NatCen Founder to Help Guide UK Stats Authority

Eminent social scientist Professor Sir Roger Jowell has been appointed the Deputy Chair and non-executive member of the UK Statistics Authority, serving as the Chair for the committee which advises on the UK's official statistics system.

Jowell is a social statistician and academic who is currently Research Professor at City University, London, where he is the Founder Director of its Centre for Comparative Social Surveys and runs the 34-nation European Social Survey.

In 1969, he co-founded Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR), which is now the London-based National Centre for Social Research, known for its British Social Attitudes surveys and for conducting many government surveys.

He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, an Academician of the Academy for Social Sciences, and was awarded a CBE in 2001 for services to social science. In addition, he is a recent Vice-President of the Royal Statistical Society and he was knighted for services to social sciences in the 2008 New Year's Honours.

Sir Michael Scholar, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority welcomed Jowell's appointment: 'In his new role, Roger will provide strategic oversight for the official statistics system as a whole, including the allocation of resources to statistical work, the production of statistics, and the communication of those statistics in the public interest. I very much look forward to working with him.'

The UK Statistics Authority is the government agency that produces and disseminates social, health, economic, demographic, labour market and business statistics.

Web site: www.statistics.gov.uk .