Readers, friends, and other kind people who have opted to receive this periodical.

You may have noticed that your quarterly package of verbiage is a little late, for which I offer my humble apologies (it was nice to receive a few -well, at least one email - asking when it was due to be dispatched).

I have excuses: writer’s block? The dog ate it? My computer crashed? Too busy helping clients (an oft-seen favourite)? and other such things. I could, in fact (#shamelessplug), blame the production and polish that went into our inaugural School Report (more on that below), which consumed a minute or two over the last few months. In truth, though, none of these things are the real reason. The truth is, in fact, less succinct (probably less interesting), but for me, at least, more thought-provoking.

Cutting to the chase then: the reason for delaying sitting down at the writing table has been an onslaught of development work supplemented by a good deal of pondering. This has ranged from internal systems and reporting development to further evolutions of Oscar Bot and a couple of new services to boot. All under the ever-present consideration of automation, AI, and IA, with the simultaneous mental burden of contemplating the micro and macro impacts, implications, and consequences of what is often referred to as the Fifth Industrial Revolution.

The micro dimension of angst is: what should be done by Oscar humans, what can be automated through rule-based systems, and where the application of AI will be most useful in the delivery of Public Sector data, intelligence, and ultimately, the stuff we do. The macro concern is the extent to which ‘smart software’ will change our world, workplace, and the general exchange of time for spendable credits. I recently read that 200 years ago, over 80% of Americans were employed in agriculture, but by 2008, this number had dropped to 2%, largely due to the agricultural revolution, especially mechanisation. Quite a change on every societal level in a relatively short space of time.

For those of my age—i.e. those who had an analogue childhood fuelled by dreams of living on Mars and promises (!?) of exploring the universe by the year 2000—little did we know that the future of technology over the next 30 years would revolve around the microchip, not the spaceship (excluding SpaceX et al). I am, in fact, still a little bitter about the lack of outward-looking focus over the past 30 years, but it could certainly be argued that the technological changes we have seen and will continue to see have been no less impactful.

What does all this mean, and how does one tie it up neatly? Well, I’m not completely sure, but as ever, this is a lovely opportunity to wax lyrical on one of the big topics of the day.

In the meantime, though, back to all things Oscar-related, wrapped up in the usual manner:

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Updates:

Following the local and national elections earlier this year, all local government post-holder changes were completed within 30 days, and national updates were completed within around 24 hours. In the case of councillors, we have also completed the structural and functional updates (which always take a little time due to AGMs and positions and responsibilities needing to be decided). We are now—as ever—working through the non-election councils to make the necessary updates and changes.

In relation to this, we have updated all our population-served bandings across Local Government, and for anyone who needs them, we also have exact figures available as well as the bandings.

As many of you will know, the national elections saw a change in constituency boundaries (and codes). The new versions have now been fully integrated into our PSN platform and lobbying systems. Speaking of our platform, we have now included the ~50,000 main organisational emails we maintain into the org sections (or ‘panes’, as we like to call them). If platform users need more information on this, just shout.

We have updated the employee figures for over 100 Central Government Departments and Agencies.

Our LATCO (and other Public Body-owned company) work continues this quarter, with a further 60 companies identified and added to the database, linked to their respective parent entities.

We have also just completed a review of Care Home Types, and around 400 homes have been reclassified as either having (or not having) nursing services. Regular users of this part of the database may also like to know we are mid-review on the service types and can expect a significant update to be reported in due course.

Outside of these, the research team has been as busy as ever working on the post-holder updates across all areas of the database. The scope and breadth of this work across the last 90 days can be seen in the usual format below (a reminder—as ever—for those with post-holder database subscriptions to take regular updates):

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New:

As mentioned in the introduction, we have just launched our annual Schools Report—the first of what we hope will be many annual editions that take a deep dive into school type, political and financial performance. A big thanks to our sponsors and contributors who made it possible. You can (and please do) download a free copy here.

Somewhat related to this has been the evolution of our PSN Reports area, which now includes a search by report type and area of Government (lots of potential—just need to build more reports!). Regular users will also notice the inclusion of a new Local Government report, showing a live, dynamic list of all councils across the UK, including detailed types and key metrics.

A few regular clients (who have kindly been involved in discussions and testing) will know we have also started keeping a history of changes to post-holder records. There are many potential applications for this, but initially, we have begun producing a weekly report on changes across senior Local Government records, showing positional changes and new/previous values. If anyone would like to receive these and/or discuss how this kind of information might be useful, just drop me a line.

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Interesting:

We have recently begun ingesting yet another geo-data feed, which includes some neat values like distance to the sea, average income, and property type linked to postcodes (I have to admit, I was actually excited when this landed—#datageek). I (obviously) couldn’t help but have a play with this and, in keeping with the School Report theme, I thought I’d share something perhaps fun (if not entirely useful):

Based on postcode, Bournebrook CofE Primary School in the village of Fillongley is the furthest school from the sea at 119.11 km, while St Bridget's CofE School in Parton is the closest at 0.0018 km. The average school in our fine country is 37.12 km from the sea.

There was so much more I could add here—showing the closest, furthest, most populous etc.—but I thought I’d save those virtual trees for another day.

Finally, I can’t not mention that this month saw our 8 millionth article view of our PSN articles. A big thank you to our editor, Alan, and to all those across the Public, Third, and Supplier sectors who engage with our content on our platform.

That’s about it for Q3—I shall continue to wait for my seat on the next colonial rocket going to Alpha Centauri, and in the meantime, I wish everyone well for the inevitable six months of winter that follow the two days of sunshine we optimistically call the British summer.

Keep warm and well!

James and team at Oscar

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