News and publications

Projecting the future requirement for residential care in Leeds
“Planning4care has given us a more robust understanding of the scale of the future care needs of our older population, enabling us to generate options for the future provision of residential care and the development of extra care housing on a much sounder basis”, [...]

The Audit Commission “Under pressure – Tackling the financial challenge for councils of an ageing population” study highlighted that local authorities are ‘not prepared’ for an ageing population. The report also identified that most councils do not know enough about the costs of their ageing population, and that opportunities could be missed for [...]

The Big Lottery Fund commissioned OCSI to visualise the relationship between Big Lottery Fund spending and levels of deprivation in local areas for Big Lottery senior managers and board members. We used a range of visual techniques to identify how areas of high need have received increased levels of funding, and those areas where [...]

Planning4care provides the intelligence that social care and health commissioners and providers need in order to improve service planning and delivery. Information and analysis from Planning4care enables local commissioners and providers to understand likely future care needs and service requirements under a range of alternative future planning scenarios. Planning4care is led by OCSI, who have [...]

The debate over the “right” level of governance rumbles on, with politicians and think-tanks making the case for city regions (Centre for Cities Outlook 2010, and director Dermot Finch’s blog), regional development agencies (the National Framework for Regional and Local Economic Development identifies a pivotal role for the regional tier in joining up national and [...]

Government commissioned research published this week values local information systems (or Data Observatories) at up to £500K per year, significantly above development and ongoing costs.
By far the bulk of annual spend (ranging up to £130K) were staff costs, and system managers identified that the main area for potential saving was in reducing the time spent [...]

The new government open data website data.gov.uk, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, was launched to much acclaim last week. As well as linking to public datasets, Data.gov.uk gathers together applications, ideas and discussion around open data use.
As of launch, the site links to more than 2,800 public datasets [...]

Data.gov.uk is part of the drive to open up access to government data, and has just gone live with a sneak-preview for developers. The site provides a single online point of access for government-held public data, helping you “locate the data you need, share ideas about what to do with it, and show others [...]

The September economic data has been added to the Local Economic Monitor, showing the latest information on jobs and unemployment, and house sales at local level.

Unemployment claimant data for September 2009: The figures include data on the number and proportion of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance, the ratio of claimants to available jobs, and the 12-monthly [...]

The fall in the number of people receiving unemployment benefit last month could well be another one of those green shoots (the latest economic data published yesterday is available on the Local Economic Monitor).

The September 2009 data showed that the total number of people claiming Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) across England fell by 4,700 compared with [...]