Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

The CSO is very conscious of the need to provide the best evidence possible to inform decision-making. Mr. Paul Morrin is the newly appointed assistant director general for statistical co-ordination and he is working directly with the Department to look at all available data sources. One of the strengths of the CSO is cross-referencing and linking multiple data sources. We have noticed the fragmented nature of the data sources and there is significant difficulty in linking the various sources together because we lack the data infrastructure to identify the same house across individual data sources. This is a key problem for us. One of the answers is to ensure we capture the Eircode postcode in all available data sources so that we can pull together the data on house A with the same house on a different data source. Individual data sources are of value but when one combines them their value increases significantly. Some 50% of our outputs are now blended outputs, where data linkage has been done.

Mr. Morrin and his team will look at the available data sources, not just in respect of housing but beyond, in education and other areas. We will spend time assessing the sources to see what value can be added by linking certain sources with others. We see ourselves not as producers of data but as producers of insight and evidence. Increasingly, national statistical institutes around the globe are shifting their mindsets from the production of statistics to the production of insight, because statistics are not relevant without insight. A key part of that is linking data sources, which requires national data infrastructure to be in place. It is a long road and our experience of developing administrative data sources for statistical purposes is that it takes time and a lot of intensive work and resources. We are now growing the resources and are devoting a team to this block of work. We will look at all opportunities to improve the range of insight and evidence available for policymakers who are trying to get behind the statistics.