Emu Analytics

Supporting Future Growth with Interactive Location Insights

Bassetlaw District Council (BDC) is using Location Insights Explorer to be the shareable platform for data and the evidence base of their work in re-purposing Worksop away from a heavy reliance on retail as well as engaging the community as it does this.

Central Evidence Base

By using an existing platform BDC have avoided significant software development costs and been able to collate and view all key data in one place.

Visualising Change

By having a single, continuously updated data platform, awareness of the issues and the associated evidence is clear for all to see and use.

Community Engagement

BDC are able to share key insights and changes happening in Worksop, raising awareness and creating engagement with the community.

The Challenge

Bassetlaw District Council’s largest town is Worksop (population c.45,000). As with every town in the UK they face significant challenges with the change in shopping habits, competition from out of town retail parks and internet shopping along with an ageing demographic and the usual social and economic issues that local authorities face including housing, health and employment.

Using data as an evidence base for the Council and for a newly formed Town Commission was seen as a key component to supporting Worksop in its journey to repurpose itself for the future. The ability to gather all relevant data, public and commercial, in one place was an important first step to facilitate strong engagement with the Council, the Town Commission and community through clear maps and data analysis.

The Solution

As part of a wider project that analysed the town and its data along with supporting a vision and strategy for the town and a new Town Commission it was decided that Emu Analytics’ Council Data Explorer would provide an effective and transparent data platform to intelligently collate key, existing and new datasets.

Location Insights Explorer enables us to understand the data that underpins Worksop and thus how we can track and share progress across a significant number of data variables. Being able to share data clearly and visually is key to our determination to engage and involve the community in all we do. Simon Greaves - Leader of Bassetlaw District Council

Existing Council open data such as brown field sites, housing, car parks, fly tipping was easily and efficiently collated and visualised through maps and links to other data sets such as shop occupiers, vacancy rates, social media, crime, markets, library users, leisure centre users and transport usage. In addition, socio-economic government data was pulled in including housing stock, demographics, education, health and consumer data.

This was the first time that 70 data sources had been brought together and that their inter-relationships could be analysed to enable better decisions to be taken for the town and the wider Bassetlaw District Council area. Through the data file drag and drop facility it can be easily maintained and updated.

Download a PDF version of this case study.

Case Study