Mapping One Public Estate

One Public Estate is a programme supporting locally-led partnerships of public sector bodies to collaborate around their public service delivery strategies and estates needs, helping partners to repurpose surplus public estate in a way that utilises it best.

To fully understand the public estate available in a region, you need to have all the data available, and an easy and comprehensive way to present and analyse it.

Parallel’s SHAPE tool is an online, interactive, data mapping, analysis and insight tool that supports service planning and estates strategy development. Supported by the Department of Health and Social Care, SHAPE facilitates scenario planning and option appraisals in support of public services. The information SHAPE holds makes it perfect for planning and coordinating One Public Estate projects.

As part of the government’s levelling up agenda, South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) wanted to identify a pipeline of schemes to tackle inequalities in health, housing, education and regeneration.

Parallel’s SHAPE team were asked to map existing schemes and pipeline developments for the region, alongside the area’s greatest needs, utilising population and demographic information.

The SHAPE team identified and shortlisted the most relevant information held in SHAPE, including:
o Index of multiple deprivation (top 20% and top 10%)
o Population and population density
o Population deprivation
o Population disease prevalence
o Access to housing

This data was cross referenced with SYMCA’s own data, and used to identify the priorities of the Strategic Economic Plan (SEP). This data focused on skills, employment, housing and gross value added (GVA) productivity.

By overlaying these datasets on the map, the SHAPE team were able to identify ‘hot spots’ where need was greatest. This information was plotted, and also shared as images to support project presentations and reports.

The public sector organisations identified as stakeholders were asked to provide details of projects in pre-delivery stages of development. These were plotted by the SHAPE team onto the mapping system.

All pipeline projects have been gathered and mapped into SHAPE, providing useful and easy-to-understand visuals to support more detailed project information.

Workshops were then scheduled with stakeholders to prioritise projects that will have the biggest impact on the communities they will serve.

The clear and thorough information that the SHAPE system was able to provide made managing a One Public Estate project much simpler.

Lisa Childs, Managing Director of Thrive Project Management, who supported SYMCA on the project, said: “We wanted to identify how public land and assets in our region could be better harnessed to support our strategic outcomes, and SHAPE was the ideal tool to use for this. It helped us establish simply and clearly where there were ‘hotspots’ of inequality and need for investment. Using SHAPE meant that not only did we have a great way to see all the data, but then we were also able to easily visualise key maps for use in evidencing our plans in projects and reports. This has also enabled us to create an active pipeline of projects which are evidence based in terms of need and will allow a much more informed response to funding opportunities.”

If you’d like to know more about how Parallel can support your OPE project, please get in touch.