to move away from batch file data sharing and towards in-place data shares, whereby data is shared from a single source and re-used many times without unnecessary copying.
“This approach avoids creating new data warehouses and drives up data quality across government by having a single source of truth.
“We are testing this concept over the course of the pilot when assessing data from other government departments and when drawing on their existing internal data catalogues. This is enabling us to test what improves discoverability and interoperability of data.
“The security controls for any platform will align to industry best practice and include specific department requirements. All designs and processes across the project have been developed in line with our ‘privacy by design’ principle and informed by the National Cyber Security Centre’s cloud security principles.”
The pilot is being financed through HM Treasury’s Shared Outcomes Fund that encourages departments to work collaboratively across policy areas. It is scheduled to run until the end of March when it will be fully evaluated.
