Services / Statistical consultancy
Statistical consultancy for organisations that need a defensible number
Charities, universities, NHS teams and businesses come to us when a decision, a funder report or a board paper depends on getting the analysis right. A named statistician scopes the question, runs the work and writes it up so it survives scrutiny.
- Named statistician assigned before you commit
- Written method note you can hand to a funder
- Board-ready reporting, not raw output
- Follow-up questions included
Statistical consultancy is the design, analysis and interpretation of data by a qualified statistician on behalf of an organisation. It covers scoping the question, choosing and justifying a method, running the analysis, and reporting the result so it can be defended to a board, funder or regulator.
What is included
What you get with statistical consultancy
Scoping the actual question
We start by pinning down the decision the analysis has to support. Most briefs arrive as a dataset and a hope; they leave as a testable question.
Design and method
The right method for your data and constraints — and a written justification for why, which is what funders and boards actually ask for.
Analysis and validation
Assumptions tested and reported. Where the data will not support a claim, you are told before it reaches a board paper.
Reporting you can circulate
Charts and tables built for a non-technical reader, with the technical appendix kept separate for anyone who wants it.
A method note that travels
A plain description of what was done, so a reviewer, auditor or funder can follow it without calling us.
Support after delivery
Questions from your board, funder or reviewers are answered as part of the price.
Who it is for
Two kinds of client, one standard of work
- Funder and grant reporting that needs statistical backing
- Service evaluation, outcome measurement and survey work
- Needs assessments and population estimates
- Evidence for a business case or commissioning decision
- Customer, staff and market survey analysis
- Trial, pilot and A/B evaluation
- Departmental research support without a permanent hire
- Independent review of analysis done in-house
The work itself
What statistical consultancy actually involves
Most organisations arrive with a dataset and a deadline rather than a statistical question. The first job is to turn one into the other. A funder asks whether a programme worked; a board asks whether a movement in the numbers is real or noise; a commissioner asks how many people in a population will need a service. None of those are statistical questions yet — and answering the wrong one carefully is worse than answering the right one roughly.
Scoping usually takes a day or two and produces something specific: the outcome being measured, the comparison being made, the population it generalises to, and what would count as an answer. That document is what the quote is priced against, so you know exactly what you are buying before you commit.
Not in the modelling. Almost always in the question — a brief that asks whether something “worked” without defining the outcome, the comparison, or the population it applies to. Fixing that at the start costs a day. Fixing it after analysis costs the project.
Choosing a method that survives review
Method selection is driven by your data and your constraints, not by preference. Observational data cannot be made to answer a causal question by applying a more elaborate model to it. Where a design limits what can be claimed, that limit goes into the report rather than being left for a reviewer to discover.
In practice a written justification accompanies the analysis: why this method, what assumptions it rests on, and what happens to the conclusion if those assumptions are relaxed. Funders and internal audit ask for precisely this, and it is the part most analyses leave out.
Typical work
Projects organisations bring us most often
If your project resembles one of these, we have done it before and can quote quickly.
Service and programme evaluation
Did the intervention change the outcome, by how much, and for whom — with the confounding made explicit rather than assumed away.
Survey and consultation analysis
Weighting to a known population, subgroup testing, and reporting that does not overstate small differences in small cells.
Needs assessment and estimates
Prevalence applied to local populations with the uncertainty carried through rather than dropped at the first step.
Outcome measurement design
Deciding what to collect before collection starts, which is far cheaper than rescuing an analysis afterwards.
Independent review of in-house work
A second pair of eyes on analysis your team produced, before it reaches a board, a funder or a regulator.
Trial and pilot analysis
Including the sample size work that should have come first, and an honest account of what a pilot can and cannot show.
Where a request falls outside what we can do well — large-scale health economics modelling, or anything requiring primary data collection — we say so, and point you somewhere better where we can.
