LARIA Conference 2010

Colleagues from the Observatory recently attended the 2010 Local Authorities Research and Intelligence Association (LARIA) Conference held at Royal Holloway College, University of London.  Presentations on a wide range of thought-provoking and innovative research projects are now available on the LARIA website. Presentations from the LARIA Annual Conference 2010 Interesting presentations include a Chief Exec’s [...]

Fear of Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour Report

The Warwickshire Observatory have recently conducted some further analysis of the 2009/10 Partnership Place Survey. The latest report focuses on the fear of crime and anti-social behaviour experienced by respondents to the survey. The report highlights significant reductions in fear of crime, although the south of the county continue to have lower levels of fear [...]

Profiling Warwickshire’s Community Forum areas

The Observatory has just completed an exercise to map the distribution of Mosaic Groups across our 30 Community Forums.  At this stage they are simply illustrations without any interpretation or analysis, but will be used to help understand the range and diversity of our customer types and will inform the county’s ‘one front door’ programme.  An [...]

West Midlands Regional Observatory – Environment Newsletter

The West Midlands Regional Observatory have just produced the April edition of their Environment Newsletter.  It contains many interesting articles including ones on the low carbon economy, the Rural Regeneration Zone, historic farm buildings and regional progress towards sustainable development.  It’s available on their website:  www.wmro.org.

Work gets underway on Quality of Life 2010

The Research Team have started work on the Quality of Life report for 2010. This covers a range of economic, social and environmental indicators that, together, give a snapshot of quality of life in the county and how Warwickshire compares with other areas. It also shows how the situation in the county is changing over [...]

Unemployment in Warwickshire continues to fall

The Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) claimant count level in March 2010 was 11,327 in Warwickshire. This represents a fall of 449 claimants or 3.8% from the previous month and this downward trend is mirrored across the Region and nationally. The graph below shows the longer term trends for the county over the last 5 years. [...]

Communicating effectively: telling stories using data

Two members of the team recently attended a course run with the West Midlands Regional Observatory on using data to communicate effectively with people. The day was well attended and the website below has been set up with handy hints and tips on presenting as well as some stand-out presentations – I’d personally recommend watching [...]

More or Less

For those of you with an interest in the use (and misuse!) of statistics, you may be interested in listening to the weekly podcast from the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘More or Less’.  The show describes itself as being “devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers” and investigates [...]

Warwickshire Police announce that crime is falling in the county

Last week Warwickshire Police announced on their ‘online news’ website that crime continues to fall in the county and public confidence is rising thanks to the hard work of Warwickshire Police and local partner agencies. The headline message is that crime has fallen 25.2% compared to three years ago. A link to the press release [...]

The Partnership and Performance Unit celebrates its 1st birthday!

Last week saw the one year mark of the Partnership and Performance Unit being set up within Warwickshire County Council. The Observatory has been part of this new unit for the past twelve months and has seen many benefits to joined up working between the various teams in the unit. The unit were officially thanked [...]