When was the Decision Maker Panel launched and how long will it be running?
The panel launched in August 2016 and we currently have funding until 2021. However, the Decision Maker Panel is proving very useful for policymakers and we hope to continue beyond 2020.
Is my company eligible to join the Decision Maker Panel?
If your company operates from the UK and has minimum 10 employees, you are eligible to join the Decision Maker Panel. Our panel consists of a wide range of companies from across the UK, including schools and charities. Click to join the panel.
I have been invited to join the panel via phone/email – how did you get my contact details?
Many company details are available in publicly accessible data based such as Companies House. Companies House provides data inputs to major data providers such as Bureau van Dijk. The kind of information we can see includes balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, cash flow, some basic contact information for directors and the company headquarters.
What types of questions do you ask?
Sample questions can be found on the Survey Design page.
I run a charity or school and so not have sales or prices. How should I answer the questions?
If your business is financed mainly from grants or donations rather than sales, we kindly ask you to provide figures from those sources instead.
Are questions meant to focus on operations of UK-based businesses or should I include the overseas part of the group too?
All values should be for UK-based businesses only and not for any overseas part of the group.
How long will it take me to answer the questionnaire?
We appreciate that the senior executives we reach out to are busy people, therefore we keep the questionnaire short. It should take 5-10 minutes to answer all questions and we allow panel members two weeks to provide responses. If you do not have exact numbers at hand, approximate answers or best guesses are acceptable.
We also appreciate that there are times where finance officers will simply be too busy to reply. If this is the case, we kindly ask you to continue as normal in the following month.
How often will I receive the questions and who will send them to me?
Members of the Decision Maker Panel receive one set of questions every month and usually have two weeks to answer them. All questions are accessed through a link, which is emailed to panel members from dmp@bankofengland.co.uk.
What happens if I cannot answer this month’s questions?
We acknowledge that occasionally, a selected topic may not be relevant to your business or you may unable to answer all of the questions. If this happens, we kindly ask you to ignore the relevant questions and continue as normal in the following month.
If you are no longer able to contribute to the DMP and wish to remove yourself from the panel, you can do so by clicking the ‘opt-out’ button. However, before you do so, please consider whether there is somebody else within your company who could take over the DMP position from yourself.
If this is the case, please contact Philip Bunn (philip.bunn@bankofengland.co.uk) with their details.
What if I have changed job or I am about to leave the company?
If you have changed job or are about to leave the company, please let us know. We can arrange to send the questions to the person moving into your former role. It would be very helpful for us if you could provide us with the name and contact details of the individual who is replacing you. We will contact them to ensure that they are happy to receive the questions each month.
Please contact Philip Bunn (philip.bunn@bankofengland.co.uk) with their details.
If you are interested in continuing to answer the questions in your new role, we would be delighted to keep you on the panel provided the new company that you have joined is located in the UK, has more than 10 employees and is not already part of the panel. Please provide us with your new email address, the name of the company that you have joined and ideally, your company registration number and we will make contact.
What are Decision Maker Panel members responses used for?
Policy: The DMP makes a significant contribution to policymaking in the UK. Over the period that the panel has been running, the evidence it collects has been used to brief members of the Monetary Policy Committee individually and collectively. Civil servants in government departments such as HM Treasury and the Department of Business Energy & Industrial Strategy have used DMP data to brief Ministers.
Research: We are aiming to write a series of research papers from this work. Brexit is in many ways the canonical uncertainty shock – large, partly unexpected, and long-lasting – so studying its impact will be invaluable for the field of economics. As uncertainty is pervasive in the economy, the DMP will offer a valuable tool to assess the level of business uncertainty even post-Brexit.
Data: In the long term, we plan to make this data available to other researchers with suitable anonymisation or confidentiality protocols.
What can I expect in return?
The DMP makes a significant contribution to policymaking in the UK. Over the period that the panel has been running, the evidence it collects has been used to brief members of the Monetary Policy Committee individually and collectively. Civil servants in government departments such as HM Treasury and BEIS have also used our data to brief Ministers. Your contribution to public policy is therefore very important and you can take satisfaction in knowing that your voice is being heard.
Panel members can also expect to receive monthly feedback reports, including key findings based on responses that we received from you in the previous month, sent by the DMP Team (dmp@bankofengland.co.uk). will send out feedback emails. We aggregate all data before compiling feedback reports or briefing policymakers, so individual responses always remain indistinguishable. In addition, we provide quarterly updates on our findings in the March, June, September and December releases of the Bank of England Agents’ Report on the Bank of England website. Hyperlinks to the page on our website containing these docs.
Will my data be stored securely?
Individual survey responses will be treated as confidential.
They will be:
♦ held securely;
♦ aggregated before being published; and
♦ anonymised before being made available to researchers.
The Bank of England may use a secure service, such as the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service for these purposes.
By completing the survey you authorise the use of your data in this way. If at any point you no longer wish to participate in the survey please inform us by emailing dmp@bankofengland.co.uk.
Our privacy policy, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation, is available here.