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TalkLIS 1 - Interview Wigan Metropolitan Council and Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council
Hello and welcome to the first in our series of TalkLIS sessions with me Julian Tyndale
Biscoe, I’m joined by Matt France who is customer Insight Analyst at Rochdale Metropolitan
Borough Council and Jonathan Caunce who is Intelligence analyst at Wigan Council, thank
you both for joining us.
I wondered first if i could have a quick talk to Matt about your particular project. Matt
I understand that this has been very important in terms of getting intelligence out to the
local strategic partnership, and that your projects play an important role in that. I
was just wondered if you could take us through how it came about and any particular issues
that cropped up along the way.
Yeah sure Julian, a few years ago we indentified a need to provide the local community and
our LSP with evidence to support decision making and we sort of realised that at the
time that there was lots of sources of evidence and lots of different data sources that people
were using, so we wanted to pull it all together under the one easy-to-use, easily accessible
system, that our partners, and especially our local community and third sector s could
access , to help them develop their funding bids and give them the information that they
need to understand their local communities. So we obviously we went with Geowise to help
us come up with a solution to that and ‘Stats and Maps’ was born, and it’s been a real
success so far with our local community groups and our LSP partners using the site to get
interesting and valuable information of it.
And it’s called ‘Stats and Maps’ and as you say it’s not just the wide variety
of users, it’s also the wider community is also that’s benefiting from this. I mean
have you had some good feedback from the community Ithink.
Yes we have, we actively take the system out into the community so we go to their community
centres, community bases and demonstrate the site and take the groups through how they
can use the system best to meet their needs and because of this training and this high
level of accessibility we are getting some really good feedback from our local communities,
especially around using evidence to support their funding bids, to develop their local
areas and their local community groups and its almost sort of empowering the local community
to challenge the council, as well because they feel like they have got a lot more evidence,
a lot more intelligence about their local areas, and some of their decisions being made
so they feel a lot more confident in challenging their local partners and Councils.
And this evidence, i think i would like to bring in Jonathan if I may. Jonathan, this
idea of evidence from local strategic partnerships is quite important i think the same similar
things happened with you with ‘Wisdom’, can you just tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah absolutely, I think that very similar, I think that maybe we came at it at a slightly
more sort of strategic angle originally than Matt, obviously with the votes. I think we
kind of done that afterwards if you like realising the benefits that it has to the community
but I think in terms of decision making in our local strategic partnership, I think the
keeping really for us is that people need to make sure when making they were making
decisions, although people understood the area very very well its about making sure
that that evidence, that sort of gut feeling that people have about what the issues are
is backed up by evidence.
As well we are not just thinking about Wigan as a whole, Wigan is quite a diverse place
in terms of it has many different communities within it, that all have quite different problems
then I think what LIS is able to do is able to is really to think about. What are the
specific problems in specific areas that we need to address, so rather than kind of a
one size fits all I think that local authorities generally have been trying to move away from
that kind of one size fits all to a more focused approach I suppose and I think that’s what
LIS is really trying to be about , let’s not just tar everyone with the same brush,
let’s think about what communities actually need, and I think that’s were wisdom has
really came into, to try and really help that process so that people are not having to search
around lots of different data websites to find statistics from lots of different places.
To be able to try and pull that together, so if you are working in one department you
can actually access the data from many other departments, all in one place, rather than
tying tor better that time consuming aspect of pulling together data as well.
Yes I just wondered whether you both have come across, you know we talk about providing
service according to need and I think in the past we have picked up example where effectively
anecdotal evidence was being used as opposed to hard evidence and data led or intelligence
lead commissioning if you like. I wondered if you had ever came across that in the past,
whether that was something you had seen examples of.
Yeah I mean, to be honest that was one of the main reasons why we developed our LIS
was to make sure that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet as you say. We found
evidence of people using out-of-date statistics, statistics that weren’t really fit for purpose
for what they were being used for. So one of our main aims was to bring together all
these statistics in one reliable, easy to use sort of sources, which all our local communities
could access, especially they since they were non experts so statistics can be quite daunting
so that use of them and use of research and evidence is quite daunting to some people
so we are trying to cut down on that and trying to give the facts and figures a bit more reliability
and a bit more presence.
From our point of view I think , trying to not making decisions based on no evidence
at all I think that obviously there is a place form that kind of more knowledge based , in
terms of new past experience, rather than instead of necessarily having the percentages
for whatever types of statistics, I think there is definitely a place for that, I think
we are trying to move to marrying up that more sort of anecdotal evidence with the hard
facts as well , although we can almost be sure that we can almost be sure that the anecdotal
evidence if accurate , it just makes that case even stronger. Especially as Matt has
talked about funding bids for community groups that’s absolutely key, they are there on
the ground, they know what these issues are but it’s just helping them so that they
can evidence that in the easiest way so that access the kind of funds and get access to
them will really make a different so that’s they kind of aim that we are both trying to
get to really.
As Matt mentioned there are a wide group of people with different levels of expertise
and so simple data presentation is the key, so I guess you both must have found that having
something straight forward, and that is easy to understand is very important its that the
case Matt?
Yes absolutely, previously we did have a different LIS system from the InstantAtlas product and
one of the main criticisms of that system was the limitations in the data presentation,
data visualisation, and what we are trying to do with the InstantAltas product is that
it allows people to access and more importantly to understand the information much more easily
and the ability to create custom reports and custom atlases to better meet needs of the
users is a big plus from our point of view.
I’m pleased you are getting such good use out of it. I wondered finally if we could
touch on the future for LIS and we know that the situation is looking relatively grim in
terms of funding for public services and you both have said how important LIS is in determining
that resources are spent in the right way, I suppose that there is a concern short-termism
might come in and those projects might not be as well funded but actually these are the
projects that have a lot of benefits for communities and services public services. I just wondered
what your views were on the future, you can both tell us, Jonathan you can tell us you
are just about to get ‘Wisdom’ off the ground and wondering what your views are,
what you thought the future will hold.
Yeah possibly in the past when we had gone through this, these kind of times, maybe we
have not seen cuts on this scale, but we have certainly have obviously seen cuts before
but possibly not having these kind of systems has meant that what as we were talking about
early in terms of anecdotal evidence has meant that when people have put that forward in
the past that’s where the short-termism has come in and you can’t sort of, evidence
that properly. We have got to make saving and unfortunately that’s going to have to
go, and I think that that what our systems can hopefully aid and that this time round
that we will be able to make sure that communities and departments as well have got the best
evidence base they can to make the case, keeping hold of some of these services, so that those
ones that are really really making the difference when we can really evidence that they are
making that difference as well , so that when it comes to deciding where the funds are going,
even if there are less of them around, we can make sure that we are using them in the
best possible way
Yes so you still see yourselves as an integral part of that and hopefully able to direct,
the way that to help fund be directed in the directed in the right place. Do you think
that’s the same with you Matt?
Yes I definitely would echo Jonathan’s comments. I think one of the main benefits is going
to be the idea with the big society and local empowerments. I think LIS just in general
is going to could play a big role in that in informing local communities about their
local area and where the real issues do lie so initially i thought that the spending cuts
would possibly be a bad thing for our LIS systems but I’ve been thinking about it,
i think there may be a greater need for them in the future.
So it’s good to hear that you are both positive.
I would just like to say thank you both matt and john and all the best for the future.
Thank you very much.