Around the world today, organisations and communities are recognising the 26th International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This is a moment to reflect on one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world – but it’s also a call to action.

As one small action in that continued effort, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) this year, to explore how something like our Local Intelligence Hub could help their members organise for change.

Little did we expect that, in building a prototype Data Hub for them to explore their needs, we’d discover a gaping hole in data collection about the safety of girls at schools in 16% of local authorities.

But first, what were we aiming to achieve?

In a post last month, I shared some of the goals of this work – such as using data to galvanise support from MPs, to monitor patterns that official bodies might miss, and to help EVAW’s members make the case for increased local funding to address violence against women and girls (VAWG).

I also shared how we were using the batch request tools in WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (our advanced Freedom Of Information service) to generate new public data on VAWG prevalence in schools.

And, of course, all of this work builds on top of the Local Intelligence Hub we designed and built with The Climate Coalition and Green Alliance – which has already proved its worth as a tool for community organising and public affairs, including through events like this Summer’s #ActNowChangeForever Mass Lobby, and The Climate Coalition’s Great Big Green Week.

Now it’s time for an update – how did we get on?

A replicable pipeline of brand new VAWG data

When we built the Local Intelligence Hub with The Climate Coalition (TCC), much of the data we included was already publicly available: MP information from Parliament, demographic data from the ONS, public opinion data shared by polling companies. Combined with TCC member organisations’ own data on their local support and activities, the Hub was able to present a nuanced picture of climate and nature are being protected across the whole country.

We knew we faced a different challenge with the VAWG data hub. As I explained last month, public data in this space is often incomplete, or missing entirely. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to test how WhatDoTheyKnow and the Local Intelligence Hub could work together to generate and then publish brand new datasets on VAWG prevalence or activity, made public through FOI requests to local authorities and policing bodies.

We chose school safeguarding referral figures as a suitably challenging example that was also indicative of levels of risk to children. When school staff fear a child may be in danger in any way, they are meant to refer it to the safeguarding team at their local authority. The UK government collects some information about these referrals as part of its Children In Need census, but the definition of a “child in need” is somewhat open to interpretation, and we and EVAW both suspected that, as a result, the official data was only telling part of the story. The census also only covers local authorities in England, leaving Scotland and Wales to collect their own, incompatible data (the CRCS census in Wales, and Children’s Services Plans in Scotland).

With the help of the WhatDoTheyKnow volunteers, we drafted an FOI request to be sent to every UK local authority with a responsibility for education, asking for three things:

1. The total number of safeguarding referrals made to them, by schools in their area – this is data that technically should be collected by the CIN census for English authorities, but we suspect is not
2. Any sort of categorical breakdown they held about those referrals, such as a breakdown of the genders of the children involved – this doesn’t currently appear in any public dataset that we know of
3. The total number of schoolchildren in their area

You can browse the requests and responses on WhatDoTheyKnow. Here are some key things we learned through the process:

No matter how much you research your request, something will slip through

Our background research and even our first pilot requests failed to reveal that the total number of schoolchildren is something that’s already published for England, Scotland, and Wales. Thankfully, many authorities simply pointed us to this data (with a “Section 21” refusal – “information already accessible”), but others continued to provide the data for each year we requested. Had we known in advance that the data was already available to us, we could have left it out of our requests to English, Scottish and Welsh authorities. We can only hope, since this is such basic information, the authorities who did go on to provide the data to us didn’t spend too long gathering it.

You will receive information in every format imaginable, and your data extraction process needs to handle that

We asked for responses to be provided in a “re-usable, machine-readable format” if the authority deemed the information to meet the FOI Act definition of a ‘dataset’. We think, in reality, very few of the authorities held this data in a format structured enough to count as a ‘dataset’, but a few did send over their data in spreadsheet format, which was nice to see! Others, however, sent us tables in Word documents, in PDFs, SharePoint links, even ASCII-art tables in raw email text.

We also knew authorities might hold the information by calendar, academic, or financial reporting year, so we gave them the freedom to provide it to us in whichever scheme they had. Unsurprisingly, we received responses across all three (57% calendar year, 35% financial year, 8% academic year).

