LARIA Webinars 2025: Book Now!

LARIA Webinars: Registration now open

Tickets are free of charge for LARIA Members (Full Individual, Additional Corporate, Corporate and Full Corporate Members). For Non Members and LARIA Associate Members, sign up to membership today to gain access to the webinars. For more information on the different memberships and benefits available, see here: LARIA Membership benefits

Session 2: Mind the gap: how patients experience hospital discharge
Mind the Gap was a research project commissioned by Southwark council and its NHS partners to improve the hospital discharge process, particularly for patients transferring from hospital to home with at-home support. The research used ethnographic methods, including interviews and observations in hospital before discharge and later at home, to capture the experiences of patients and families. Key findings revealed gaps in patient understanding and anxiety about the discharge process, and a lack of family-carer involvement. We co-opted community researchers to bring local context, ease communication, and build community research skills. The findings led to the establishment of the Returning Home from Hospital Project which is implementing improvements like accessible patient information, new roles to provide discharge advice, and better coordination with family-carers. Two of the community researchers who were involved in Mind the Gap continue to work with Partnership Southwark, and one is using the experience to support her ambitions to become a social researcher.
Ben Lee, Director, Shared Intelligence

Session 3: Tackling the cost of living together in Stockport
A look at how in Stockport, a highly polarised borough in Greater Manchester, the council has worked together with partners to use data as the key to unlocking inequalities and to close the gap between our most deprived and our most affluent areas. Our approach has allowed us greater insight into emerging trends and helped target financial support to the most vulnerable households in the borough.
Imogen Fox, Delivery Manager – Financial Inclusion & Tom Plant, Anti-Poverty Lead, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council

Webinar 2
Wednesday 14 May 2025, 10:30 – 12:00 BST

Session 1: Using qualitative research and partnership working to tackle fuel poverty
Qualitative researchers in Wirral Council’s Public Health team have been using ethnography and interviewing to see and hear how residents are affected by fuel poverty, including those that may be hidden from the national statistics on fuel poverty. Hear how the insights have been used to shape a partnership approach to tackling fuel poverty in the borough.
Abi Yeates, Qualitative Insights Researcher – Public Health, Wirral Council

Session 2: Tackling the Digital Divide: The Digital Exclusion Risk Mapping Tool
Digital inclusion is essential for modern living and ensuring health and wellbeing equality.
To address concerns about digital exclusion in Essex, ECC’s Data and Analytics team explored data and research on infrastructure, affordability, and digital literacy and created an engaging visual to illustrate the county’s digital divide. In this session ECC will share how they created the Digital Inclusion Mapping Tool, an interactive dashboard available through Essex Open Data, which pinpoints at-risk populations at the LSOA level, and how the tool is enabling ECC to work with partner organisations to inform the design and delivery of inclusive local services.
Melody Cremer, Analyst & Amos Turn, Data Science Fellow, Essex County Council

Session 3: Unlocking the power of address data: A data-driven infographic report for benchmarking and transformation
We developed an innovative method to create a bespoke, data-driven infographics report for each of the 318 planning authorities in England and Wales. The target audience was senior local government leaders (Chief Execs, Directors, Heads of Digital Services and Transformation).
The aim of the report was to highlight in a non-technical, visual way how effectively their authority was utilising address data and its Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) across multiple departments.
This was achieved through a range of techniques:

– Benchmarking to quantify the level of UPRN integration
– A summary page highlighting current progress and trend against the national average.
– A service-level view indicating where attention is needed most.
– Creation of an “integration infographic” depicting the current state.
– Assignment of a “UPRN Integration maturity level” and ways to improve
– Key action points to improve

The reports have been hugely successful in supporting local authority officers responsible for creating and maintain their address data (Address Custodians) and engaging senior leadership, building their awareness of address data and critically gaining their buy-in and support of it. The project had no budget and was achieved by using existing tools and staff time alone.
Join Luke Studden, Data Integration Lead at GeoPlace where he will explain in depth the methodology of how we created the reports and why.
Luke Studden, Data Integration Manager, GeoPlace

Webinar 3
Thursday 15 May 2025, 11:00 – 12:30 BST

Session 1: Adopting a blended data approach to weather the storm of change
At a time where we’re seeing increases in our daily cost of living which affects multiple community group as well as decreases in available budget to provide local services, it is critical for the public sector to assess the impact of change faced by its residents. Whether you’re focusing on challenges such as child poverty, fuel poverty or housing affordability, it is essential to be able to access and use detailed up-to-date data to evidence decision-making. This session will examine ways in which public sector organisations can adopt a blended data approach to predict likely future change and assess the impact on communities in order to weather the storm of change.
CACI

Session 2: Understanding poverty in Luton through the Minimum Income Standard (MIS)
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) Minimum Income Standard (MIS) sets an aspirational benchmark for the minimum income needed to fully participate in British society. At Luton, we’ve enhanced this data with local intelligence to create a more accurate reflection of our town’s needs, to help establish the required income for different household types that we then compare against data on household incomes. This has helped provide a deep and more nuanced understanding of poverty in Luton that we can use to benchmark and monitor over time – and help with one of our ongoing ‘Luton 2040’ ambitions to eradicate poverty and unlock everyone’s potential.
John Stokes, Senior Intelligence Analyst, Luton Council

Session 3: Harnessing Council Data to Understand Unmet Need in West Lothian Council
There’s a lot of data out there that tells us about the places and people who are getting the support they need, but how do we identify and find those who are missing out? In this session we will cover a project undertaken by the Improvement Service and West Lothian Council to understand and identify this unmet need. The session will describe the background to the project, how data has been used to identify the areas of interest, how West Lothian have used the findings to inform interventions, and next steps for building on and improving this approach. The approach is easily replicable and should give participants some ideas about how they could use their own data in a similar way.
Nick Cassidy, Research Manager, Improvement Service

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