ADR UK's sustainable model returns £5 for every £1 invested
How a sustainable approach to administrative data is delivering economic benefits for the UK.
Every time someone in the UK uses a public service, a record is made. Government teams collect this information to run our public services day to day.
From school exam results to GP bookings, tax information, or court records, administrative data isn’t collected for research, but overtime it has created a vast collection of useful information about the UK’s society and economy.
These datasets have been largely locked away and divided by delivery team or government department. The knowledge they held was inaccessible to researchers and therefore unusable as evidence by policymakers.
Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK), an ESRC data-infrastructure programme, has taken on the challenge of ensuring this data can be securely accessed, linked, and analysed by approved researchers now and in the future.
A sustainable model with economic benefits for the UK
ADR UK has established itself as the leader in UK administrative data, working hand-in-hand with government and academic partners to safely link different sets of public-sector data together, often for the first time.
These linked datasets are then housed ongoing in safe digital spaces called trusted research environments. Here they can be accessed securely and used repeatedly to answer new questions, with regular updates by data-owners.
As one researcher said during the 2025 ADR UK evaluation:
“(Prior to ADR UK) you had to destroy the dataset once the research had been done, which makes no sense. It’s night and day in terms of the effectiveness of the model.”
Cost savings of the ADR UK approach
That same 2025 programme review reported that:
“Our economic analysis points to strong return on investment (ROI) across the partnership (…) For every £1 spent on the programme, it produces an estimated £5.05 worth of benefits.”
The financial evaluation focused on the cost savings from the large-data linkage model developed by the programme. This showed that the ADR UK model, of providing secure access to linked datasets for re-use by different research projects, provided a positive financial saving for the public.
Unlocking new policy evidence from administrative data
The report also found that, before ADR UK, there was just one set of administrative data being widely used by UK researchers: educational outcomes data held in the National Pupil Database. Since ADR UK’s launch, over twenty flagship datasets across crime and justice, health, social mobility, and the UK economy have been launched for research use – and critically, for reuse.
This sustainable model ensures ADR UK is creating a collection of critical research-ready datasets that can answer policy questions now and, in the future, with unlimited potential for social and economic impact.
