Question
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth on 23 December 2016 (HL4166), what were the data quality issues in respect of the evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme and how long it took to resolve them.
Answered on
25 January 2017
In September 2015, quality assurance by analysts in the Department of Communities and Local Government of the dataset for the National Institute of Economic and Social Research's (NIESR) ‘Impact Study’ (one strand of the evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme 2012-2015) revealed significant errors, particularly in NIESR’s handling of the data submitted for the study by some local authorities.
It took around 11 months, working with NIESR, for these errors to be resolved satisfactorily and the final version of their report to be signed off. This process included making sure all relevant and correct data was included in the study, re-running all of the analysis and carrying out further quality assurance. The quality assurance process was strengthened by the commissioning of an independent peer review undertaken by the University of Cambridge to consider the study's approach to data handling, its analysis and conclusions . That peer review recommended that the report authors include clear statements in the report about how they had handled the data, the assumptions made in their analysis and the limitations of the study’s findings.