News and publications

Earlier this month, the Cabinet Office transparency team (led by Francis Maude) published the Open Data Consultation paper.
On a first skim, the consultation has lots about getting more data out - proposing an enhanced right to data, and a presumption that public bodies (and public service providers) will need to publish data. All [...]

Last week the Food Ethics Council launched the 2011 Food Issues Census report, presenting in-depth analysis from a survey of over 300 organisations working on food and farming. Alongside the report (which can be downloaded here), the Food Ethics Council also worked with OCSI, to create a more interactive way to present and explore the data [...]

We’ve been keeping a set of links for Indices of Deprivation visualisations and analysis. Get in touch if you know of any more.
Visuals:

Guardian map at Super Output Area level: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england#zoomed-picture
Maps of England from Alasdair Rae, including cartograms: http://undertheraedar.blogspot.com/2011/03/indices-of-deprivation-2010.html
Coventry: http://ias.facts-about-coventry.com/IAS/dataviews/report/fullpage?viewId=236&reportId=234&geoId=7&geoSubsetId=199&geoReportId=7774
Cornwall: www.cornwall.gov.uk/deprivationmap
Nottingham: http://www.nottinghaminsight.org.uk/IAS/dataviews/report?reportId=383&viewId=992&geoReportId=26806&geoId=5&geoSubsetId=
Change over time in London: http://spatial.ly/eEGcEO

Comments:

Guardian DataBlog: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england
OCSI: http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/headline-results-from-the-indices-of-deprivation-2010/ and http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/03/24/why-the-imd-is-still-important-in-the-open-data-age/
Centre for Cities: http://centreforcities.typepad.com/centre_for_cities/2011/03/the-index-of-multiple-deprivation.html
Regeneration [...]

As part of our Rural Evidence work for Action with Communities in Rural England (ACRE), we’ve been analysing the strength of the rural economy for Local Authorities and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) across England.
Data and reports have now gone up on our “Evidencing rural need” website, providing the information needed to effectively represent [...]

(See the previous post for background information on the Indices of Deprivation 2010)
Overall, the IMD 2010 shows broadly similar results to the older IMD 2007 - areas that were deprived in 2007 are still in the main those that are highly deprived in 2010 (with a correlation of 0.986 between the 2 timepoints). Overall 66% [...]

The government Indices of Deprivation were published earlier today, including the overview Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 (IMD2010). Commissioned by CLG from the Social Disadvantage Research Centre at Oxford University, these are an update of the previous 2007 and 2004 datasets.
The full datasets and technical report are available at http://www.communities.gov.uk/communities/research/indicesdeprivation/deprivation10/.
We’ve been hard at work providing [...]

The government Indices of Deprivation were published earlier today, including the overview Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 (IMD 2010). The IMD is used very widely to target programmes and resources to tackle inequality and deprivation - below I set out my thoughts on why the IMD is still important, despite the wealth of data [...]

With the Office for National Statistics (ONS) hit by a near 10% per year budget cut in the 2010 Spending Review, ONS has to consider where savings can be found.
They are running a consultation to help determine the shape of the ONS future statistical work. Details and a response document are available from the ONS [...]

The media spotlight has highlighted how the Housing Benefit reforms from the spending review will impact on claimants in central London, however other areas will also be hit hard. Our analysis shows that the changes to housing benefit are likely to affect a higher proportion of claimants in seaside towns such as Blackpool, Brighton and [...]

The Comprehensive Spending Review has confirmed that local government is going to be making a lot of very tough decisions in the coming months, with local government funding from the centre reduced by 26% over 4 years (very close to the 25% cuts predicted by IFS in May based on the Conservative manifesto plan).
The impact [...]