Warm spaces update
At the end of November I launched our attempt to compile warm space offers from some of the many separate directories that were being created. At that point I'd managed to collate 4,574 offers from 46 directories. Since then I've been adding more directories and improved the parsing of opening hours bringing us up to 12,253 offers from 121 directories.
As well as the finder tool I created to help people find warm places near them, the collated data is available as a JSON file and a GeoJSON file. I've added these to a dataset on Data Mill North which means it automatically shows up on our Data Mapper too if you'd like a map interface e.g.
Credit: Data: Open Innovations; Map tiles: OpenStreetMap, CartoDB
Some initial analysis
With fairly good national coverage I decided to start some analysis. I wanted to see if the offers of warm spaces are in the areas that are likely to have the most need for the offers.
First I had to decide on a level of geography to look at. I ended up going with UK Parliamentary Constituencies partly because there are a nice round 650 of them but also because this may be of interest to MPs.
The next challenge was to work out what dataset could be used to rank constituencies from most to least need. Alasdair Rae pointed me to MySociety's a UK-wide ranking of constituencies by Indicies of Multiple Deprivation - they've had a go at trying to combine the different rankings within each of the UK nations. If I was to limit to England IMD deciles I could use the sub-domains related to income/indoor environment to create a heating-and-cost-of-living-crisis-specific ranking of constituencies. But I didn't want to exclude Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland so stuck with the combined IMD ranking from MySociety. The result is this:
Credit: Data from 121 warm spaces directories; IMD scores from MySociety; Constituency boundaries from ONS. Created by Open Innovations.
The top left of the constituency visualisation is the most deprived constituency (Belfast West) and the bottom right is the least deprived constituency (Wokingham). The colour scale has purple being few offers and yellow being more offers with green somewhere inbetween. As it stands now, the constituency with the most offers appears to be Perth and North Perthshire. There isn't a very obvious pattern to the graphic although I'd be inclined to say that the most deprived decile (1) appears to have fewer offers than the least deprived decile (10). So the people with the most need don't seem to have the most support.
To help our warm places finder tool do better in search results we'd really appreciate if you linked to it from your website or social media. Thanks.
