Over £7 million for government data project

UCL is part of a consortium that has been awarded £7.6 million to provide academic researchers with access to government data. The new Administrative Data Research Centre for England (ADRC) will enable information collected by government departments and other agencies, such as tax, education and health data, to be shared with researchers. The centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will support approved academic projects and use anonymised data, accessed in a secure environment. Professor Ruth Gilbert, Deputy Director of the ADRC at UCL, says: "By harnessing the power of these large datasets for research we hope to improve understanding of people's lives and to build a stronger evidence base for policy and service development in the UK. We will have unprecedented access to information that will help us tackle some of the most pressing issues in society." The Administrative Data Research Centre for England will be led by the University of Southampton and run in collaboration with UCL, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the University of London's Institute of Education. It will be one of four such centres for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which with the newly formed Administrative Data Service (ADS) acting as a 'gatekeeper' to the research data, will form the Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN). We hope to improve understanding of people's lives and to build a stronger evidence base for policy and service development in the UK.