insight
infrastructure
Building a better picture of socio-economic inequalities in the UK.
Making sense of data on poverty is difficult, and it is often hard to turn that knowledge into meaningful action. That’s why at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation we are developing the Insight Infrastructure programme, a powerful resource which helps to tackle injustice and inequality in the UK.
This programme aims to democratise access to high-quality data and evidence through open collaboration and innovation. Data and insight products will act as a satnav providing a series of possible routes to navigate from problem to solution, enabling the transition to a more equitable and just future, free from poverty.
Such routes will be paved by insights generated through triangulation of quantitative and qualitative information. From established datasets, to new sources, experimental data, and lived experience of people.
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Meet the team
Rosario Piazza
Chief Insight Architect
Emma Wincup
Qualitative Insight Manager
Adél Schofield
Quantitative Insight Manager
Aleks Collingwood
Partnership Insight Manager
Katie Johns
Experiential Insight Researcher
Guiding principles
When we set out to start developing our insight infrastructure, we have invested time and resources engaging with the variety of stakeholders and audiences who are working towards the resolution of poverty and would benefit from and contribute the infrastructure we are developing.
In addition to understand what the ideal infrastructure should look like, we have explored the ethos informing our culture and ways of working. Together, we have identified a set of principles to guide our work and collective efforts moving forward:
- Make decisions informed by trusted sources, reliable evidence, and actionable insights.
- Ensure that data and insights are useful and accessible to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Adopt open-source and public good principles, wherever possible, to guide everything we do.
- Always use data and insights in a manner that is proportionate, purposeful, and respectful.
- Make sure innovation and experimentation embrace the possibility of failure, strive to learn from mistakes and widen our collective appetite for risk.
Toolkit
Our toolkit currently consists of the resources listed below. Click the text to find out more or use the website navigation menu. The legend provides an indication of the type of data used in each project.
Legend:
Established datasets
New sources
Experimental data
Lived experience
Grounded Voices
The Grounded Voices programme was launched in 2022 to ensure JRF’s work is informed by what matters to people struggling to afford what they need. Its ambition is to amplify the voices of those seldom heard in debates around poverty, particularly people from minoritised ethnic communities.
Co-designed with people with direct experience of financial hardship, Grounded Voices uses a range of online qualitative methods (interviews, diaries and group discussions) to engage people from all four nations of the UK over a five-month period.
Our participants reflect the diversity of people now struggling to afford what they need. As a rolling research programme, we recruit new participants twice a year.
Our longer-term ambition is to share data and insights with individuals and organisations who share our ambitions to end poverty and its harmful effects. In so doing, we will support more organisations to develop solutions grounded in an understanding of the lives of people with direct experience of hardship.
Intro calls
One-to-one
conversations
Diary tasks
Mid-point
session
Group
discussions
Wrap-up calls
Grassroots Poverty Action Group
Founded in 2020, JRF’s Grassroots Poverty Action Group (GPAG) is made up of 14 people with direct experience of poverty from across the UK. Members of the group include people who are most at risk of poverty, including people from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds, lone parents, Universal Credit claimants, disabled people and unpaid carers.
The group meets monthly and works alongside JRF staff, and sometimes external partners, on a variety of projects spanning research and policy, insight infrastructure development and campaigning. Group members bring their experience of living on a low-income but also the skills, knowledge, and experience they may have from employment, voluntary work, caring responsibilities, and community activism.
You can read more about GPAG and its members’ contributions by clicking the links below:
Social Media Listening
A key aspect of our work is to identify new and timely insights drawing on the experiences, contributions, and concerns of people dealing daily with hardship and inequality.
Working with Demos and their partners CASM technology, we are running a project applying social listening methodologies, designed to understand more about online conversations on poverty-related issues. The insights from this project are being used to support and complement qualitative data from other sources in JRF’s insight infrastructure.
The project consists of 4 social media listening waves over the course of 2024. The aims of this programme are twofold:
- Firstly, to provide a regular ‘dip in’ to the online conversations, to pick up salient and emerging insights on poverty and inequality.