How to compare us
Choosing a statistical consultant
Statistical consultancy is hard to buy, because what you are buying is judgement you cannot easily evaluate in advance. These are the questions we would ask. They apply to any provider you are considering, including us.
| What to ask | Why it matters | Our answer |
|---|---|---|
| Who specifically will do the work? | Agencies often sell on a senior name and deliver with a junior analyst. | Named before you commit; you correspond with them directly. |
| Will I get the code or syntax? | Analysis that cannot be reproduced cannot be checked — by a reviewer, or by you in a year. | Always delivered, as standard. |
| What if the data does not support the claim? | A consultant whose answer always matches the hoped-for conclusion is not doing statistics. | You are told before it reaches a board paper. |
| How is the work priced? | Hourly billing against an open scope transfers all the risk to you. | Fixed quote against a written scope. |
| How is our data handled? | Storage, access, retention, and whether they will sign your DPA. | See below — and we sign yours before you send anything. |
Security and governance
How your data is handled
Usually the first question from NHS, university and local authority buyers — reasonably so.
If your organisation has a standard supplier assurance process, send it with the enquiry and we will complete it during scoping rather than after you have committed.
Pricing
What it costs, and why it is quoted rather than listed
The honest answer is that price depends on the state of the data and the scope of the question. A clean dataset with a well-specified question costs a fraction of a project that begins by reconciling three incompatible systems. So we look first and quote after.
Typical agency model
- Hourly billing against a scope that expands
- A senior name sells it, a junior delivers it
- Output without the code behind it
- Revisions billed as new work
How we work
- Fixed price agreed before anything starts
- The statistician named on the quote does the work
- Syntax and method note delivered as standard
- Follow-up questions included in the price
For most organisations this is materially cheaper than the alternatives — a permanent analyst hire for intermittent work, or a large consultancy billing hourly.
How it works
Three steps, entirely in writing
Send what you have
Attach the data, or just describe the project. No account, no mandatory call, and a five-field form rather than a fifteen-field one.
Approve a fixed quote
Usually within one working day, naming the statistician assigned, the deliverables and the deadline.
Receive the work
Output, syntax and a plain-English explanation — with follow-up questions answered at no extra cost.
Client feedback
What clients say about this work
“Professional statistical consultancy with practical recommendations that helped us make informed business decisions.”
“Their organisational data analysis was thorough and easy to understand. The final report provided valuable insights.”
Proof
This work, on real projects
Clients are not named and no identifying detail is published, so what is described is the statistical problem — which is the part that shows whether a consultancy knows what it is doing.
Cox Proportional Hazards Modelling to Identify Patients Most at Risk of Readmission
Modelling time-to-event rather than event-or-not, so a large public sector organisation could target risk assessment where it mattered.
Public services · Time series forecastingSeasonal ARIMA Forecasting with Intervention Analysis for Resource Planning
Twelve years of monthly demand with seasonality, trend and structural breaks — where simple smoothing methods failed consistently.
Manufacturing · Generalised linear mixed modelsGeneralised Linear Mixed Models to Identify the Drivers of Production Defects
A quarter of a million production records across six lines and two years, where univariate analysis could not separate interacting process variables.
Your statistician
Who does this work
Member of the Royal Statistical Society
Econometrics, forecasting and causal inference for policy evaluation, business analytics and operations.
This page was reviewed for statistical accuracy by Saad Tariq on 14 August 2026.
Common questions
Answers before you ask
Who will do the work?
One of five named statisticians, matched to your method and sector. You are told who before you approve the quote, and you deal with them directly rather than an account manager.
Can you invoice our organisation?
Yes. We work on invoice with PO references, standard 30-day terms, and can complete supplier onboarding or procurement forms.
Is the data secure?
Data is handled only by the assigned statistician, kept for the duration of the project, and deleted on request. We can sign your data processing agreement or NDA before you send anything.
What if our data has problems?
We will tell you early. It is common for a project to start with cleaning and end with a narrower question than the brief imagined — that is a better outcome than a confident answer built on unreliable data.
How long does it take?
Scoping usually takes a day or two; the analysis depends on the dataset. Both are written into the quote before you approve it.
Related
Often needed alongside this
Power analysis & sample size
A priori power analysis with the justification an ethics committee will accept.
From £180Data cleaning & preparation
Messy data made analysis-ready, with a documented log of every change.
Fixed quoteSPSS training
Practical SPSS training taught on your data, with exercises from your field.
Fixed quoteSend the data. Get a fixed quote.
Attach your dataset or just describe the project. A named statistician replies with a price and a deadline, usually within one working day.