Getting Down to Brass Tacks: Practical Data Sharing and Problem Solving in London December 21st, 2016 by Alan Lewis The latest in our series of London Borough Data Partnership meetings was held last week at the London Fire Brigade HQ. The Partnership aims to bring together London’s Government to share, discuss and create data projects to solve some of our public service challenges. An interesting set of speakers, along with the promise of festive…
Are Thirtysomething Londoners Really ‘Fleeing’ the Capital? December 20th, 2016 by Monica Li There have been a number of media reports[1] in recent years about the exodus of young adults from London. One report from 2014 suggested that the number of thirty-somethings ‘fleeing’ the Capital was the highest on record. Rising housing costs are commonly cited as the main reason behind this apparent recent exodus of Londoners in…
LODA Pilot Update December 19th, 2016 by Nevena Dragicevic (Nesta) and Wil Tonkiss (GLA) In June this year the GLA’s Intelligence Unit began working with Nesta on the pilot for the London Office for Data Analytics (LODA). As the year draws to a close, this post provides an update on the key milestones we have already achieved and looks forward to some of the next steps being taken in…
Exploiting The Potential Of Data: How Changes To The Statistics Code Of Practice Can Help Achieve This December 16th, 2016 by Vivienne Avery This week saw publication of a Stocktake Review of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. The recommendations from this report are a big step forward in helping us to implement the Mayor’s manifesto commitment to comply voluntarily with the Code as part of his pledge to run the most transparent Mayoralty. As well as…
London’s Economic Outlook: Autumn 2016 December 1st, 2016 by Daryl Rozario Despite some economic uncertainty the London and UK economies continue to grow Gordon Douglass from GLA Economics goes through the latest economic forecast for London… Since our previous forecast was published in the spring of 2016, economic events have moved on a pace with the UK voting in the June referendum to leave the EU.…
Redeveloping the GLA’s modelling framework November 23rd, 2016 by Wil Tonkiss For over 40 years the GLA, and its predecessors, have produced population projections for London and the boroughs. These projections form the foundation of much of the GLA’s strategic planning and help to shape a wide range of policy decisions. The projection models themselves are continually evolving as new data and methods are incorporated into…
Organising and Mobilising for Change: Observations and Lessons from America’s leading Data Cities November 4th, 2016 by Andrew Collinge Last week I attended a gathering of the Civic Analytics Network. This was an incredibly useful and hard-working event, supported by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. This quick report sets out a series of observations and reactions. If you are interested in increasing data and digital capabilities…
The GLA’s data science journey October 20th, 2016 by Marta Lapsley Over the past couple of years the Greater London Authority has been developing its data science capacity. This blog post aims to give a brief snapshot of where we are and where we are headed, in terms of skills, organisation and infrastructure. Skills The Intelligence Unit at the GLA comprises a number of teams with…
Falling Workless Households in London September 29th, 2016 by Rachel Leeser London, along with other regions in the south of England, has a lower proportion of households (with at least one person aged 16-64) with no-one in work. Previously, London has had higher levels of workless households, but both the number and the proportion of such households have decreased with the proportion falling lower than the…
School rolls projection: moving foRward September 26th, 2016 by Marta Lapsley 2016 has seen some big changes in our school roll projections service with the development of a new projection model which has been written in the statistical programming language R, allowing us to harness R’s power to make use of much bigger datasets and a more complex model. Every year the GLA intelligence unit produces…
Where to draw the Line in Use of Personal Data? A New Experiment to understand Public Acceptance and a Call for Help September 21st, 2016 by Michelle Warbis Today – sometimes knowingly, most of the time almost certainly not – people share, or depending on your point of view, give away, the data they create simply as a result of passing through a normal day. This data is drawn from a wide array of sources, in both the public and private sectors, in…
Comparing London with other global cities September 1st, 2016 by Daryl Rozario By Mark Wingham A common question we get asked at the GLA is how does London compare with other international cities. Many comparisons between London and other global cities to date have focused on particular topics or sectors, such as tourism and foreign direct investment. These comparisons have been outlined in Chapter 3 of the…
Developing Data Infrastructure for London August 15th, 2016 by Larissa Suzuki Earlier this year we published the Implementation Plan for the GLA’s City Data Strategy. The Implementation Plan is a key organising element of our work, needed for the realisation of the priority actions we have set out in our strategy, all of which are designed to help us to deliver maximum social, economic, environmental and…
London Office of Data Analytics Pilot: two weeks of showing and telling to focus the data science and sharpen the overall approach August 12th, 2016 by Lora Armstrong It’s been 6 weeks since our kickoff workshop for the London Office of Data Analytics (LODA) pilot programme, a joint venture between the GLA and Nesta, with involvement from nearly half of the London boroughs. The broader context shows a real sense of growing intent and purpose around data sharing for impact. In the same…
