BY ROBIN HARRIS

Tower Hamlets Local Strategic Partnership has successfully completed the first phase of implementing a Local Information System to support the delivery of neighbourhood renewal initiatives, our Local Area Agreement and localised service delivery. Known as ‘THIS Borough’, the webbased system has been developed by Geowise for the Partnership and enables the reporting, exploration and retrieval of local area information from borough level down to Super Output Area.

Facts At your Fingertips

We have a wide range of data on the system – from national sources such as the Census and Labour Force Survey, to very local sources such as reports of antisocial behaviour, abandoned vehicles and local resident satisfaction data. The site was launched in September; since then the number of registrations has been steadily increasing and feedback has been very positive. An Assistant Director at the PCT praised it as the best data front end he had seen in his whole life! Resident representatives on our Local Area Partnership committees have also welcomed the easy access the new system gives them to data about their local area. We have found that the site attracts visitors from a wide range of backgrounds including Tower Hamlets staff, local community groups and businesses, health workers, the police, teachers, researchers and journalists.

Making a Difference

The recent local government white paper puts an increasing focus on localised service delivery and engaging local people in developing services which meet local needs. Tower Hamlets is already well advanced in this agenda with eight wellestablished Local Area Partnerships (LAPs). Each LAP has a representative Steering Group which develops a local area action plan focusing on issues that are priorities for the local area. A key new development has been to use THIS Borough to report back to the LAPs on the impact of local action plans and feed into their planning next year. We found that the new system enabled us to quickly develop customised reports for each area which highlighted significant variation below ward level and relationships between indicators. In addition the reports were able to be dynamically linked to more detailed information, that otherwise would be hard to obtain.

Feeling the Benefits

Although we are still at an early stage, we have already seen signs that through providing such open access to data the level of discussion and the level of community involvement in those discussions are significantly raised. We have found that it becomes easier to challenge perceptions about an area and to reveal previously hidden aspects of the community which were masked by reporting at borough and local area partnership level.

In summary, our experience since launch has been positive and has clearly demonstrated that the benefits of developing a Local Information System can be achieved – and how this better enables us to meet growing national and local expectations for services and interventions more tailored to local need. In order to maintain the momentum, our next steps will be to further develop the range of local data available, keep data uptodate and accessible, and work with partners to ensure that the data on the system continues to provide insight into the local area and community.

The Tower Hamlets Local Information System can be accessed at http://thisborough.towerhamlets.gov.uk

Contact: Robin Harris, THIS Borough Manager, Tel: 020 8364 4201 email: robin.harris@towerhamlets.gov.uk

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