Newsletter, September 2018 No Images? Click here Hi there, In this month's newsletter, you can find
Adult obesity: a major cause for concern for everyoneRecent data published by Public Health England showing the percentage of adults (aged 18+) classified as overweight or obese is now available for 2016/17. It’s staggering to find that in some areas more than 70% of adults are classified as overweight or obese. To find the findings for your area, see the report in LG Inform. Key LG Inform Plus reports updatedWe’ve updated the basic reports from LG Inform Plus, to use more recent data and expose some metrics previously only available to subscribers. The reports cover a sample of metrics on population, health, employment and education. One report describes a selected single area in detail, such as this report showing basic facts about Greater Manchester, while another gives details of a selection of smaller areas within a chosen area - for example Greater Manchester broken down by Ward (sample from this report shown below). These open reports provide an insight into what’s available from LG Inform Plus for a variety of audiences, such as councillors and project teams. If your council is a subscribing organisation, you can see many more metrics and both view pre-written reports and create your own custom ones. New downloads to show metric data by areas and periodsWe’ve just added to our standards page more information defining the area types (such as local authority, ward, police authority, CCG and more) and period types (including calendar year, financial year, academic year, month, and more) that apply to different types of metric available in LG Inform and LG Inform Plus. Mappings between these new lists and the metric types list show which periods and areas have data available. This information helps LG Inform and LG Inform Plus users find the data which applies directly to their citizens and places. These new lists were recommended by a recent review of the standard lists. Our consultation on other recommended changes is still happening, so do give your feedback in the document, in the forum or by email. Using our data in other reporting toolsThe visualisation of data in support of decision making is at the heart of LG Inform and LG Inform Plus. Many organisations use our data to support local performance management systems, including products such Power BI and Tableau. See our Devon API case study as one example. Now Colin Wojtowycz of DataWoj has used of LG Inform/LG Inform Plus data from the API in Tableau Software - you can see his example visualisation online now. Find more details here on Colin’s blog: How can data visualisation support better decision making in the public sector? We’ve previously written about how to stream data feeds from our Application Programmer Interface (API) into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft’s Power BI. Keeping track of legislation changes with LG Inform PlusKeeping up to date with legislation changes is never easy. However, LG Inform Plus can help take the strain out of this. Each year, we update the Powers & Duties tool to take account of legislative changes which affect the services councils can and must deliver. These changes are reflected in the Local Government Services List. As more councils use our Records Retention tool to create their required Record of Processing Activity (RoPA), they bring more legislation to our attention. For example, such extra legislation provides the justification for holding records in relation to functions that a councils performs as a landlord or employer. Normally we’d only include legislation that specifically references local authorities, but we will check other legislation if you bring it to our attention and need it to maintain your RoPA. So do let us know - we’ll advise our RoPA User Group of such changes. LG Inform Benchmarking club – 2018/19 Q1Over the past two years, we've had great success with over 160 councils participating. The Q1 2018/19 results are now live in LG Inform and available to view through a custom summary report here. 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. 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 the LG Inform and LG Inform Plus group on Knowledge Hub (sign in required). This is a strictly voluntary process and we will be sending out links for Q2 2018/19 collection in the second week in October. If your authority doesn’t already upload data and would now like to, please let the LG Inform team know at lginform@local.gov.uk. Training and 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. During these online meetings, we will give you a phone number so you can dial in to a conference call. We will also share a URL so you will be able to see our screen from your desk. 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. |