National waste survey

Hadley Hunter and Peter Jordan were asked to provide statistical support to the Environment Agency for the first National Waste Survey of 20,000 companies. They developed methods to validate the data and identify implausible values for follow up. They developed innovative ways of grossing up the data on a regional and national basis to produce results for different purposes. They also developed and ran the survey analysis programs.

Fraud detection

Allan Cole developed systems to help HMRC risk assess applications for Working Families' Tax Credit by both employees and employers. He used statistical analysis to determine the combination of factors that indicated that an employee application was potentially fraudulent. In addition, he developed a statistical model to identify potentially fraudulent applications for funding by employers. Both systems have detected and prevented fraudulent applications entering the system and led to the prosecution of employees and employers making fraudulent claims.

Measuring Health Service performance

Barry Stoker developed a scoring aggregation model for the pilot of the Healthcare Commission's Acute Inpatient Mental Health Service Review which formed the basis of the final aggregation model for the review. The assessment for each of the 69 mental health provider trusts was derived from 96 items of data, collected from a number of sources, including published national databases, data obtained from other organisations, and bespoke data collected by the Healthcare Commission itself. The aggregation model comprised a framework in which data items were related to assessment questions, which in turn were related to one of four key criteria against which performance was being assessed. Data item scores were aggregated and converted to produce question scores which in turn were aggregated and converted to produce criteria scores which were then further aggregated and converted to produce an overall score for each trust. The aggregation model can be used to generate individual assessment reports for trusts and to produce league tables to compare performance.