Government Social Research
Eland House
DCLG's aim is the creation of thriving, inclusive and sustainable communities in all regions. To achieve this, the Office's priorities are:
The Office relies on research and analysis to provide the evidence base to inform and support current and future Ministerial decisions and support policy development, delivery, and evaluation. The Office also builds links with the wider research community to develop capacity and strengthen the research-policy interface and supports public and private sector stakeholders to implement government policy, through provision of research evidence and research based guidance.
We rely on research to support delivery of our objectives and targets and build our evidence base to underpin decision-making and policy. We also need research to look ahead to anticipate future challenges and opportunities and to evaluate the effectiveness of our policy interventions and processes.
Our research objectives are:
1. To provide the evidence base to inform and support current and future ministerial decisions.
2. To support policy development and delivery.
3. To evaluate delivery outcomes and processes.
4. To build links with the wider research community to develop capacity and strengthen the research-policy interface.
5. To support public and private sector stakeholders to deliver government policy, through provision of research evidence and research based guidance.
DCLG analysis and research underpins the development and delivery of our policy and objectives:
To strengthen our focus on delivery we are reorganising teams to address the Office's delivery agenda and are developing a consolidated research and analysis programme across the Office. Our new Head of Analytical Services will ensure a close fit between our delivery agendas and our analytical plans.
A strong and robust evidence base informs the design and application of appropriately scaled and targeted public interventions to achieve intended policy outcomes. This evidence also provides the baseline for monitoring policies and evaluating their effectiveness.
Our research covers people, places and how they interact to address three essential questions - what are the issues? Who do they impact on? And what are the effects? Our evidence base is derived from a wide variety of sources: surveys and quantitative and qualitative research from our own analysts; commissioned through our research programmes; or obtained from other government departments and research providers. The Office has a strong commitment to research - social, statistical, physical science and economic - and all of these are integrated to inform policy.
Horizon scanning, anticipating change, and the exploration of future policy scenarios are essential to meet future risks, challenges, and opportunities.
The Office maintains links with others engaged in Futures work such as the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit. 'Futures thinking' and risk management is used by the Office to raise the level of strategic policy making and to develop a clear view of the challenges ahead.
The Office sponsors research on issues that may not be close to immediate policy priorities yet are important from a longer-term perspective. A New Horizons programme commissions research to provide us with an opportunity to anticipate and prepare for risks and opportunities and to be informed by a better understanding of present and future contexts for our policies. New Horizons research facilitates exploration of emerging issues that may impact on policy, challenge existing conventions and tackle cross-cutting issues. Issues can be researched from different perspectives and researchers can experiment with new methods and approaches, which may provide radical solutions.
We will use appropriate research methods to systematically investigate the effectiveness of policy interventions and processes and determine their contribution to the achievement of our objectives for improving the social and economic conditions of communities.
We will meet the requirements of Cabinet Office for evaluation of major policy initiatives and maintenance of a programme of policy evaluations. Our framework for evaluation provides for quality assurance of evaluations, promotion of best practice and maintenance of a record of DCLG policy evaluations for tracking and information purposes.
The purpose of our research is the creation of a sound evidence base upon which policy can be developed, applied, monitored, and evaluated. The primary customers are DCLG Ministers and colleagues supporting them in developing and implementing policy.
The policy customers for our research are involved in the research process from design of programmes through to the commissioning and running of individual research projects. Analysts work closely with policy makers, with strong connections between analytical and policy units providing a clear focus on delivery.
The Office's Agencies and the Government Offices for the Regions benefit from our research and guidance based upon it.
Most of the Office's policy is delivered through other organisations, both in the public and private sectors. These stakeholders are either direct users of guidance developed from our research or indirect users of the knowledge base established by it. Policy implementation often requires extensive collaboration or partnerships with other organisations, for example housing associations or homelessness charities, which can be either active participants in the research process or beneficiaries of the research findings.
The Office's overarching objective of creating thriving inclusive and sustainable communities in all regions links across individual policy areas in DCLG and extends into the remits of other Government Departments. In some areas of policy, for example Social Exclusion, departmental boundaries become artificial and research has a broader Government customer base.
The Office has a policy of making research open and where possible available to all. Other users of our research and data include the academic research community, interest groups and the general public.
DCLG analysis and research is delivered by twelve research and analytical units. Research is organised into six research programme areas. There is also a cross-cutting strand delivering the New Horizons programme and the DCLG/ESRC joint Research Studentship scheme.
The DCLG GSR community is made up of around ninety social researchers spread across the Office.
Seventy of these are located within the four main social research units:
Other social researchers are bedded out in economic and statistical analytical units and policy units.
Waqar Ahmad is the Chief Social Scientist and Head of Profession for social researchers in the Office.
Social researchers are usually involved in a number of topics within DCLG and need to be familiar with the legislative and policy background of the areas they deal with. Good working relationships with colleagues in policy units are important in achieving this.
A key role for researchers is the provision of advice and briefing to policy colleagues. Researchers provide an intelligence service to policy colleagues using research results and the Office's large-scale survey data.
Social researchers are responsible for translating policy questions into viable research projects in consultation with policy colleagues. Researchers design, commission, and manage these research projects and communicate the findings to policy colleagues. Researchers also design and execute specific pieces of analytical work in-house using a range of research data in order to address certain policy issues.
The results of the research and analysis are presented to colleagues in several formats -
The Building Regulation research programme supports the Department's aim to deliver thriving, inclusive and sustainable communities in all regions.
Building Regulations Division
A core feature of the Fire Service modernising agenda is the integration of fire prevention and firefighting intervention within a combined framework as the means of managing the businesses of individual fire authorities. The procedures and practices for doing this are the product of 5 years' research and development. They are evidence based and derive from the analysis of fire authority incident data, national fire statistics, census data, and other data from international sources.
Building Regulations Division
The local and regional government research programme makes a major contribution to the development and evaluation of policies associated with the milestones in Office's Public Service Agreement Target 4.
The National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal aims to improve services such as education, health, crime reduction, housing, and employment in the most deprived areas and to narrow the gap between these areas and the rest.
Social exclusion research is undertaken to add to the overall understanding of the causes, consequences, and the most effective interventions to prevent and tackle social exclusion.
The Sustainable Communities agenda cuts across many areas of the Office's responsibilities, but a significant proportion of the research and analysis to support the development and delivery of the Sustainable Communities action programme, including research on housing, homelessness, urban and planning issues, is undertaken within this programme area.
The RMD holds information on all research programmes and their associated projects. The information includes basic details such as aims, objectives, costs, and responsible officer for all projects. As projects progress it includes more details about progress and finally data on the results and evaluations of completed projects as well as details of publications.
The RMD holds information on all research projects that were live or commissioned on or after 01 November 2002, when the Freedom of Information Act came into force. Some programmes have voluntarily entered additional historic data, but only where the information is readily available.