Happily, the crowdsourcing interface in WhatDoTheyKnow Projects enabled us to make relatively quick work of extracting the data we needed, but we were ultimately only able to extract a fraction of the information some authorities provided and we found that some of the interpretation of the responses (ie: “is this a financial year, or an academic year?”) heavily relied on human intuition, which means we’ll need to think carefully about the way we structure future requests, if we want to process the data through any sort of automated pipeline.

Complex requests are a risk

The more information you request, the more useful it might be to you, but the more you risk the public authority refusing to answer it on “Section 12” cost grounds. WhatDoTheyKnow’s advice is to keep your request as short and focused as possible. But we knew that historical data, across a few metrics and a few years, would be most useful to the VAWG Data Hub’s users, so we asked for as much as we felt we could justify – and it mostly paid off.

70% of responses to our batch request contained both key pieces of data we wanted (the total referrals for multiple years, and the gender breakdown). Another 7% contained just the yearly totals, without any gender breakdown.

7% are still awaiting a response, even now, over a month after the statutory deadline. And 6% of authorities said they didn’t hold the information at all (because they, surprisingly, don’t record the referrals they receive). Which leaves 10% who refused our request on cost grounds. If our request had been simpler, this number of refusals would likely have been smaller.

However, this result is in itself interesting: at least 16% of local authorities responsible for handling safeguarding referrals either don’t record them, or record them in such a way that it would take more than 18 hours of officer time to report how many they received in a given year, or how many relate to girls.

If the government is serious about halving violence against women and girls within a decade, this is precisely the sort of data local authorities will need at their fingertips, in order to monitor progress and allocate resources. The fact that it’s effectively inaccessible to 16% of them right now is a worry.

Combining data for new patterns and new questions

Remember how I mentioned we were adapting the Local Intelligence Hub for EVAW’s needs?

With our FOI data extracted through WhatDoTheyKnow, we were able to very quickly load it into a prototype VAWG Data Hub. Alongside it, we loaded in a whole new area type to filter by—“Policing areas” or Police & Crime Commissioners—as well as some examples of crime prevalence data (the number of reported VAWG-related incidents, by policing area) and public policy guidelines data (the Council Of Europe’s recommended minimums for VAWG service provision).

Thanks to my colleague Alex’s improvements to our TheyWorkForYou Votes infrastructure, we were also able to make quick work of importing VAWG-related MP data into this new hub – including VAWG-related parliamentary groups that MPs might be sitting on, or relevant votes and motions they’d supported.

Plus, of course, there was all the usual MP and area data that campaigners and public affairs teams have already found so useful on the Local Intelligence Hub – things like election results, public attitudes polling, and income and poverty indicators.

Data in action

With the data in place, it was possible for us to give EVAW’s member organisations a demonstration of how they could use a data hub like this as part of their campaigning, fundraising, and policy influencing work. For example, to find the council areas with the most school safeguarding referrals for girls and also the highest overall deprivation:

Or to find the MPs with the strongest support for VAWG prevention, but in constituencies with high VAWG prevalence:

All of the data we demonstrated this Autumn is still a work in progress, but it was reassuring to see almost 70% of members on a recent demo call saying that a VAWG data hub like this would “definitely” be useful to them in their day-to-day work.

We look forward to honing the VAWG Data Hub further with EVAW and their members, to make sure we’re asking the right questions, and presenting an accurate picture of the VAWG landscape.

Header image: Khyati Trehan, for Google Deepmind – Pexels Free License.

This year, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW).

We wanted to see whether we could replicate a successful model that we’ve already established in our work with The Climate Coalition, building the Local Intelligence Hub – we had an idea that the same approach could benefit coalitions of other types, and this was a chance to put that to the test with EVAW’s network of 160+ service delivery, campaigning, and advocacy organisations.

EVAW very kindly invited us into their office last Spring, where we showed them how mySociety’s tools (including WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, as well as the Local Intelligence Hub) are already being used by citizens, campaigners and activists to engage with elected decision-makers. We then had a chance to talk about how EVAW and their members use—and could use—data as part of their work.

