UPDATE: SocialCareInfo has now been rolled into the all-encompassing AdviceLocal service, which covers all areas of social welfare law (benefits, housing, debt, employment, immigration and social care), and has the same 408 local authority look-ups powered by MapIt to help display maps showing the local provisions.

It’s great to see the launch of SocialCareInfo, a new website which helps people in the UK find local & national social care resources.

All the more so because it uses one of our tools, MapIt, to match postcodes with the relevant local authorities. The site’s builders, Lasa, came to us when it became clear that MapIt did exactly what they needed.

Socialcareinfo.net covers the whole of the UK. Users begin by typing in their postcode, whereupon they are shown the range of services available to them.

That’s also how many of our own projects (think FixMyStreet, WriteToThem or TheyWorkForYou) begin, and there’s a good reason for that: users are far more likely to know their own postcode than to be certain about which local authority they fall under, or even who their MP is.

MapIt is really handy for exactly this kind of usage, where you need to match a person to a constituency or governing body. It looks at which boundaries the geographic input falls within, and it returns the relevant authorities.

We’re glad to see it working so well for SocialCareInfo, and we feel sure that the site will prove a useful resource for the UK.