Number 10's data science team
A scroll-driven walkthrough of how the Number 10 data science team, 10DS, built a view of government from 2020: data gathered from departments one relationship at a time, the front-line services behind them, the open-source rAPId platform and the dashboards on top.
10DS · Downing Street · since 2020
Number 10
2020
Born in the pandemic: a data science team inside Number 10, 10DS, set up after the centre found how little it could see.Departments
The data came from departments, one relationship at a time. Diplomacy first; special advisers when diplomacy wasn't enough.The front line
Behind the departments sit the services where the numbers start: hospitals, schools, police forces, jobcentres, courts and councils.rAPId
The plumbing is open source and deliberately simple. rAPId gives departments one consistent way to store and share named, standardised datasets.Today
On top sit the team's data science platform and the dashboards, read by Number 10 and the departments alike.
To present it, press the full-screen button in its corner, then step through with the arrow keys or a clicker. Esc leaves.
Reuse and citation
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with credit. Archival photographs are credited where they appear and keep their own terms.
Liam Wilkinson, “Number 10's data science team”, interactive, lwilko.com, 2026. https://www.lwilko.com/library/interactives/number-10-data-science
An isometric model of the data that reaches Number 10: departments, the front-line services behind them, the shared rAPId data platform and the dashboards read at the centre.
In the essays
- Neo-Technocracy: Same Dream, Bigger Budget
Read the essay
Sources
Projects
- rAPId
Depicts
Ideas
Organisations
- No.10 Data Science (10DS)
Depicts
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/interactives/number-10-data-science.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5-5 on 2026-10-24