Data for parishes
I had the chance to attend a DCMS / Policy Lab event on the vision for the government’s data strategy on Thursday last. One of the perils of being Town Clerk of a small council far from the centre of government is that all too often we miss out on events that set the agenda for policy. So I wasn’t going to miss this event.
I should probably declare at the start that I’m a huge advocate for the intelligent use of data and information. I was reminded this week (by a letter in the London Review of Books) of C S Lewis’s prediction of the potential for policy and data aggregation, via a device he called the pragmatometer, in his polemical novel That Hideous Strength. Lewis was, arguably, satirizing J D Bernal and the cult of science as progress, but even as a young man reading his novels I was able to conclude that the issue was not the collation and connection of data, but its purpose. If the pragmatometer sounds like nothing more than a mechanical version of a hyperlinked document, it was an early suggestion to me of the power of connecting evidence and data for a useful purpose.
If nothing else the Policy Lab event was a good refresher course in event facilitation. I’ve done a lot of that, and I have to say, the materials provided and the exercises run were a great reminder of what you can do with a sensible budget and some pre-event prep. If there were hiccoughs with the IT and problems with the room layout, those are the kind of things that are almost inevitable when you take an event on the road. Post event, I caught up with the Policy Lab website — their Policy Lab in a day page was a handy cut out and keep template for when you’ve got the chance to fully engage with an issue. In our sector I’d love to think about how that could be done with volunteers who have no more than two hours a night once a week or fortnight to give to an issue — I might come back to this.
It was the focus of the event that intrigued me. Data and strategies about it are a huge subject. As a data controller, responsible for how my council manages personal data, a refresher in the ethical issues around personal data, and a chance to see how individuals react to scenarios about the uses of data was valuable. One of my takeaways from the event was to think about whether officer only events to discuss data policy would be better if they always included members of the public to provide an external perspective.
The other side of the debate though, the question of data as an asset and as a resource to be used in systems, was also represented in the room, and possibly was under-explored. Around the room I counted data managers from a government department, from a charity and from local universities. I suspect each of us had our own perspectives on how data should be exploited and developed but I’m not sure how this event could capture them.
My perspective is quite simple. Small communities like the one I work for (fifteen thousand people or thereabouts, in a small town on the Anglo Scottish border) are at risk of being left behind on key quality of life issues like transport and air quality because of a lack of usable data and policy tools to respond to it. In large cities transport, congestion and air quality can be addressed by a wide variety of tools and with the use of massive data sets that are easily aggregated. No-one’s talking about how small communities do that work, or explore those options. Just one example — to test this thesis I went to the government’s data blog — the word parish returns no search results, even though parish councils (sometimes calling themselves town councils) are at the heart of developing neighbourhood plans for towns with populations often as large as 40,000 to 50,000 people. Of course there are issues of scale, and reliability, but those issues are far from insuperable, and the problems are real and significant.
Two examples spring to mind. We’ve no real evidence in Berwick as to the extent of cycling in the town, or the routes people use. We’d like it, because policies on sustainable transport are potentially something that can be included in our neighbourhood plan. Leisure cycling could be mapped using data published on sites like strava, if someone could work with the data owners to share the anonymized data, aggregate it, and then provide it in usable form to local councils. Yes, that would require government to identify the data source, negotiate the data, and build the tool, but the result would be localized, usable data. In some cases, such as when cyclists use off road routes to connect communities, it might be the only reliable way to identify land that needs to be protected or routes that need to be enhanced.
Transport issues are always on my mind because Berwick has a familiar set of challenges for a small town in an historic setting. The centre of our town has a post medieval street plan, with a limited number of entrances and exits to the town centre, a relatively fixed supply of car parking and a limited road capacity that is unlikely to change. Even getting the data to understand the impact of changing car park rules is challenging.
There are solutions of course; an ANPR based camera system could easily allow us to build a strong data set of how many times certain vehicles come in and out of town, how long they stay, and, if aggregated with DVLA data about the emissions of the vehicle, could help us understand our air quality better.
Why do we need this data? Simple, really. We have a mix, in the town centre, of short term and long term car parking. If we have, for instance, 350 long term parking spaces and 300 three hour car parking spaces, but 500 vehicles are spending all day in the town centre, there may well be 150 vehicles car hopping one or more times a day into and out of the short term car parks, with all the knock on effects for our air quality and congestion. We can hypothesize that right now, but without data we’re just guessing.
Similarly, if we know how many journeys are made on each of the corridors into town, and have anonymized access to data about where the car is kept or where the journey might have originated, we have a robust tool to start planning sustainable transport alternatives. We think we can specify and develop our own system to do this in Berwick, if we have funding and policy support to enable us to get at the data, but my suspicion is that we’re not alone, and that there are other towns who could do with a similar solution off the shelf.
I’ve used transport as an example because it’s on my mind right now, but there are lots of other examples. To me what’s key is that if we have real time data we can opt for dynamic solutions, avoiding the trap that is the way in which each solution, currently, ends up set, if not in stone, in concrete and tarmac, making it instantly out of date as users change their behaviour in response to the solution. Having real time data about how users are responding to each intervention is essential to avoid the post-implementation debate about the effects of any change,
So part of my vision for data in government in 2030 is that it’s not just about mining existing datasets for insights, but about redressing the data inequalities that mean large areas like cities have much more data, and many more insights they can derive from it, than rural areas and small towns. Government needs to commit to helping us understand our communities and develop affordable and usable toolkits that make it possible for us to enjoy the facilities and options much larger communities do.
That’s my vision for data and government in 2030 then, that enabling local collection and micro aggregations of data by even the smallest communities will be an essential part of delivering localism and neighbourhood management.
