Office for National Statistics: Operating Costs
(asked on 5th February 2024) - View Source
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what was the cost of running the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Integrated Data Service in 2023; how many projects were active in the Integrated Data Service in 2023; and what are the equivalent figures for the ONS Secure Research Service for the same period.
The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.
A response to the Noble Lord’s Question of 5th February is attached.
The Lord Clement-Jones CBE
House of Lords London
SW1A 0AA
13 February 2024
Dear Lord Clement-Jones,
As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking (1) what was the cost of running the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Integrated Data Service in 2023; (2) how many projects were active in the Integrated Data Service in 2023; and (3, 4) what are the equivalent figures for the ONS Secure Research Service for the same period (HL2184).
The approximate costs of running the nascent Integrated Data Service in 2023 were £4,200,000, including infrastructure costs that permit future scaling of the service.
There were 20 active projects within the Integrated Data Service in 2023.
The cost of running the ONS Secure Research Service in 2023 were £7,000,000.
The Secure Research Service had a total of 842 projects during 2023. On average, there were around 600 live projects at any one time during 2023.
Equivalent operating costs and projects numbers should be interpreted with caution. The Integrated Data Service (IDS) is in development and currently operates within a BETA maturity phase. In September 2023 IDS received Digital Economy Act (2017) accreditation for data provision, making IDS the first cloud-native trusted research environment to be accredited for data provision under the legislation and opening the opportunity to scale.
The IDS is built to be future proofed, to better enable the Government’s data sharing agenda in a more effective and efficient way. The IDS will grow at pace over the remainder of the programme with a pipeline of additional and transformational capability, data, projects and users which exceed the capabilities of the Secure Research Service (SRS). Improved data integration and cross-sector collaboration enabled through cloud technologies will drive significant uptake.
The SRS is a long-standing and mature Trusted Research Environment which has operated in its current form since 2017, having previously operated as the Virtual Microdata Laboratory (VML) from 2004. The SRS grew rapidly upon achieving DEA accreditation in 2019, which enabled greater expansion of its data catalogue and user base. An improved trajectory is anticipated for the IDS with many SRS’s data sets, as well as projects (where applicable) migrating to the IDS as part of a transition that is underway.
Yours sincerely.
Professor Sir Ian Diamond