On a personal level, after having been steeped in the climate and nature sector over the last few years, it was fascinating to see how different the data landscape is in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector.

A lack of data in the VAWG sector

For example, it looks like sensitivity around personal data and the safety of individuals accessing support services is having a knock-on effect on what data is publicly available. To an outside analyst trying to get a top-level picture, it’s hard to see what’s happening on VAWG at a local level.

Protecting the safety of victims and service users is obviously paramount. But these laudable protections seem to extend into a broader, less necessary ringfencing, with little transparency about spending on VAWG and the provision of services, for example.

This creates a challenge not only for the campaigners and services looking to tell a local story to bring about more commitments to addressing VAWG, but also the public bodies trying to monitor and tackle VAWG across the country.

We’re interested to see how a website modelled on our Local Intelligence Hub could help here, by bringing together safe, already public data, into a single place, so that it can inform more constructive conversations with and between public bodies.

This work is also timely given that the government has committed to halve VAWG in a decade, with only limited information about how it intends to measure its progress.

Sharing data already collected by authorities

Another approach we’ve taken to this deficit of data is by using Freedom of Information (FOI). Everyone in the UK has a right to request information held by any government or public body, and over our many years of running the FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve seen lots of examples of how people have used this right to highlight and campaign around all sorts of social causes in the UK – from contaminated blood, to modern slavery, to disability rights.

This Summer, with EVAW, we’ve been investigating how we could use FOI to open up better data on the handling of safeguarding concerns in schools.

EVAW research has shown that schools are a critical site for tackling violence against young people, and especially girls. And yet much of the data that would help them track the scale of VAWG in schools is either collected by schools or local authorities but not then published, or published but in subtly incompatible ways between the four separate countries of the UK.

And so we’ve used WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch and projects features to send FOI requests to every local authority in the UK.

We’ve asked how many safeguarding referrals they receive from the schools they manage. While we’re still processing the responses, the disparity of data (and data unavailability) between different authorities in different areas is eye-opening. Not to mention the variety of formats we’ve received data in – plain text, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSVs… it’ll be fun extracting data out of them all!

Our aim is that, through experiments like this, we can build a replicable pipeline to feed more data from public authorities’ internal records, through FOI requests, into a tool modelled on the Local Intelligence Hub, for activists, VAWG services, elected representatives, and the wider public to benefit from.

Header image: Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, attends the Women’s Aid 50th anniversary conference in 2024. Photo by Andy Taylor – Home Office, CC BY 2.0.

Tl;dr: We’ve added lots of local council data to the Local Intelligence Hub.

In February, we launched the Local Intelligence Hub, and today we’ve released a huge new update. 

We designed the Local Intelligence Hub — in collaboration with The Climate Coalition and supported by Green Alliance — to provide all the data you need, either about one constituency or across the whole country, on issues around climate. It helps you gain a deep understanding of public opinion, demographics, political considerations, and much, much more. In short, it’s an extremely powerful tool, free to use, and invaluable for anyone pushing for better climate action.  

At launch, we divided the data by UK Parliamentary constituency — but with this huge new update, you can now also explore data at the local council level.

As ever, there are several different ways to view this data:

• by individual authority, so you can deep dive into your local area
• as a table, so you can compare councils by metrics that matter to you
• plotted onto a map, so you can see where to find hot- and cold-spots of action

And it can all be downloaded as a spreadsheet for use on your own desktop.

What kind of data are we talking about?

We’re pulling together data from multiple different sources. What does it all have in common? We reckon that it provides new insights for climate campaigners, researchers, journalists and organisations  — especially when it’s combined in new ways, as Local Intelligence Hub allows you to do quickly and simply. 

Sources include national polling data, information from our services CAPE and Scorecards, and other Climate Coalition member organisations, like the National Trust and the RSPB. 

And we’re always looking for more data, so do get in touch if you know of a useful source we haven’t yet included! 

What can I do with it?

