Other livesSociety This article is more than 3 years oldObituaryChris Skinner obituary
This article is more than 3 years oldMy father, Chris Skinner, who has died of cancer aged 66, was a statistician whose work informed vital policy decisions in many areas, including the minimum wage, on privacy and confidentiality, and on the future of the national census.
He directed the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Applied Social Surveys from 2001 to 2005 and was the founding director of ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods from 2004 to 2009. He authored more than 80 peer-reviewed journal papers and edited two influential books on the analysis of survey data.
In 2013 Chris led an independent review of plans for the 2021 census against a backdrop of growing government pressure to scrap it owing to cost. Accurate UK population data obtained by census is vastly important and the review concluded that alternatives were not yet methodologically sound enough to replace it, and it would instead move online to become a “digital-first” census. The title of the subsequent parliamentary report was Too Soon to Scrap the Census.
Chris was born in Penge, south London, the elder son of Richard Skinner, a claims settler at Lloyds of London, and Daphne (nee Edginton), who worked at the family-run furniture store, Edginton’s, in Penge. At St Dunstan’s college, Catford, he showed an early aptitude for maths, gaining a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduating with a first in mathematics in 1975.
He went on to complete an MSc in statistics at the LSE in 1976 and followed this with a year at the Central Statistical Office and then the Statistical Advisory Service at the LSE, which sparked a passion for the application of statistics in government, academia and our everyday lives. In 1978 he joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer. Chris was awarded his PhD in 1982 and became a professor of statistics in 1994.
In the 1990s Chris worked with the Office for National Statistics supplying information required to study the effects of the new national minimum wage. In 2011, he returned to the LSE as professor of statistics.
He co-organised a six-month programme in 2016 at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, examining how privacy and confidentiality can be protected as data is increasingly linked between different organisations.
In his last years he worked with the Department of Health and Social Care on a survey used to determine how much high street pharmacies in England are reimbursed for NHS prescriptions. These improvements led to savings of tens of millions of pounds to the NHS, and a more stable and predictable funding stream for pharmacies.
In 2009, Chris received the West medal from the Royal Statistical Society and the following year he was appointed CBE for services to social science.
He married Maggie (nee Gay), a graphic designer, in 1978 and they had two sons, Tom and me. They divorced in 1985. In 1998, he married Sheila (nee Martin), a teacher. Sheila died in 2010. In 2012 he met Sandra Jones and they married in 2018. They enjoyed exploring London’s cultural life, regular holidays to Sète in the south of France, and a sabbatical in Wollongong, Australia. Chris was a truly gentle man, a deeply caring person and a joy to be around.
He is survived by Sandra, Tom and me, and a granddaughter, Zoe, and by his mother, Daphne, and brother, Julian.
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