Senior Statistician for the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) Publication Team

The annual Households Below Average Income (HBAI) publication is the UK’s leading source of data and information on:

• household incomes
• trends in income-based poverty
• income inequality
• material deprivation

It is a very high-profile publication with a range of users across government and other organisations, like charities and think tanks. If you have seen the statistic in the media that “4.3m children in the UK live in poverty”, then it will have been sourced from the publication. The statistics meet the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP’s) statutory obligation to publish child poverty measures under section 4 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016.

The role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Statistician to join the team in 2022 to 2023 to help us develop the March 2023 publication. The successful applicant could be from the Senior Executive Officer (SEO) mainstream, or Fast Stream. The role is available on a level transfer.

The role on offer will cut across a range of behaviours and technical skills. On the technical side, you will concentrate on developing and utilising your data analysis, statistics, and programming skills using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS). You will gain experience of interrogating and understanding complex survey data, such as the Family Resources Survey (FRS).

You will also gain experience in considering a range of statistical issues, for example, generating reliable poverty estimates for smaller subgroups. Each year, changes to the questionnaire, the fieldwork, or the wider social or policy context mean we do exploratory analysis to understand and address how any changes affect our estimates. The role therefore includes a strong element of problem solving. You will need to be able to clearly explain the effect of any changes on the statistics.

In the most recent publication, covering 2020 to 2021, HBAI data quality was thrown into sharp focus due to the effect of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on both FRS fieldwork and household incomes. You will be involved in assessing the continuing effects of COVID-19 on the 2021 to 2022 sample. In the near future, we are expecting more of the reported income in the FRS to be supplemented with administrative data, alongside a planned increase to the size of the FRS sample. These opportunities will offer a range of new methodological questions for you to work through.

A more unique element of this role is the opportunity to work directly with external users of the data. For example, we regularly meet and present to think tanks like the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the Resolution Foundation. We also meet and present to academics, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and the devolved governments as part of our ongoing development work and quality assurance. We work closely with other colleagues across DWP to help build the narrative and sense check our estimates, drawing on wider research evidence. HBAI and poverty more generally is a topic of great interest to the DWP Secretary of State and across government more widely.

You will be expected to develop your leadership skills in this role by:

• project managing your own analytical work steams or investigations
• regularly presenting your work and communicating your findings with a range of users, including senior members of DWP
• taking responsibility for a specific element of the publication process – this should be agreed with your line manager depending on skills and development needs

There is also the possibility of gaining line management experience in this role.

How to apply

If you are interested in this role, please complete the DWP Expression of Interest (EOI) form. You will need to write 500 words explaining your suitability for the role. Please send your completed form to Natalie.Lloyd@DWP.gov.uk and copy Joanna.Littlechild@DWP.gov.uk into the message. We will then sift the applications and arrange formal interviews, as needed.

You should send in your EOI by 5pm on Friday 10 June. Please email Natalie.Lloyd@DWP.gov.uk or Joanna.Littlechild@DWP.gov.uk if you:

• would like more information about this role
• would like to apply for this role, but may have difficulties meeting the deadline