Critical analytics: inside a council's early use of predictive data

Critical analytics: inside a council's early use of predictive data

In-depth research for the Ada Lovelace Institute into one of the first UK local authorities to use predictive analytics to identify vulnerable individuals.

I was the research project manager for this study, carrying out the first round of fieldwork and analysis. The Ada Lovelace Institute carried out additional analysis and reviews, and published the final report.

The research

As UK councils began turning to data analytics to help decide how to deliver services, little was known about how these systems worked in practice — or how the staff using them navigated questions of ethics, privacy, transparency and bias.

Critical analytics? is an ethnographic study, carried out for the Ada Lovelace Institute, of one of the first English local authorities to adopt predictive data analytics in its services: the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham. The research examined how the council used the OneView system, built by the private company Xantura, across two areas — children’s social care and the council’s response to COVID-19.

Findings

The study found that questions of transparency, accountability, ethics, privacy, trust and bias were not settled by the technology itself but were constantly negotiated by the people using it — and that whether a system was judged a success depended heavily on expectations that were often never made explicit.

Its central recommendation was that councils procuring and implementing analytics systems should define clear, actionable success criteria and plans for how the system will be evaluated from the outset — including for pilot deployments — and that those most affected by a system should take part in setting those criteria.

Behind the research

The fieldwork was conducted in 2020, in the opening months of the pandemic, making this an unusually early, inside view of predictive analytics in UK local government at the moment councils were under acute pressure to act on data. The Ada Lovelace Institute developed the work into a full report published in 2024.