Agenda item

(Director of Governance) to consider the attached report.

The Senior Performance Improvement Officer, Ms Copson, introduced the report on Data Quality Strategy (2016/17 to 2018/19). She noted that the Council needed timely, accurate and reliable data in order to manage activities and meet internal and external requirements to demonstrate accountability through accurate reporting. Data was used for the assessment of the Council’s performance, including the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The Data Quality Strategy set out the arrangements for the next 3 years to ensure key data met the highest standards and was ‘right first time’.

Good quality data was essential to support the Council’s decision making especially decisions involving finance and performance. Additionally the Council’s customers, partners and others interested in the Council’s performance, needed to be able to rely on the data produced for evaluation purposes. The Council was also accountable for the money it spent and must manage competing claims on its resources. It therefore required data which was accurate, reliable and timely in order to plan for the future and meet customer needs.

The Council had identified principles and arrangements to ensure high standards of data quality and had for a number of years, formalized them within a strategy, to support consistency and encourage high standards of practice of data quality management. This revised strategy continued to reflect the principles for data quality originally identified by the former Audit Commission.

The Date Quality Principles were:

Accuracy – Data must b accurate for its intended purpose and be represented clearly and in sufficient detail to enable informed decision making.

Validity – Data must be recorded and used in accordance with relevant requirements, rules and definitions to ensure consistency.

Reliability – Data must reflect stable and consistent collection methods.

Timeliness – Data must be available for its intended use within a reasonable time period. It must be available quickly and frequently enough to support information needs.

Completeness – Data must be recorded in its entirety, avoiding gaps in information and duplication of data.

Relevance – Data must be relevant to the purpose for which it is used.

Security – Data must be stored securely and confidentially where appropriate.

This report has already been to the Governance Select Committee where they discussed what was meant by the term data, but concluded that defining it would tend to exclude certain data streams. There was also a need to be aware of the relevance of the data streams.

The Chairman asked if we label third party data to indicate that this was not our data. Ms Copson said that they did. They defined where they had received the data from and attempted to ensure that it was accurate by identifying the data streams.

Councillor Kane asked if there was any need to refer to the redundancy or timeliness of data. Ms Copson said that they needed to know if the data was accurate and also the relevance and timeliness.  Councillor Philip added that they needed to know the frequency of the data and that it was up to date.

RESOLVED:

That the Data Quality Strategy for 2016/17 – 2018/19 was noted.