The ability to share and analyse information about what happens where is key to the localism agenda. At a recent CSW round table, Suzannah Brecknell heard delegates discuss the challenges and opportunities

As the government pushes power away from Whitehall, local providers will have an opportunity to reconsider how services are provided and co-ordinated – opening the door for savings and quality improvements.

To do this, they’ll need to have a clear understanding of how organisations and services fit together in the locality, and geographic information (GI) – analysing data using maps – can be an effective way to drive this kind of improvement.

At a recent Civil Service Worldround table on the potential of GI to drive savings and service improvements at a local level, delegates provided several examples of ways in which location-based data analysis is already being used effectively.

Ray Boguslawski, director of the UK location programme – a cross-government initiative to improve the reuse of public sector data – mentioned a recent study into the value of geographic information. This had shown that better info use brings tangible financial benefits, he said, enabling managers to – for example – plan more efficient routes for rubbish collections or local transport. “A number of local authorities are already taking elements out of that, and that presents some good practice for others to follow,” he said.

As well as helping to make individual services more efficient, GI can help providers to develop a clear picture of demand across a range of services – leading in turn to better co-ordination between agencies. Keith Wishart, the government strategist from geographic information specialist ESRI, which sponsored the discussion, described how Hammersmith and Fulham council has been able to save around £4m a year through geographic analysis of its data on families with complex needs – those who have a lot of interactions with the state. Examining the data, he said, has enabled the council to consolidate services into areas with the most demand. “That kind of method can be applied across a range of organisations to extend those benefits,” he suggested.

Many societal problems, Wishart added, have a “natural geography… which doesn’t recognise local authority or agency boundaries”. So a geographic approach to data analysis, rather than one based purely on numbers within a given organisation, can help to design more holistic services which deliver better outcomes. To do this, however, different provider organisations must be willing to work together not only in sharing data and analysis, but in designing and delivering services more collaboratively.

Broadening the partnership
Boguslawski was optimistic that this sort of joint-working will emerge, but suggested that there are yet more partners to consider in making the best use of local information. “We will see more pooling, sharing of best practice and re-use of a lot of the ideas that some of the pioneers have developed across local government,” he said. To really achieve benefits, however, “that needs to be coupled with greater engagement with citizens in the local community, to build what they want into the services that local government offers.”

Carol Tullo, director of information policy and services at the National Archives, agreed that more of the value of public data will be realised if citizens are encouraged to interact with data themselves. “This is about service improvement,” she said, “and what’s really important is how others challenge those of us who hold data, or are delivering services, to improve those services.”

One benefit of presenting or analysing data in a geographic form is that maps can be more accessible than graphs or tables, and can also make the local relevance of the information clear, in turn making it easier to engage the local community.

Tullo gave an example of a website which allows residents of a housing estate to report fly-tipping by adding a photo of the fly-tipped item to a map. This means the issue can be resolved “much more quickly than going through a traditional bureaucracy”, she said.
“That’s using place data very effectively to drive the local service,” she said. “It’s very easy for us to think that we’re the guardians of this information, and we want to encourage people to use it and build on it, but actually there’s another part of it, which is people driving us to do something with data that we wouldn’t normally have done.”

Boguslawski emphasised the importance of encouraging community and voluntary groups to make the best use of public sector data. The location programme, he explained, is “looking to involve as many different representatives of the potential user community” as possible, in an effort to find out “how we can help representative voluntary organisations do things with government information that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do”.

Susan Cassidy of the UK Border Agency raised the concern that data could become diluted, simplified, and possibly misrepresented if used in this way; but Carol Calvert, head of client statistics at the Department for Work and Pensions, said civil servants shouldn’t be too worried about this potential misuse. “There is a risk about misuse of figures,” she said, “but there is a balance with the potential value that people might bring to [data] that we can’t.”

Calvert also reminded delegates they should not forget the commercial world when thinking of new ways to use data. For an upcoming piece of work on customer segmentation, she said, her team has used data from credit company Experian, which gave “a different slant, a different dimension, a different richness to the segmentation, so it’s not just about government and local authority data”.

But, she commented, it will be important to approach this new data set in a collaborative way: “I would hate to see lots of local authorities not collaborating to use their power to buy in commercial data,” she said, adding this was another area with enormous “scope for partnerships and need for collaboration”.

Devils in the details
There are several challenges for organisations wanting to make better use of shared information to improve services. There are technical challenges, for example, around the need to protect personal data, or the different levels of information security between organisations.

There might also be difficulties in comparing information sets across organisations because different collection methods could make comparisons unreliable, suggested David Rhind, chair of the government advisory panel on public sector information, and a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority. He said that it can be hard to tell “whether the differences between local authorities are due to reality or simply because of the way data has been collected”.

Boguslawski brought optimism to the proceedings, noting that the UK location programme is introducing standard publication mechanisms across the government. “It will take time to get there, but that standardisation is developing,” he said.

“We’re also working with the data community on piloting linked data approaches,” he continued. This would enable organisations to join different sets of data together, to “make it interoperable and do much more analysis”.

