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A data-driven welfare strategy

Over the course of 2022-24 we took part in a Scottish Government funded tech accelerator (CivTech Scotland), designed to match public sector problems to emerging technology solutions. This led us to develop a place-based baseline assessment tool, working collaboratively with South of Scotland Enterprise (SoSE) and Scottish Borders Council (SBC).

The CivTech Scotland challenge provided us with the opportunity to work with a number of different teams across several Local Authorities in England and Scotland, in order to explore different use cases for our WIP tool. One of these use cases was supporting the SBC Parks & Environment Team in the development of a welfare strategy, following the recent closure of approximately one third of Council-run public toilets. The strategy hinged on identifying alternative locations that could serve local people in lieu of council run facilities.

Our approach

We worked with the SBC team to identify key parameters that would inform a data-driven, transparent welfare strategy. What we set out to discover was:

"What is the current level of access of [x] to a public toilet? What could be the level of access of [x] to a publicly accessible toilet?"

[x] in this instance referred to playparks; however we could have run this analysis centering any particular asset, or all buildings in an area.

 

The context

The availability of public toilets near a park can be a deciding factor towards whether people visit that park, and how long they spend there. This is a worthwhile consideration when evaluating the physical and mental health benefits for children and adults associated with spending time in nature, and the basic necessities for them to do so.

What is the current level of access of a playpark to a public toilet?

We find any Council run toilet within an 8 minute walk from each playpark, via the mapped walking network in OpenStreetMap (OSM). This paints the scale of the problem.

The baseline of toilet accessibility from a park, following the closure of many Council-run facilities, is no access. It indicates most parks are not within a short walk of a publicly accessible toilet.

They were keen to understand, how to change this.

Working with SBC Officers we identified a number of alternative toilets that might be open to members of the public, based on the following hierarchy:

1. Public: Currently open public toilets, listed here.

2. Semi-Public: Currently available third-party public facilities the public could access with little friction. For example, within a supermarket, a council-ran leisure centre, a GP clinic, a library, a museum, or a community centre. Facilities either not promoted as open, or in need of support to make wholly public use viable.

3. Private: Third-party facilities – such as cafes, shops, fitness centres, etc.

We identified the public, semi-public and private facilities using OSM tags.

Our findings

This process allowed us to run a new analysis, to understand:

  • The proximity of SBC parks to 3rd party public facilities, quasi-public facilities, private facilities, open to the public,
  • Which parks would be within 500m of a publicly accessible toilet if the additional facilities described above were to be taken into account
  • For SBC team: which operators might need to be approached in order to increase public accessibility to welfare facilities across the Local Authority Area

Next steps

There are a number of ways in which this type of analysis could be extended such as:

  • Including demographic information to understand who is most affected by lack of accessibility to public toilets in a given area
  • -Linked to the above, including housing data such as affordable housing data to understand both accessibility to parks, and then accessibility to public toilets from those parks
  • Using crime data to understand how safe publicly available toilets might feel
  • Changing the focus from parks to a different amenity
  • If a Council or local group has taken the time to differentiate between different types of toilets (i.e. with baby changing, suitable for wheelchair users etc), we could use their data to provide a more in-depth understanding of public accessibility

And more! If you would like to know more about this piece of work, or are interested to explore how we might support you on a similar project, please get in touch!