Best Practices and Recommendations for Government Geographers
In the realm of statistics and policy making, the importance of accurate geographic information has never been more pronounced. The Government Statistical Service Geography Policy underscores this significance, emphasising its role in locating and referencing statistical events, sampling, data collection, analysis, presentation, and accessing information for specific geographical areas or places.
This emphasis on geographic data is not limited to statistical purposes alone. The Analysis Function, a multi-disciplinary approach taken by the government, is using this data to tackle societal issues such as achieving net zero, levelling up, and preserving global relationships.
However, with this increased reliance on geospatial data comes a responsibility to use it ethically. The UK Statistics Authority has set forth ethical considerations for the use of geospatial data in research and statistics, focusing on data quality, risk assessment, and mitigations to ensure responsible use.
Key ethical considerations include data quality and representativeness, risk assessment and mitigation, transparency and accountability, and adherence to data ethics frameworks. For instance, in a UK government project mapping ancient woodland, stratified sampling was used to ensure training data captured varied terrains and landscapes, minimising bias from imbalanced or poorly labelled data.
The HM Treasury, in its Green Book, requires additional distributional analysis for interventions with sub-national or regional distributional effects, those targeted at specific geographic areas, or those that involve redistribution of welfare. This analysis can include regional, sub-national, and local analysis based on geographically defined areas.
The Green Book also highlights the dependency of policies on geography and the need for regional, sub-national, and local analysis. Key sections relevant to geography include constructing options, productivity effects, land use values, environmental and natural capital, sub-national and distributional analysis, and leakage.
Moreover, the Magenta Book, another HM Treasury publication, requires evaluation designers to consider if the same results would be achieved in different places or contexts, and to take account of geographical location in producing a stratified sample.
The ethical use of geospatial data is particularly relevant in modern society, where locational information is ubiquitous. Personal smart devices, cars located by GPS, and CCTV and other sensors capturing locational data are common examples. Given its ability to locate individuals, addresses, or businesses, geospatial data is considered a special or intimate type of data by the public.
In light of these considerations, the UK Statistics Authority has published a website providing a discussion of the main ethical issues for researchers, along with a checklist for users to consider. The profession aims to embed the importance of place in the guidance of other professions, recognising geography as crucial in the implementation and roll out of new policies.
Furthermore, it may be necessary to assess the differential impact of new interventions in devolved administrations due to differences in existing policies. Results should be shown separately alongside the calculation of UK-wide NPSV to clearly identify local effects.
In conclusion, the ethical use of geospatial data in the UK is guided by established government data ethics frameworks and quality assurance practices championed by the UK Statistics Authority. This ethical approach involves ensuring accuracy, fairness, transparency, accountability, and mitigation of biases or errors in geospatial data use, a crucial aspect in modern policy making and research.
In the context of policy-and-legislation and politics, the importance of geospatial data extends beyond statistical purposes, as it is utilized by the Analysis Function to address societal issues such as net zero, levelling up, and preserving global relationships. Concurrently, the ethical use of geospatial data is relevant in modern society and is guided by established government data ethics frameworks, with key considerations including data quality and representativeness, risk assessment and mitigation, transparency and accountability, and adherence to data ethics frameworks.
