Newsletter, February 2018 No Images? Click here Hi there, In this month's newsletter, you can find
Subscription RenewalsWe are currently contacting our subscribing authorities about subscriptions for 1st April 2018 to 31st March 2019 and renewal letters have been sent to lead contacts. For details on how to renew your subscription or to become a subscriber please contact us at lginformplus@local.gov.uk. For more details about the LG Inform Plus service and what's new, here is our 2019/19 guide. GDPR - Prototype RoPA now availableWith GDPR almost upon us, we have extended our existing Records Retention service to include the necessary extra information mandated by the Information Commissioner's Office and help authorities conform to the new regulations. This new development will allow authorities to tailor, download, build and maintain a Record of Processing Activity (RoPA). The extension is now available as a prototype out with councils for final review. Take a look at the Records Retention and the RoPA video or slide show. Contact the support team if you’d like to try the prototype and provide feedback. Say if you’d like someone to give you a demo of the tool. Latest Police recorded crime stats availableCrime and disorder and the perception of crime are key factors influencing the quality of life in an area. Our Police Recorded Crime report, updated quarterly, provides an overview of crime in any selected authority or region and comparison group. For example, in the year ending September 2017, Police forces in England recorded a total of 5.3 million offences showing an annual rise of 14 per cent: 79.29 per 1,000 people for this period. The North East had the largest number of police recorded crimes per 1,000 people for this period at 95.41, followed by Yorkshire and Humberside who had 95.02 per 1,000. To explore overall crime and the individual types of offence in your or elsewhere, take a look at the full report. URI search and breakdownWithin our open data catalogue is the URI Search, used for looking up a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). URIs uniquely identify things like geographical areas, organisations and types of service, in order to link information between different datasets and increase their value. Our URI search for areas has now been extended with a breakdown option (the button shown below) which lets you see all the URIs for areas that sit within a larger area, e.g. wards within a local authority area, or parliamentary constituencies within England. The breakdown feature will help populate URIs in Electoral Management Systems so they can output election results in compliance with the Elections Results Schema. BenchmarkingThe LG Inform Benchmarking Club will be releasing the Q3 data for 2017-2018 in the next few weeks. For further information please visit Benchmarking Club. In next month’s newsletter we will be sending out the summary report links. If you have any questions please contact us via email. If you would like to suggest and/or vote for new metrics, please read more about how you can do it here. Fire benchmarkingWe are pleased to announce the Fire benchmarking report for Q3 is now LIVE. Here is the report that we produced for the South West Fire Performance and Benchmarking Group (requires signed in to view) and here is the equivalent report for all benchmarking participants. The ‘all participants’ report has the added feature of allowing you as users to change the comparison group used - you can now focus the report on a regional, metropolitan, combined or county group, or the Family Group 4 comparison group. We are working on a companion report for the Benchmarking Club which will contain a series of heat maps covering each of the metrics in the main report. If you have any other requests in terms of reports or additional metrics, please let us know. For any questions about our Fire benchmarking work or if you know of anyone else who would be interested in taking part, please pass on and contact us via email. LG Inform direct data feed (API) in actionWe just wanted to take a moment to show you a couple of practical examples with the LG Inform Plus API - our direct data feed which allows you to use metrics from our database in your own websites or applications. Wakefield Council's JSNA and Observatory web sites have merged to establish a new data and information resource about the health of local people and the broader characteristics of the district and neighbourhoods in which they live. Created by the council's intelligence officers, it utilises our direct data feed (API) and reports from LG Inform Plus alongside data from Public Health England and other central government sources. The team used Google Visualization tools to display the data, which come with a lot of customisation options helping to establish a consistent style across the Wakefield JSNA website and State of the District Report (PDF). We've also created this video on importing LG Inform API data into Power BI, based on user feedback saying this would be useful. Power BI is a useful package for creating dashboards and conducting data analysis. If you'd like to learn how your organisation could implement the API for a project, don't hesitate to get in touch with the support team. Training and eventsBook your place on one of our popular training days using the links below. You can learn what's available, how to use the tools, and ask us any questions you may have.
If you'd prefer a live demonstration from the comfort of your desk, join one of our online webinars. We'll take you through the most popular features of both tools and there's also opportunity to ask questions. They're a great way to refresh your knowledge. For more information or to book your place, visit our Online Training pages. 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. |