News and publications

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 [...]

DataViz has launched! This is our project to support and improve public sector data visualisation, commissioned by the Department of Communities and Local Government.
Good data visualisation can help users explore and understand the patterns and trends in data, and also communicate that understanding to others to help them make robust decisions based on the data being [...]

The importance of the Data4nr service run by OCSI for the Department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) has been recognised in the recently published statutory guidance on the economic assessment duty:
“The majority of nationally provided data sets for local development are signposted on data4nr.net (data for neighbourhoods and regeneration) and these are updated as [...]

The Audit Commission has just published their Is there something I should know? Making the most of your information to improve services study, looking at how councils use information to make decisions.
I’ve been involved in the study as part of the external advisory group, and was impressed by the effort put in by the Commission [...]