- And secondly, over the course of the year, to provide a sense of the overarching trends, seasonal changes and wider socio-political and economic impacts relating to the experiences of and conversations on poverty.
Our Grassroots Poverty Action Group have been invaluable with their guidance and input at the beginning of both the pilot and each subsequent wave of this project. You can access the results by clicking the icons below:
Wave 3
(2024)
Wave 4
(2024)
Making Sense of Data Gaps
Identifying data gaps in the socio-demographics characteristics of the UK population is the first step towards ultimately boosting our ability to understand, represent and support all people and all communities across a wide range of initiatives.
It is crucial that we provide evidence of how official surveys, that are used to produce national estimates, hinder the sector’s ability to provide adequate services and funds to the right places, and the right people, around the country.
This evidence will give us the knowledge we need to develop a wide range of initiatives and collaborations with other organisations who share our aim. It will also create the conditions for a much more effective collaborations between the charity sector, local, regional, and national government. We want to pave the way for a significant boost in the sample size and inclusive information gathered through some of the main government surveys.
We are keen to learn from organisations who are working on and adopting solutions to the problem - albeit planning large new sample boosts in official datasets, or by gathering new sources of data locally about the people smaller organisations support. You can find out about the results of this work by clicking the report and icons below:
R.A.P.I.D.
Real-time Analysis of Poverty Indicators Dashboard
How we measure poverty and low income matters. And real-time data is crucial for policy-making. However, when it comes to UK households’ living standards, no reliable real-time data is available.
Administrative data is created whenever people interact with public services. A lot of this data is underused and not linked in a way that could provide better insights on those most affected by social and financial hardship. There is also a long time lag for data to be available publicly from data sets such as the Family Resources Survey.
So, we have developed R.A.P.I.D., a new tool to track more up-to-date aggregate rates of low income and poverty using administrative data collected routinely by local authorities as part of administering benefits such as Universal Credit, Council Tax Support, and Housing Benefit.
R.A.P.I.D. currently shows aggregate measures of poverty and low income across 16 London boroughs starting in September 2023. It will be updated monthly until Sept 2024 to test the impact having more up to date information on low income has with a more immediate view of trends across the capital. Extension of the data to cover regions beyond London is a possibility for the future. We would welcome your feedback on the site, how you use the data presented, and what real time data you would like to see in the future. The tool is accompanied by several blogs setting out more detail behind the site and the data it contains, describing trends in the data and defining and contextualising the measures used.
Click the icon below to launch R.A.P.I.D.
Income Volatility Dashboard
There is a gap in evidence on within-year earnings and income volatility in the UK. In order to fill such gap, we have developed, in partnership with Smart Data Foundry, a free online interactive tool powered by close to real-time banking data.
MyFoundry allows free access to a series of interactive dashboards to examine key indicators relating to economic security and financial wellbeing. Data can be explored and combined using the following indicators:
- Postcode and Income Variability
- Postcode and Payment Interval
- Postcode and Source of Income
- Sex, Age Band and Source of Income
- Sex, Age Band and Payment Interval
- Sex, Age Band and Income Variability
The data currently available on MyFoundry pertains around 1.5 million NatWest customers across the UK. Data is updated daily and dates back to 2019.
Furthermore, for those interested in accessing the underlying data, whether active in the research and world, or the policy and advocacy space, we have made available a total of 20 free licences to perform your own research and analysis.
Click the icon below to launch MyFoundry:
- Mean Weekly Income
- Mean Weekly Salary
- Mean Weekly Total Expenditure
- Mean Weekly Discretionary Expenditure
- Benefits Claim Rate
- Unemployment Rate
The Role of Charity Data
Charitable organisations collect a wide range of data on activities and support they provide those in need with. This data is largely underused, mainly due to limited financial resources, technical challenges, data literacy, lack of standards and clear governance. We believe it is important to explore how 'charity data', when properly anonymised and aggregated, could be used to monitor close-to-real-time trends on service provision and demand, as well as the characteristics of people seeking support.
