Analyst, journalist, editor and training on IT, healthcare, government and data
In an article for Computer Weekly this week, I highlighted four different official numbers for UK Covid-19 deaths on 30 April, from 548 to 769 (on the day, Boris Johnson said 674). The graph below shows how much these four measures vary.
Continue reading “Why case numbers don’t tell the whole Covid story”
Socitm’s annual President’s Conference usually takes place over two days somewhere in Britain. This year, the renamed President’s Week took place over five half-days somewhere on Webex. That longer duration provided the chance to try something new in covering the event.
On each of the five days I wrote and edited a four-page PDF newsletter, In Our View Daily, published at the end of the afternoon. This required significant preparation in advance, followed by intensive work every day by Socitm’s staff and myself. Continue reading “In Our View Daily: covering an online conference, fast”
First published in the May 2020 issue of Socitm In Our View magazine
Large numbers of Britons have recently started working from home (WFH) for the first time or have turned an occasional practice into a full-time one. The sudden shift from communal office to kitchen table or spare bedroom, swapping colleagues for partners, children and pets, will have been disruptive for many. Continue reading “How to work well from home”
It would be nice if all data was easily comparable and highly accurate, but it’s not. Office for National Statistics numbers on nationality of people in local authority areas are rounded to the nearest thousand to reflect the fact they are survey-based estimates. The ONS recently pointed out a range of problems involved in comparing this dataset to Home Office data on applications to the EU Settlement Scheme.
I still made these comparisons for PublicTechnology, because the differences between areas are huge. Excluding Irish citizens (who generally don’t need to apply to stay in the UK post-Brexit), the number of applications to the EU Settlement Scheme is equivalent to about three-quarters of 3.6 million European citizens in the UK. But for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire and Sevenoaks in Kent, it is around one-quarter.
Continue reading “EU Settlement Scheme needs to level-up locally”
There is a lot to be said for a British general election. It is brutally fast in delivering the people’s verdict. It uses technology that everyone can understand and is impossible to hack remotely. And in returning to Rick Wakeman’s prog-rock classic, the BBC has given it back its theme music.
But elections alone are a pretty thin form of democracy. Those who shifted from Labour to vote Conservative did so because of Jeremy Corbyn, because of the party’s far-left manifesto, because of Brexit, because they like Boris Johnson or a mix of these and others. The reasons will come out in surveys and interviews, but aren’t a formal part of the results and the government can ignore them. Continue reading “How to build democracy with technology away from elections”