However, the drive for more local freedom may exacerbate this tension in the way data is collected. While the coalition is pushing central government to publish more and more information, and to develop business plans and indicators for each department, at a local level many targets and indicators are being scrapped.

This might mean that organisations collect different data – or, equally problematically, that they collect similar data in different ways – suggested Ann Oldroyd, from the Home Office’s local policing, crime and justice unit. The localism agenda is bound to create a balancing act, she suggested: service providers must be free to collect the data that they consider most important, even while providing a core data set to the central agencies charged with developing national strategies. Alluding to elected police commissioners, she said: “Clearly [on crime data] there’s that balance between what they will see as important to hold their local police to account, and what’s collected nationally. You do have to strike that balance, because there are some things that I would be concerned about locally in London that I wouldn’t be if I lived in a more rural area.”

Wishart suggested one possible solution to this tension, arguing that intelligent use of geographic information can overcome these inconsistencies. “Geography is quite tolerant to quite large variances in different data sets,” he said, so information “doesn’t have to be completely standardised; we can still extract a lot of meaningful data from it by taking a geographical approach.”

Incentives and barriers
There are also organisational barriers to effective collaboration in this area. Richard Waite, managing director of ESRI, raised his concerns about the effect of the drive to centralise some government operations – for the sake of efficiency – on the development of local partnerships.

His particular concern was with the drive to standardise and centralise control over estate management across government, through the Government Property Unit. This, he suggested, might inhibit local delivery agencies from thinking creatively about how they could share property or relocate services to meet citizen demand. “At a local level you could get recognition that if we share resources we can all achieve our core objectives more cheaply,” he said, “but if all the players are part of centralised silos and the command structure says: ‘You will do what we tell you’ then there’s an unhealthy tension.”

On the other hand, co-location doesn’t automatically create policy coordination, pointed out Carole Edwards of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In many overseas offices the FCO shares space with, for example, staff from the UK Borders Agency and the Department for International Development – “yet we’re all working in silos on different systems to different departmental agendas, so we need to find a way to overcome those”.

Perhaps the biggest barrier was first highlighted by Boguslawski. Despite his optimism that examples of good practice exist, and that more local authorities will want to adopt that best practice, he followed this with a caveat: “The current financial climate is making investment that much more difficult.”

His point was echoed by Rhind, who said the local authority community is concerned about having to invest in data facilities while making large cutbacks across their budgets. “Many people can see that in the longer term there are advantages [to making better use of data] and there are certainly big advantages in people feeding information to local authorities, but there is a real issue about how to get from where we are now [to the point where we] produce benefits to the populace, given the fact that [local authorities] don’t get direct benefits,” he said.

This touches on another major barrier to collaborations of any sort across different government agencies or departments. If investment in one part of the public sector leads to benefits or savings in another, but few or no savings for the investing organisation, how can a business case be made to invest?

Rhind argued that concrete financial incentives are key here, sharing his experience at the Portsmouth Hospitals NHS trust, of which he is non-executive chairman, and which has recently been trying to foster cross-organisation working in order to make large savings in the local health economy. “It hasn’t been straightforward because different organisations have different priorities,” he said. “I’m all in favour of collaboration, and we need to have good personal relationships with the heads of the different organisations, but the incentive structures are absolutely crucial to get right.”

Later in the discussion he returned to the point, saying: “The prime driver to get collaboration is not to rely upon altruism but actually to have some financial drivers behind it and also make performance outcomes public.”

One such financial driver could be the use of pooled budgets which would combine departmental funding to address a particular issue. This approach will be piloted across the country from next April. While the pilots will focus initially on just one policy area – supporting vulnerable families – and operate in just 16 areas, the communities department has indicated that it wants to roll the model out across the country.

Should this happen, the opportunities to create savings will grow as some organisational and financial barriers are removed – but the need to align data will be even more important. A pooled budget without an intelligent and collaborative approach to sharing data and service design could be a wasted opportunity for service improvement.

In the meantime, the challenge of forging meaningful partnerships which can overcome silos and organisational barriers to create genuine improvements will remain. The key to this, suggested Boguslawski, will be to develop closer understanding and joint planning across both local and central government. “We need to understand what local communities and organisations want in terms of information and in terms of contributions to local services,” he said, adding that organisations need to build relationships not just in terms of ad hoc information-sharing, but also by sharing planning processes “to give best value services: we’ve got limited budgets, so let’s plan how we use that budget and combine that budget with the activities of local organisations.”

Round table attendees

Back row (l to r)
Carol Calvert, Head of client statistics, Department for Work and Pensions
David Rhind, Chair, government advisory panel on public sector information
Susan Cassidy, Senior project officer, UK Border Agency
Ann Oldroyd, Crime strategy – Local Policing, Crime and Justice Unit, Home Office
Richard Waite, Managing director, ESRI UK
Keith Wishart, Government strategist, ESRI UK

Front row (l to r)

John Andrews, Child Poverty Unit, Department for Education
Ray Boguslawski, Programme director UK location programme, based at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Carole Edwards, Head of information policy, Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Carol Tullo, Director of information policy and services, National Archives

Written by Suzannah Brecknell, CSW