Offices of Data Analytics: next steps for London and the North East July 28th, 2016 by Eddie Copeland, Director London Office of Technology & Innovation As announced in previous blogs, Nesta is working with the GLA and more than a dozen boroughs in London – and with local authorities, the Digital Catapult and Sunderland Software City in the North East – to pilot data analytics projects that address public service challenges. This post provides a brief update on the latest…
Local authority level gross value added estimates for London, 1997-2014 July 21st, 2016 by Daryl Rozario By Gordon Douglass, Supervisory Economist In December 2015, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released provisional estimates of regional, sub-regional and local gross value added (GVA) for 2014[1]. These data showed that in 2014, London’s total GVA was over £364 billion, up 6.8 per cent on 2013. London now accounts for 22.5 per cent[2] of…
Long-run employment projections for London 2016 July 11th, 2016 by Daryl Rozario In June, GLA Economics published its latest employment projections for London, and the supporting data on London Datastore. The projections use updated data to project the number of jobs in London broken down by sector and at the borough level. To support these judgements GLA Economics has developed a longer back series of employment and…
London Office of Data Analytics: Documenting the Learning Process July 7th, 2016 by Andrew Collinge As regular readers of this blog will know, the GLA and Nesta are working together to run a pilot to demonstrate that performing data analytics on datasets sourced from multiple local authorities and other novel sources can help reform public services in the capital. This short blog provides a link through to a more detailed…
Sharing Cities Update: What on earth is a SEMS and why does it matter? July 4th, 2016 by Rick Curtis ‘SEMS’ (Sustainable Energy Management System) is a key deliverable of the Sharing Cities programme. At its simplest, SEMS is the joining up of smart energy infrastructure and services (e.g. a river source heat pump and associated district heating scheme) with a data platform (in the case of Sharing Cities, our Urban Sharing Platform). Achieving the…
Three lessons on City Data Analytics from Mike Flowers June 30th, 2016 by Eddie Copeland, Director London Office of Technology & Innovation I’ve previously written about plans by the GLA’s Andrew Collinge and Nesta to run a pilot for a London Office of Data Analytics, inspired by the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA) in New York City. Last week saw significant progress when 15 London boroughs came together for a workshop with the GLA to select a…
EU Referendum Results: A Demographic Breakdown June 29th, 2016 by Joseph Colombeau Note: The analysis provided is by no means comprehensive and simply aims to provide some early pointers as to the relationship between socio-demographic factors and vote share in the Referendum. On the 23rd of June the British public were asked if the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union or leave. The…
Open data and design thinking – new tools to tackle social challenges June 24th, 2016 by Andy Hamflett and Lucy Kimbell Over the past 18 months, the Trussell Trust, the UK’s biggest foodbank, has been exploring its data in new ways. Working with researchers from Hull University Business School, data science firm Coppelia and social innovation agency AAM Associates, the project honed in on new insights and ways of viewing its network, which has undergone rapid…
London to pilot LODA with Nesta June 9th, 2016 by Eddie Copeland, Director London Office of Technology & Innovation If you’ve heard me speak at a conference or read one of my blogs, you’ve probably gathered that I’m a big admirer of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA). At times I may have sounded like a broken record. In my defence, there are good reasons to be excited about the model…
London’s Economic Outlook – Spring 2016 June 1st, 2016 by Daryl Rozario Despite a slowing global economy the economic forecast remains positive for London. Gordon Douglass from GLA Economics goes through the latest economic forecast. Since our previous forecasts were published in the autumn of 2015 economic conditions in London have slowed a touch but remain more upbeat than for the UK as a whole, despite continuing…
Implementing a City Data Strategy: The Data for London Road trip starts here May 19th, 2016 by Larissa Romualdo-Suzuki On the 1st of March 2016 we published our City Data Market Strategy – a document that aims to be both technically competent and persuasive to a political and senior leadership audience in London about the need to actively integrate and mobilise all the ‘working parts’ of the city data economy. Over the intervening weeks,…
Steal with pride and share with passion May 18th, 2016 by Nathan Pierce When is stealing something the right thing to do? We learn from a young age that society frowns on the concept of stealing. Yet, in the case of the Horizon 2020 programmes, I would argue that we should actively borrow from each other, with transparency and with pride, in order that we can combine, build,…
A barometer of London Government’s digital and data capacity? May 17th, 2016 by Alan Lewis [bs_row class=”row”][bs_col class=”col-xs-8″]Response to our recent call for London Boroughs to get involved in a London Office of Data Analytics (LODA) pilot have been very positive, with over half of the 33 Boroughs expressing an interest. This in itself demonstrates a real willingness and appetite to try and do things differently. Next step will be a…
