Newsletter, December 2018 No Images? Click here Hi there, In this month's newsletter, you can find:
Support team availability over ChristmasAs the festive season approaches, we hope you all enjoy this time of year and have a good break. If you are working around Christmas and the New Year, you might find it a quiet time when you can get up to speed with our tools and perform tasks you’ve been putting off - maybe create your own neighbourhoods, author a new report or look at your legal duties to deliver certain services. Our Support team will be available at support@esd.org.uk every working day to answer any queries you may have. Easy access to key data in advance of local authority boundary changesFrom 1st April 2019, several new local authorities will come into existence and each one will need to up-to-date data to match their new needs and responsibilities. Our Natural Neighbourhoods tool, combined with LG Inform Plus reporting, lets you see the characteristics of areas proposed under local government reorganisation. Two such recently defined areas are West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire, as proposed by the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government’s Proposed Reorganisation of Local Government in Northamptonshire. You can use our “basic facts” reports to see how data for the new boundaries of West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire can be summarised and broken down across their current districts. Data availability downloads now availableTo give greater visibility to the metrics within LG Inform and LG Inform Plus and which ares have data available, we have extended the current download facility to show which metric types are applicable to which area type, e.g. County Council, Fire Authority or Police area. The "download" tab for each of our standard lists lets you download spreadsheets of each list and its mappings to other lists such as area type. Mappings are cross referenced between lists. We’ve now also added a similar facility for individual list items. So, for example, the "download mappings" link from the Police force area type gives all metric types applicable to police force areas. You will also see the 'DISCONTINUED' stamp against metric types whose values are no longer updated by the source organisation. Over the coming months, you’ll see other list items and some whole lists marked as discontinued following our review and overhaul of lists. See here for details. You can comment on changes in this Knowledge Hub forum (needs sign-in). Local services to help combat lonelinessThe LGA is planning a half-day workshop in London in the afternoon of 23rd January 2019 to describe and promote our thinking for discovering local services from councils and their partners (voluntary, social care, health, private sector) that can help lonely people. This work builds upon the data standards and open data strategies for local government that have been making progress over the last decade. The project has the support of the Cabinet Office and DCMS, and is a response to the priority of tackling loneliness made by the Prime Minister earlier this year. We hope to assemble four pilot areas that will work with us to identify services, convert information about them and publish this on line to national standards so that we can commission tools to verify, discover and match them to individuals based upon locality, eligibility and need. If you are able to come to the workshop to hear more (places are limited) please let us know on transparency@local.gov.uk LG Inform Benchmarking club – 2018/19 Q2Over the past two years we have had great success with over 160 councils participating. The Q2 2018/19 results are now live in LG Inform and available to view, click here to access the custom summary report. The most recent data is only available to registered local authority users of LG Inform, so please sign in to view the report. You can also view our newly added benchmarking street cleansing metrics report 2017/18 here. We are always interested in adding new indicators to the club. If you have a new indicator you would be interested in us adding please visit https://khub.net/group/lginform/ideas (sign in is required). This is a strictly voluntary process and we will be sending out links for Q3 2018/19 collection in the second week in January. If your authority doesn’t already upload data and you would like to join the club, please let the LG Inform team know by emailing lginform@local.gov.uk. Did you know?Our LG Inform Value for Money (VfM) Profiles site contains the latest available ‘Revenue Outturn’ (RO) data for almost 900 metric types. Easy to use reports display RO data across services and themes e.g. Adult Social Care or Financial Resilience; whilst an ‘Outliers’ report highlights where key indicators are out of line with peers. The LG Inform VfM Profiles site is here. Online training and regional eventsAre you interested in learning more about LG Inform or LG Inform Plus? If so, why not sign up for our online training sessions? They're quick, informative and easily accessible from the comfort of your own desk. Or if you’d like to discuss holding an event at your authority just get in touch using the email below. Find out about upcoming online training sessions here, or click on any subject name to download a PDF guide. Please email LGInform@local.gov.uk if you are interested in joining any of the sessions. Alternatively, you can book your place on one of our popular training days using the links below:
At these events, you can learn what's available, how to use the tools, and ask us any questions you may have. As ever, we're always interested to hear your ideas for improving our services and would love to hear from you, so don't hesitate to get in touch by replying to this newsletter. |