Runnymede’s Director, Dr Omar Khan, spoke at the 5th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy, ‘Transforming policy, changing lives’ held in Guadalajara, Mexico 13-15 October. Among the questions the conference addressed were how we can or should measure human progress, whether and how ‘wellbeing’ could replace GDP and other income measures, and how data can better influence policy. He gives his account of the conference.

The conference brought together over 1,000 delegates and high level speakers including Nobel-winner Joseph Stiglitz, former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, and academics, activists and policymakers from around the world. Runnymede’s presentation was part of a panel on ‘empowering minorities’ and included presentations from speakers from Mexico, New Zealand and Australia.

One of our main messages was that while a focus from income-based to wider wellbeing measures is potentially beneficial, if those measures don’t disaggregate outcomes by race or ethnicity they are unlikely to lead to policy that reduces existing ethnic inequalities.

The UK is particularly good at collecting such data in comparison with other European countries, and such measurement or categorisation should seek to map the form of inequalities and historic injustice most relevant for a given country. In other words, while there may be nothing ‘scientific’ about the nature of ethnic categories or terms such as ‘BME’, in thinking about the categories for measurement, we should focus on those groups and those forms of discrimination that structure patterns of injustice and disadvantage, whether those are among Maori people in New Zealand or Black people in Britain.

A second more positive message is that wellbeing measures may offer a particular insight into the harm of racism. While it’s certainly true that racial injustice leads to socioeconomic inequalities, what’s bad about racism isn’t just that it results in people being poorer.

When you don’t get shortlisted for a job, or stopped and searched by the police merely because of the colour of your skin, you experience a deflating and often humiliating loss of dignity or self-worth.

Racist views and actions deny the equal humanity or moral worth of non-white groups and make a mockery of ideals such as human rights and democracy. To the extent that wellbeing measures capture non-economic value (and harm), they could be adapted to seek to quantify the real harm of racism, and its continuing effects on Black and minority ethnic people in Britain or indeed elsewhere.

Finally, the conference raised the significant question of how – or how far – data affects policy. There are two aspects to this question. First, how we measure or best design policy, including such ideas as ‘nudging’ people to make better decisions, and the role of new or ‘big’ sources of data, issues where the UK policy community is seen as something of a leader internationally.

Even in the UK, however, it’s not clear that these agendas have so far responded effectively to racial inequalities. This leads to a second observation on data and policy, namely that data doesn’t always or even often influence or shift policy. Some racial inequalities – for example unemployment rates – have been gathered and monitored for nearly three decades, and yet policymakers have struggled to respond. Lack of political will or leadership is arguably more important in unpicking this seeming puzzle than wondering if we might gather better data on ‘what works’ in responding to such unemployment.

Listening to speakers around the world highlight the growing evidence on various social phenomena it’s clear that policy elites have moved on from simple measures of human progress and are increasingly using better information to design and monitor policies. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and as we’ve suggested could potentially lead to better understanding and measurement of the harm of racism and its wider effects.

But while the UK is undoubtedly a leader in data collection on ethnicity, those data have only intermittently affected policymaking, suggesting that it will require braver political leadership and more organised civil society mobilisation to ensure the big data and wellbeing agendas actually address racial inequalities.

Dr Omar Khan