Our partnerships - Office for National Statistics (2024)

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is funded to expand and improve the Secure Research Service (SRS) as part of the Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) partnership – an Economic and Social Research Council investment. ADR UK is transforming the way researchers access the UK's wealth of public sector data, to enable better informed policy decisions that improve people's lives.

By linking together data held by different parts of government and facilitating safe and secure access for accredited researchers to these newly joined-up and de-identified data sets, ADR UK is creating a sustainable body of knowledge about how our society and economy function, which is tailored to give decision makers the answers they need to solve important policy questions. ADR UK is made up of four national partnerships: ADR England, ADR Northern Ireland, ADR Scotland and ADR Wales, plus the ONS. Together they ensure that data provided by UK government bodies are accessed for research purposes, with minimal risk to data holders or the public.

The partnership is coordinated by a UK-wide Strategic Hub, which also promotes the benefits of administrative data research to the public and the wider research community, engages with the UK Government to secure access to data, and manages a dedicated research budget.

More information is available on the ADR UK website.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides the UK Data Service (UKDS), based at the University of Essex, with copies of the de-identified data it makes available to provide additional secure access for the academic research community.

The UKDS uses the same route for research access as the ONS - the Accredited Researcher Scheme. Additional data from academia are also available, including the British Birth Cohort studies. Details of the data available and application process are available on the UKDS SecureLab webpage.

The UKDS also provides access to an extensive collection of safeguarded survey microdata from the ONS, which only requires simple registration. See the UKDS Safeguarded access webpage for details.

The CeLSIUS team provides support to UK-based users of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study (LS) from the academic, voluntary and public sectors. It is based at University College London (UCL). If you are employed in one of these sectors and would like to use the LS, CeLSIUS staff will help you through the application process. In addition to becoming an accredited researcher under the Digital Economy Act 2017 (DEA), you will also need to complete the LS supplementary form, which is under “Related downloads”.

More information is available on the CeLSIUS website.

If you are interested in using the LS but are not employed in one of these sectors, or are based outside the UK, please contact the LS Development Team on: LongitudinalStudy@ons.gov.uk.

Health Data Research UK

Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) is the national institute for health data science. Our mission is to unite the UK’s health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives. HDR UK was established in 2018 to support research on health data at scale to advance our understanding of disease and enable new discoveries that will ultimately improve health and care. We have established national research programmes that use data at scale, and we are building an infrastructure to enable the responsible access and analysis of this data.

Data and Connectivity

Data and Connectivity is funded through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and led by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It connects UK health data to support and accelerate research on coronavirus (COVID-19), enabling streamlined data access and analysis for COVID-19, and supports the five other National Core Studies. To date, the programme has made available 92 datasets for urgent COVID-19 research, accessible to approved researchers via the Innovation Gateway. A full catalogue of these datasets (PDF, 7.0 MB) is also available.

Insights enabled and supported by Data and Connectivity to date include:

• research demonstrating effectiveness of single-dose COVID-19 vaccination, led by the HDR UK BREATHE Hub
• research demonstrating inequalities in COVID-19 vaccination rates in England for those aged 70 years and over, particularly for those in Black African and Black Caribbean ethnic groups.
• several studies investigating safety of COVID-19 vaccines, including a study showing that there was a slightly increased risk of specific blood clotting disorders after a first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines; however, the data also showed that the risk was substantially higher and prolonged after contracting COVID-19.

International Data Access Network (IDAN)

The International Data Access Network (IDAN) is a collaboration between six Research Data Centres from France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK to facilitate research use of controlled access data between these countries.

IDAN works across these data centres to enable researchers to work remotely on data provided by partner countries from within their local Research Data Centre. Whilst international access is currently not available within the Secure Research Service (SRS), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is an IDAN partner and is supportive of their aims for better international access to data.

Further information is available on the IDAN website.

If you would like more information or have any questions about our strategic and collaborative partnerships, please email SRS.Engagement.team@ons.gov.uk.