CGG Committee

Emma White, CFS, BSc, PhD, CMRS, is the Director of Information Governance and Data Protection Officer at City, University of London. She has previously worked for the University of Southampton, NatCen Social Research and the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
As part of Emma’s role with ONS, she provided regular census updates to CGG over a number of years, and was delighted to be invited to re-join the group in 2016 to be on the receiving end of said updates. She finds the collegiate working and responsiveness of the group very rewarding, especially when collaborating on responses to consultations and inquiries. She also enjoys the vast amount of knowledge and experience that the group brings to the table. She is delighted to chair the group, which makes a significant contribution in representing members’ views to government, and in sharing their expertise in census and geodemographics activities.

Martin Baxter is the founder and CEO of Electoral Calculus, a quantitative political consultancy focusing on elections and quantitative market research. Prior to that he has worked in academia and finance

I am Director of Statistics (Media) for Kantar. My predominant area of responsibility is television audience measurement, across dozens of countries worldwide. I am also involved with the Target Group Index. I joined the CGG in January 2017 to participate in discussions about the 2021 Census and GDPR. As a former Government statistician who was at one time responsible for producing national population estimates, a member of the National Statistics Advisory Group and a former Chairman of the Official Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society, I can discuss official statistics from the viewpoint of producers as well as users.

I was a founding member of the CGG and worked extensively with a variety of systems when I was the Market Research Director at Whitbread. I am a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London and currently teach a module on the Master’s degree in Geographic Information Science. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the IJMR and a judge on the MRS Awards panel.

Keith has enjoyed being a member of the CGG for many years. His initial interest was in improving access to Census statistics, and the geodemographic classifications that have been built from them, which have proven to be so valuable to commercial companies, public services, and academia. This was followed by the CGG supporting the policy that census statistics should be freely available, and the group has been very successful in pressing for many other government datasets becoming Open Data. Another positive aspect of the CGG is its encouragement of dialogue between commercial companies, government, and academia. In Keith’s case this is illustrated by his involvement in the Data Analysts’ User Group (DUG), his serving on ONS committees, and being an Honorary Professor at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Peter is a semi-retired mathematician who, for many years, has been closely involved with the development and application of new analytical techniques in marketing and customer management. His work in geodemographics spans several decades and he is passionate about the exciting new data and analytical opportunities opening up in the mobile world. Peter has been a member of the CGG since 1993 and was instrumental in setting up the Geodemographics Knowledge Base in 2000.

Dr Barry Leventhal is a consultant statistician with experience gained in market research, geodemographics and analytics.

Dr Leventhal founded the Census & Geodemographics Group in 1989 and was its chair for over 25 years. In 2017 he was awarded the MRS Gold Medal for signal service to the profession.

He has published books on geodemographics and predictive analytics, and has written numerous articles and papers on these topics.

Representing what was then OPCS, I joined CCG from the outset of the Group way back in the late 1980s to help give the Group some insights into the planning of the 1991 Census. Participation in the Group was part of OPCS's census user consultation programme. Since then I have been the main liaison with OPCS/ONS on census matters, and particularly so since 2004. Since my own retirement from ONS in 2014 I have been acting as an independent international census consultant and have been helping to provide some insight into the planning of the 2021 Census in the context of the UN's world programme of censuses and the experience of other countries' census practices.