Alastair McAlpine

Chief Statistician, Scottish Government

Alastair McAlpine

Alastair McAlpine is the Scottish Government’s Chief Statistician. He has overall responsibility for the coordination and implementation of professional standards that help maintain trustworthiness in the use of data, its quality, and that deliver improved outcomes for people in Scotland. Ally brings a wealth of experience having worked previously as Head of Agricultural Statistics, within the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services, and won several awards when he led the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation including the Civil Service award for ‘Use of evidence and analysis in policy making’ in 2017. Ally is co-director of ADR Scotland and a member of the ADR UK Leadership Committee

In a previous post, Alastair was responsible for the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) which is the Scottish Government’s official tool for identifying deprived areas across Scotland. In this role, and in addition to publishing the SIMD in 2016, he led on work to open up the code behind SIMD to encourage its re-usability and facilitate analysts who were linking other data sources to the index.