In Common: Why is it so hard to find data about Scotland?

Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal. To receive the newsletter direct to your inbox every week click here.

My role as head of policy and research here at Common Weal is one that demands a firm grasp of data and statistics. Not only what they mean but how to find the data that will back up or refute any question I might have regarding policies in Scotland.

It is important – before a policy is implemented – that we know if it is needed, what impact it might have and whether or not there might be unintended consequences. Simply announcing a policy without that first basic check runs the risk of government chasing itself to make something work because they’ve made a promise based on a whim and now need to work out how much it’ll cost to make happen.

This is precisely what happened late last year with the Scottish Government’s announcement of their intention to freeze Council Tax and to “fully fund” that freeze. At the time that promise was made, they had no idea what it might cost to pay local authorities to do that (the Fraser of Allander Institute later estimated that it could cost between £148 million and £417m; the Scottish Budget a couple of months later earmarked just £140m to “fully fund” the policy).

Once a policy is implemented, it is important to keep gathering the data so that we can work out if the policy is having the desired impact and is actually solving the problem that prompted it. For example, Rishi Sunak’s promise to “halve inflation” came out without any detail about what he’d do to achieve that or any real analysis since around what impact what he did actually had on inflation (convenient given that analysis of the policy said that inflation was likely to halve even if he did nothing at all).

So it’s in that context that I found myself looking for some data on Council Tax (unrelated to the freeze policy and I’ll tell you more about the project in a future column). The question “How much Council Tax is paid in Scotland?” is an easy one. It’s right there in GERS and several other government budget documents (£2.7 billion in 2022-23, if you’re interested).

The question “How much Council Tax is paid to a particular local authority?” is moderately easy. Each council produces its own annual report in a standard format. However the question “how much does every council in Scotland receive in Council Tax?” turned out to be frustratingly difficult to answer.

The lack of standardisation of council websites makes it tricky to find all 32 annual reports and I didn’t really want to go through each of them to find a single point of data anyway. Surely, there would be somewhere on the Scottish Government’s website that would have already collected it? I eventually found it just a few minutes before the deadline I set myself before going to do it manually. It’s buried in the middle of a much larger collection of local government financial statistics. A rich dataset, but not one that is easy to navigate and the website it is on is formatted for text reports, not statistical data tables. Eurostat, this is not.

READ MORE: Scotland urged to learn from 'exemplar' Faroe Islands after MP's trip

My colleagues have reported similar frustrations in trying to access data – from questions around the number of civil servants employed in various Scottish departments through issues around import and export data, Scotland’s data landscape is fragmented, scattered and far too often non-existent.

This is particularly problematic in that the solution was proposed by Common Weal in 2017 and actually adopted as SNP policy (with an overwhelming majority) in 2019. A Scottish Statistics Agency should be set up whose job it is to survey the Scottish data landscape (including statistics produced on Scotland by bodies outwith the Scottish public sector, be they Scottish academic or private organisations, or bodies outwith Scotland like the UK’s ONS or Europe’s Eurostat), to fill gaps in provision if and where they are identified and, most crucially of all, to act as a portal to access that data so that all of us – government, activist and lay public – can easily see how the country is being measured and how we compare to our peers.

Why does data matter?

Consider the counter-example to all of this. If we don’t have the data, then any politician can invent a problem on the fly and convince you that they are the person to fix it. When they publish the details of their policy, they can tell you it’s affordable and their opponents can tell you it’s not. You’ll have no way of knowing who is correct.

And then, after the policy is in place, you won’t be able to tell if it helped, hurt or made no difference at all. That might be convenient to some politicians who want to make the headline of the day disappear but if we want a properly functioning democracy in this country then we need transparency in all things. Not just in the decisions that affect us, but also in the data that backed them up.