This blog was written by Andrew Humphreys.

We’ve been making significant progress with two of our SAVVI phase three projects so wanted to provide an update on everything that has been happening.

Wigan Council 

We have continued to work with Wigan Council to support them to implement SAVVI, starting with their responsibilities under the Civil Contingencies Act. So far, we have focused our work on the council’s response to flooding to establish some principles and processes that can be repeated for other emergency types. We have developed a SAVVI-compatible data model for finding and supporting people who might be vulnerable in a flood.

Wigan Council has reached a milestone in their Information Governance treatment of adopting the SAVVI approach to find vulnerable people and have settled on a position that they can reuse existing data found in four sources to identify and support vulnerable residents, specifically:

  • Adult Social Care data
  • Social Housing data
  • Environmental Services data (e.g. Assisted refuse collections)
  • Revenues and Benefits data (e.g. single person household)

Wigan council has chosen to use automated processing (nightly) to maintain a “Risk Index”, which is a table of data that contains individuals or households in different risk categories based on vulnerability attributes found in secondary data. The risk index will be used, once a flood warning has been received, to prioritise those residents who are less likely to be able to protect their property from flood damage, or safely evacuate, without support.

Based on this data re-use proposition, Wigan Council has written a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), which is now being reviewed for approval as part of the council’s formal information governance process. Because Wigan will be re-using Council Tax data to find people in a flood, they have written to every citizen to inform them about how their data, collected for the purpose of administering Council Tax, will be used in a flooding emergency and highlighted the contents of the Council’s privacy statement.

The diagram below, generated using the SAVVI config tool, shows the SAVVI-compliant data re-use proposition for council tax data and flooding.

Having established the SAVVI data model for flooding, we are now working with Wigan Council to develop the SAVVI definitions for other emergency types and the vulnerability attributes needed to identify the needs associated with them. Wigan has already done some work in the background on how to transfer data from its sources to the risk index and we are on hand to support that process.

Greater Manchester Combined Authority

We have also been very busy supporting Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s (GMCA) Data Accelerator project that is developing a data mesh to initially support Greater Manchester Councils’ delivery of the Supporting Families Programme. The project has reached an information governance milestone by developing and adopting data re-use propositions for re-using school attendance data to identify households with children at risk of not getting a good education and youth justice data to identify households with children at risk of being involved with crime.

To support this work, we have developed a SAVVI-compliant version of the Supporting Families Programme (SFP) outcomes framework using the SAVVI config tool which has produced metadata for the definitions of all the headline outcomes, family needs and need-outcomes in the SFP, shown below the screenshot from the SAVVI config tool.

This will enable the data mesh to use SAVVI-compliant metadata when transmitting SFP data SFP through the mesh and we are currently working with GMCA and its technical supplier to develop SAVVI-compatible data attributes that can be used to identify households where children are at risk of not getting a good education. This will also help us develop a process to create the necessary definitions for a data reuse proposition to help find families with any of the 34 family needs defined by the SFP.

To this end, we have developed a proposed SAVVI-compatible data table schema and format for use with school census data which we will use as a model process for deploying SAVVI-compatible metadata for use across the mesh and are now working with GMCA and their technical supplier to design the processes by which the data dictionary or catalogue within the mesh is populated with SAVVI-compatible metadata.

Our next step in supporting GMCA to adopt and deploy the SAVVI standards and process will be to develop SAVVI-compatible data attributes and metadata for the other 30 needs and 64 outcomes.

We will continue to work with both projects in phase three of SAVVI and you can stay up to date with all the latest news and information by signing up to the SAVVI mailing list.