Championing the better use of data May 5th, 2016 by Emma Christie The GLA recently submitted a response to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on the better use of data in government. As the London Datastore team will attest, the ‘better use of data’ is a perpetual endeavour of the GLA’s Intelligence Unit – it’s the business we are in. While we are a modest bunch, and not…
Small steps towards a London Office of Data Analytics? April 21st, 2016 by Alan Lewis The message was clear and a show of hands required: 5 boroughs willing to take part in a pilot project with ourselves and Nesta to demonstrate the benefits of a London Office of Data Analytics (LODA). This was the ask of Andrew Collinge (AD of the GLA’s Intelligence Unit) and Eddie Copeland (Director of Nesta’s…
The London Landscape: supporting Policing and Community Safety in a data-rich city March 17th, 2016 by Richard Fairchild Launched today by the GLA and the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), the London Landscape is an interactive and easy-to-use collation of over a million data points – covering a wide range of thematic areas from emergency services through to finance and population – providing an overview of London to support police and…
From poetry into prose: Early stages delivery for Sharing Cities March 9th, 2016 by Francisco Goncalves From the 2nd to the 4th March, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano held two important technical meetings in the early stages of our H2020 Smart Cities and Communities Programme, “Sharing Cities”. During three days, all the relevant partners, responsible for the demonstration of tangible technology measures (in our ‘Place’ work package) and for their integration in…
London takes a look at its household bills February 12th, 2016 by Gareth Piggott Household Bills Survey London has recently been revealed as one of the least energy conscious regions in Great Britain. Statistics from the NatWest Household Bills Survey, reveal that Londoners have the lowest uptake of energy saving measures compared to any other region in Great Britain and are amongst one of the least likely regions to…
A House Divided: Talk to the Alan Turing Institute Cities Summit February 9th, 2016 by Andrew Collinge Last week I was privileged to give a talk to the Alan Turing Institute Cities Summit, hosted by UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Knowing that I would be speaking alongside some of the best in the data science business, I opted to cover the cultural and organisational blocks on the adoption of data science in…
33 boroughs, two babies and one city modelling platform February 2nd, 2016 by Elisabeth Weise We’ve been hard at work since our last update – in that time we’ve delivered our first release of Witan, and two babies! Our city modelling platform is now live and our first users in London have been given access this week. On-demand demographic projections to meet housing demand Witan is now able to generate…
Sharing Cities – the Importance of Values and Behaviours in amongst the Science and Process of Programme Delivery January 27th, 2016 by Andrew Collinge Last week, we launched our H2020 Smart Cities and Communities Programme, “Sharing Cities”. The two day event brought together 70 people, from 30 partner organisations, 6 countries, all working in splendid harmony across 8 highly connected work packages – well that’s the plan, eventually. With a desire to do things differently (representatives of the European…
London leads on a bold initiative to generate €500m smart city investment funds from €25m EU seed funds January 19th, 2016 by Graham Colclough If there was one city that should be able to deliver on such a bold goal then it would be London – the city with more financial muscle than most. The good news is that this goal is one that is shared. It is one of ten bold goals that are shared with Lisbon, Milan…
Social Exclusion of Older People in London January 18th, 2016 by Joseph Colombeau Older people can face various barriers to experiencing the full range of benefits that society affords. Poor transport links, social isolation and insufficient income can all have a detrimental impact to a person’s quality of life. This inability for an individual to benefit from the opportunities and resources that society should offer is referred to…
GLA Intelligence and Analysis Unit January 14th, 2016 by Gareth Piggott The Intelligence Unit sits at the heart of the GLA, providing the Mayor and the Authority with world class evidence and analysis which support the formation of policy and strategy in London; and developing the technology and people-driven narrative for London, the smart, innovative, digital city. We have published a short summary of our key…
Regional Well-Being Indicators January 12th, 2016 by Gareth Piggott A range of subjective well-being indicators that measure the respondents opinions using a score out of 10. The data source is the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, Well-Being Module, April, July and October, 2014. The data can be downloaded from the Datastore.
Health and Wellbeing of 15-year-olds (What About Youth Survey) January 6th, 2016 by Gareth Piggott Headline indicators from the What About Youth survey 2014, a survey designed to collect robust local authority (LA) level data on a range of health behaviours amongst 15 year-olds. Note that pupils from independent schools are not included in the survey. More detailed indicators, including breakdowns by gender, are available from the HSCIC website. Further…
London School’s Atlas Update January 4th, 2016 by Alan Lewis and Ben Corr In 2013, the GLA launched the London Schools Atlas. This was a ground-breaking new resource for parents, planners and policy makers – providing a unique view of patterns of attendance across the capital’s schools together with a wide range of contextual information. Two years on from release, we recently refreshed the data behind the Atlas…
