Introduction

How do differences in educational achievement, ethnic background, age and gender affect the likelihood of being in or out of work locally? What are the characteristics of inward migration by neighbourhood? What is the geography of social class in Newham? These are just some examples of questions that colleagues, partners and the public are asking the Neighbourhood Information Management System (NIMS) team to provide answers to.

There are areas of high deprivation across the East End of London and in Newham. In particular, in some areas, factors including child poverty levels, life expectancy below the national average and high rates of unemployment are present and need to be better understood. Levels of inward migration into Newham, especially from the newly joined EU countries, are also difficult to quantify. Health outcomes for illnesses such as heart disease and cancers are unevenly spread, indicating that complex underlying factors may be contributing to these local patterns.

NIMS was first launched in 2004, funded by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF), and envisaged as a tool to enable the London Borough of Newham and its partners, including the local health services, fire, police and third sector organisations, to share the valuable data they each collect independently. NIMS was set up to provide a web environment where access to this data becomes possible. This improves analysis of local conditions based on detailed access to data from many different sources and therefore benefits each service and the whole community.

Local Information Systems

The idea of providing web access to statistics about local authority areas, especially when this incorporates a spatial element, has been growing in popularity in town halls across the UK. With NIMS, Newham became one of the first to set up a web-based local information system. Building on earlier good ideas and expertise, the current NIMS team have continued to develop a system that takes advantage of emerging web technologies and responds to the growing emphasis from central government upon customer-focused services and collaborative partnership working.

In 2006, following a national study into local information systems undertaken by Communities and Local Government, NIMS was listed as being among the best examples of systems that are successfully addressing the public service transformation agenda outlined in the Varney Report.

How NIMS Is Used

NIMS aims to help users to understand better how diverse factors such as access to housing, recent migration patterns, healthy eating, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and local employment issues relate to the demographic characteristics of their area. Those interested in using an online resource for this purpose include the following:

• London Borough of Newham Adults’ and Children’s Services, who wish to map the data they routinely collect to see how take-up of services is spread and what effects proximity to service outlets might be having on service users.
  
• Health providers who will need to plan future activities which reflect the changing composition of local communities and to be able to demonstrate where distribution of these interventions has really matched the characteristics of those whose needs are greatest.
  
• Local police who wish to move repetitive ward-level reporting tasks to an online system, so that changes in crime patterns are updated and distributed automatically, freeing analysts to concentrate their resources on more complex tasks such as the identification of causal relationships in the data.
  
• Newham residents who also use NIMS, for example, to answer questions as diverse as the reasons for falling clientele numbers in a pub, and also how the number of vehicle break-ins in their area may compare to other areas.The Olympic Delivery Agency, along with local organisations contributing towards the 2012 Games, who all have an evolving agenda to monitor the effects the Games will have on Newham. Data such as changes in employment availability, property values and local perceptions about healthy living and its relationship to sport, can all be captured and analysed from a central and shared source.
  
• Newham’s councillors, who will also be able to refer to the latest statistics for their wards from a central source, using an interface that requires no specialist knowledge. Subject areas reflect residents’ concerns and as such are very varied, local, and often not captured by national agencies such as the ONS.

User Feedback

This year research into how to increase the number of NIMS users and data contributors was undertaken via user groups, online surveys and face-to-face interviews with potential users and made the following points:

• There is a need for the most recent possible data to be captured for very small localities (below ward level) to enable local projects to link data to just their areas.
  
• Policies for local improvement need to focus on how their interventions can be measured to quantify policy impacts. Data suitable for this purpose often exists in disparate units but must be identified at the project’s outset through early discussions between policy and data specialists.
  
• There are substantial numbers of users who require data about the same topic but over different periods of time or at different geographic resolutions. Demand for the different elements of information within a data-set need to be communicated early in the process of system data entry, if eventual information display is to meet user needs.

Accessible Online Resource

To continue to grow into being a useful resource, NIMS needs to offer a number of options to conduct a range of analyses and be intuitive to use.

Data must be up to date. How must a system be organised to ensure that latest data is always included so as not to miss disparate data updates? Consideration must also be given to periodicity – for example, how often do crime statistics need to be updated to be useful to community safety officers and is this different to the needs of other users?

Local information systems like NIMS demonstrate why evidence is important and that information is powerful stuff. Lower level geographies can show detailed patterns of the distribution and relationships for many different factors whilst more aggregated information is useful for making comparisons with other boroughs, London and the UK. There may also be surprising messages in the data that do not conform to preconceptions.

NIMS is based in the Corporate Research Unit of the London Borough of Newham. Version 3 was launched on September 12th and can be visited at www.newham.info

For further details please contact Lavinia Irving at lavinia.irving@newham.gov.uk

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