You will know best how this rich data could inform your work, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Build a profile of your local council

Dip into the local council page and see what data awaits you! Here’s an example of the top-level stats you can find for Leeds City Council:

• The area has a strong mandate for climate action. MRP polling suggests we’d see 88% of Leeds City residents support onshore wind compared to 83.5% national average, and just 10% oppose net zero compared to 12% national average. 
• Leeds City Council is doing better than most councils, but could be doing more. It scored 53% on the Climate Action Scorecards, gaining its highest scores in Planning and Land Use, but with the biggest room for improvement on Transport. 
• Emissions are huge, but so is the population. Leeds City Council serves 798,786 residents compared to the average of 307,712. According to BEIS data, Leeds City Council has influence over 2,822 kilotons of CO2 emissions, which is more than twice the national average of 1,168.3.
• There’s an active climate movement. In Leeds city there were more Great Big Green Week events than average in both 2022 and 2023.

 

2. Design a national campaign strategy 

If you’re a campaigning organisation looking to work out where and how to allocate resources, the table-builder and CSV download could form an essential part of your planning process. Here we’ve generated the single-tier councils with Net Zero target dates that fall within the coming decade, and sorted by their Action Scorecards overall score, alongside useful data about public opinion and emissions.

Council Name	Action Scorecards overall score	Net Zero target date	Population	Oppose Net Zero %	Total emissions (ktCO2)	IMD	Trussell Trust foodbanks	Support onshore wind
Wolverhampton City Council	21	2028	264407	12	854	1	0	82.0
Middlesbrough Council	21	2029	141285	12	558	1	7	78.0
Bromley Council	26	2027	332752	12	938	5	4	88.1
Dumfries and Galloway Council	28	2025	148290	15	864	3	3	80.0
Oldham Borough Council	32	2025	237628	12	690	1	2	80.1
Cheshire East Council	33	2025	386667	13	1860	4	2	87.9
Highland Council	35	2025	235430	13	1268	4	7	82.6
Nottingham City Council	42	2028	337098	9	1038	1	10	78.0
Haringey Borough Council	52	2027	266357	7	617	2	1	79.3
Tower Hamlets Borough Council	53	2025	331969	6	1019	2	0	79.8
Bristol City Council	55	2025	465866	8	1295	2	13	86.5

3. Visualise your goals

Local Intelligence Hub helps you zero in on the areas of the country that meet specific criteria. For example, where are the district councils who have declared a climate emergency but haven’t published a climate action plan? Here’s a map that shows you — just one of hundreds of maps that you can generate with a few clicks, and no expertise required:

 

 

What to do with all this lovely local data?

Thanks to this update, it’s now easier than ever to push for local climate action. With these rich new insights, you now have a number of talking points with which to engage your local councillors or council climate officers — and a wealth of facts and figures to back them up.

What next?

We need you to use the Hub and tell us what works, and what doesn’t! Give us your feedback  — and if you’d like to know whenever we add something new,  sign up to updates and we’ll let you know when there’s new data to play with.

 

Photo by Daniil Korbut on Unsplash

As we barrel into Summer at full speed, here’s a summary of what mySociety’s climate team got up to in May.

If you’re interested in working with us on any of this, or you want to use any of our data (or ask us to collect some data for you) then get in touch!

Neighbourhood Warmth: alpha testing a vision of community-powered retrofit

As Siôn blogged a few days ago, Neighbourhood Warmth has been, and will continue to be, a major focus for us over May–July this year.

Last month, we grappled with some thorny design questions (how do we test appetite for community-led retrofit? how could a service support both climate activists and neighbours who just need lower energy bills?) and started building a working alpha, which we’ll be testing out in online workshops with a handful of pilot communities around the UK this June/July.

We also had a number of really encouraging calls with other organisations working in this space – all of us keen on finding some way to square the circle of solving the UK’s massive domestic decarbonisation challenge. If you’re interested, you can read much more in Siôn’s seprate monthnotes for this project.

CAPE: making sense of messy data around local authorities’ climate plans

From our newest climate tool (Neighbourhood Warmth) to our longest running – CAPE. This May we progressed two big improvements to CAPE, which we’re hoping to deploy and test out in June/July.