This data has the potential to become a powerful asset informing advise and service provision, campaigning and grant-making. Since April 2023, we have been working together with Data for Action and a variety of charities and civil society organisations from across the UK to explore the idea of ‘insight infrastructure’ powered by and for the sector. We have been focusing on the following core themes, with a view to creating a data sharing movement:
- Barriers and enablers of data sharing for charities;
- The needs of end users of any insight infrastructure, including the organisations sharing data;
- Data standards that might facilitate more automated data collection and sharing;
- Governance required to bring the insight infrastructure to scale and underpin its ongoing development.
We are currently in the processes of prototyping the tools that will make data sharing and insight dissemination possible.
Click the icon below for further information and resources:
Improving Access to Social Care
Social care charging and eligibility policies and practices applied by cash-strapped local authorities are compounding destitution for disabled people and unpaid carers who experience worse health and social care outcomes, and are vastly more likely to live in poverty than the general population. In addition, data on social care need and outcomes is often patchy and so makes it difficult to base impactful decisions on.
Access Social Care (ASC) are a specialist health and social care advice provider. Their purpose is to improve the lives of people with health and social care needs. They use data to challenge, persuade and influence quality, policy and practice improvements, locally and nationally; and technology, to increase efficiency and impact. They have developed on online AI-driven chatbot service which provides expert legal support, called AccessAva.
Our partnership is focused on driving increased usage of the chatbot and the resulting data insights. As well as developing AccessAva further, ASC are also working on a chatbot specifically for advisors to help them get the right advice to people in need of support, quicker.
We want to drive change in the way people view their right to social care and how they can access support. We also want to gather data along the way to help local authorities better understand and fill gaps in their social care provision.
Cost of Living Tracker
The Cost of Living (CoL) Tracker is a series of large-scale bespoke online polls of around 4,000 low-income households, across the UK. We have been tracking the cost-of-living crisis and the financial impact of the pandemic since October 2021, with the help of Savanta, who have run surveys every six months since the project started.
The tracker has allowed us to fill the gap in large-scale government surveys being able to provide timely data on the experience of low-income households’ financial positions during these challenging years. This has been reflected in our conversations with government, the media using our findings in their reporting on the crisis and working with other organisations like regulators and the Bank of England to ensure that they are aware of how low-income consumers are faring. Latest reports include:
Click the icon below to launch the CoL Tracker dashboard:
Dragged down by debt: Millions of low-income households pulled under by arrears while living costs rise (Oct 2021)
Not heating, eating or meeting bills: managing a cost of living crisis on a low income (Jun 2022)
Going under and without: JRF’s cost of living tracker, winter 2022/23 (Dec 2022)
Unable to escape persistent hardship: JRF's cost of living tracker, summer 2023 (Jun 2023)
Autumn Statement 2023: addressing an evolving crisis (Nov 2023)
The scale of the challenge: JRF's pre-election cost of living tracker (Jun 2024)
Open Innovations
N.E.I.F.
Northern England Insight Finder
The Northern England Insight Finder (N.E.I.F.) is our first attempt to offer a tangible example of the type of digital features the Insight Infrastructure toolkit might contain. We created this first iteration of an online, interactive insight hub which draws from a variety of open-data sources. We set out to:
- Cohesively bring together disparate datasets
- Automatically update data sources in real-time
- Allow users to navigate content by geography as well as thematic areas
- Provide statistically sound estimates at local level for data otherwise available only at regional level.
We have not achieved all we set out to do in the first phase of development. In the spirit of working in the open, the tool in its current form is available for you to explore and we share some of the learnings we’ve gathered from one round of user testing.
The regional estimates have proved more difficult to do than expected, so those are not currently available. There is also a lot more work to be done on the user experience and accessibility of the interface. When developing this prototype, we decided to limit its content to 34 data sources, focused on Northern England and identified 3 spotlights to test the concept and the data architecture required to build it.
Whilst we will not be developing this prototype further, we will use the learnings in the next phase of our work looking into hyperlocal administrative data and ability to compare different areas across the country.
Click the icon below to launch N.E.I.F.
Find out the latest about our work.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation is a Reg. Charity in England & Wales (1184957) and Scotland (SC049712). Company Number (12132713).
Contact The Homestead, 40 Water End, York, YO30 6WP Tel. 01904 629 241