Surrey County Council: The Surrey Index

Surrey partners have committed by 2030, through the Community Vision for Surrey, for the county to be a uniquely special place where everyone has a great start to life, people live healthy and fulfilling lives, are enabled to achieve their full potential and contribute to their community. We have committed that no one is left behind.

Priority 3 of the Surrey Health and Wellbeing Strategy is about enabling our citizens to generate aspirations and fulfil their potential by helping them to develop the necessary skills needed to succeed in life. This not only relates to academic success, but also to wider skills and involvement in communities. Healthy lifestyles and emotional wellbeing are fundamentally to fulfilling potential -this priority builds on this by empowering citizens locally.

Previously, there was no single way to measure population outcomes on aspects of social and environmental progress in Surrey at a local level, to understand which areas in Surrey are being left behind. As a county balancing an increasing demand for services and increasing financial pressure, we rightly focus on issues of the most pressing need and immediate priority, and do not always have in view how we are meeting the wider needs of residents and help establish the building blocks that allow individuals and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and to reach their full potential. We have worked to address this by building the Surrey Index - a framework which measures the social, environmental and economic wellbeing of communities in Surrey and allows for comparison across different areas.

Thanks to the Index, we can see the different outcomes experienced by communities in Surrey, from education, skills and employment, the wider determinates of health, to access to information and inclusiveness. The Index allows us to probe these differences further and understand the relationship between these social indicators and the unequal health outcomes we find in urban areas.

For all these examples a user needs to look in more detail to find the possible causes and potential solutions for the disparity, but the Surrey Index gives us a starting place to start asking important questions and think about the correlations these have with other outcomes, and to look for other patterns of relationship.

The index dashboard shows where some of the worst outcomes occur and understand the characteristics of these areas. By guiding us to where need is greatest, this can help us target our resources more effectively. This is especially important given the huge range of outcomes in a county as broad and varied as Surrey, where pockets of deprivation can sometime go unnoticed.

This combination of granular quantitative data, and qualitative and experiential data gathered from speaking with residents and patients is a powerful combination of insight that can be used to inform local decision making and place shaping.

Building the LRI enabled senior leaders to identify the geographic and thematic areas where Surrey was recovering well, and communities felt confident and safe, and those where it was struggling. In turn, this will help guide borough-level decision making and identifying policy and investment priorities.

For the index to be truly successful, it needed to be a partnership product that is relevant to a wide and varied audience. This was achieved through regular engagement with stakeholders at every step of the products development. At the outset, we engaged partners in ‘discovery days’ to develop a shared list of priorities and to map these to available indicators; we hosted learning sessions while the index was in development to talk about the concept, methodology and how the index would be used to test our ideas and seek feedback; the project sponsors were kept updated on progress through reports and updates to the Surrey Health and Wellbeing Board. All this was an important part of project because it provided a broader view of what progress toward the Community Vision looks like in Surrey and guaranteed that the index encompassed shared priorities and reflected a partnership aspiration for the county.

The project had several intrinsic risks and opportunities which were key considerations as the project progressed. A key challenge was ensuring the availability of enough standardised data at the relevant geographical units for the appropriate time periods to meet the statistical requirements of building the index. This meant revisiting and reiterating the list of indicators several times to come up with a set that was robust but also reflected the story we wanted to tell.

It was also extremely important when communicating and promoting the index that the language used reinforces the progressive and aspirational intention of the index rather than simply highlighting the worst performing areas and further stigmatising communities and reinforcing negative stereotypes. It was important to avoid the use of jargon and use plain English wherever possible.

One key learning point from this project is not to underestimate the time or resource required to build something which takes a very complicated landscape and presents it in a clear and transparent way. It was very difficult to distil the list of potential and desired indicators into a functional index and this required many revisions and repeated testing.

Allied to this point is to identify the skills and resources available to the project from colleagues and other teams and to draw on these as much as possible.

The index can be viewed on our data hub at The Surrey Index.

Rich Carpenter

Data Scientist, Population Insight Team, Surrey County Council

Email: [email protected]