The first uses AI / machine learning to extract clusters of related topics from our database of every local authority climate action plan in the UK, so you can more find other plans which mention topics close to your heart. We’re hoping these auto-extracted topics will also make it easier to quickly see what’s inside a document, without reading it from head to foot.

The second change is a big re-think of how we help local authorities find their “climate twins”, or other councils likely to face similar climate challenges. We’re in the early stages of this little mini-project, but I’m excited that we might be able to come up with something that really brings together all of the various datapoints CAPE holds on each council, in a way that you just can’t get anywhere else. More on this, hopefully, in our June or July monthnotes!

Council Climate Action Scorecards: crowdsourcing and verifying council actions on climate

May saw the end of the “Right of Reply” period for councils to contribute their feedback on Climate Emergency UK’s volunteer assessors’ analysis of their climate actions. All of this marking and feedback process has been handled through a webapp custom built by mySociety, and it’s encouraging to see that oiver 80% of local authorities in the UK logged into the site to check their score, and around 70% of local authorities provided feedback on their provisional marks!

We’re really proud of how this year’s Council Climate Action Scorecards are shaping up, and can’t wait to start sharing them in the Autumn. Our partners, Climate Emergency UK, have put a huge effort into making these as fair and up-to-date a representation of actual local authority action on climate change. Now they enter their final “Audit” phase, consolidating councils’ feedback against the volunteers’ first marks, after which we’ll be able to calculate each council’s final score.

Local Intelligence Hub: a treasure-trove of constituency-level climate data

The Local Intelligence Hub—the face of our collaboration with The Climate Coalition—soft launched to Climate Coalition members at the end of April. But just because the site is now in the hands of members, doesn’t mean work stops! Alexander has been continuing to collect and import new datasets around fuel poverty, the cost of living, and child poverty – as well as improving the reliability of advanced features like shading constituencies on the map. Meanwhile, our other Alex has been grappling with some Google Analytics-related challenges (tracking Custom Events with cookie-less GA4 – one for the geeks!) which I’m sure he’ll blog about in due course.

If you’re part of an organisation in The Climate Coalition, you can request a free account on the Local Intelligence Hub, and try out the tools and datasets for yourself. For everyone else, we’re still hoping to launch a public version of the tool later this year.

—

Header image: Krista

Once again it’s time for our monthly roundup of what the Climate team has been doing in the last, er, two months. Plenty to write about at least.

First on the list is another milestone in the journey towards Climate Emergency UK’s Council Climate Action Scorecards – the start of the Right of Reply process. All the marking of councils’ climate actions has been completed by CEUK’s small army of volunteers, and now it’s over to councils to have a look at the results and provide any feedback. We’ve also pulled in the data from Freedom of Information requests which was gathered using our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro platform so they can check that over too.

A second launch is the Local Intelligence Hub project we’ve been working on with The Climate Coalition, to help climate campaigners across the UK wrangle climate related data. There was a bunch of work in the run up to this to improve how we were displaying information on the map to make it more accessible, plus adding yet more data. Now that TCC members have access to this we’ll be gathering feedback to decide on future work, as well as adding more data, before a full public launch.

Meanwhile, our Neighbourhood Warmth project with partners Dark Matter Labs has been moving gently but steadily forward. We’ve been meeting with organisations in our three chosen pilot areas, and fleshing out some basic content and design before we put together a very minimal working alpha, to test out with real neighbours on real streets. We’ve been thinking critically about some of our initial ideas on how to connect people interested in making energy saving improvements to their home, and have broadened out our definition of “neighbourhood” from people on the same street to people nearby – to capitalise on the connections people might have across a slightly wider local area. Alongside this we’ve been working out how we’re going to get this in front of users to gather feedback once we have something to show. You can read more about this in our first set of Neighbourhood Warmth monthnotes.

We’ve also had an update on what our second Innovations in Climate Tech grantee has been up to.

In the background we’ve been moving forward with plans for our Festival of Debate session (book here) and doing some thinking about what our Climate Programme will look like in 2024 and beyond.

Finally, with the spring new councils have bloomed which means updating CAPE to include these new councils, and to guide people looking at the old councils to their replacements.

—

Image: Olli Kilpi