Great Britain: The Mappiest Place Around

‘Llongyfarchiadau!’* to all Welsh readers in Powys, who last week topped the British Household Survey Panel’s ‘happiest place’ research table. Based on a combination of their sense of wellbeing, employment, health and educational qualifications, a team from the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester have determined that the area around Brecknock, Montgomery and Radnor in Powys is the cheeriest place in the UK.

And commiserations (as well as a mass dose of Prozac?) to the good burghers of Edinburgh, who are apparently the most miserable. C’mon now people – surely the Fringe wasn’t that bad this year, was it?

I admire the Household Survey Panel as it’s the one longitudinal dataset that looks at both people and places to measure social cohesion – our sense of community, if you will – and gives a human face to statistical analyses which can otherwise seem impenetrably dull.

Not to mention expensive. A report from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) released last week estimates that the forthcoming 2011 national census, for example, will cost taxpayers upwards of £500 million and that the information gathered could be out-of-date by the time it is published. As an alternative, the NLGN is proposing a ‘rolling’ census whereby data and information on citizens would be collected from a number of streams by local councils. Electoral Roll access – the marketing bete noir of the recent Walport Report – would figure prominently in this new scheme alongside GP address records and geo-referencing systems.

For as much as I’ve been calling on the DM industry and Westminster to affect a paradigm shift in how it manages personal data in recent months, in an era of high population mobility and security issues for many when it comes to filling out official forms, I wonder if private enterprise could assist with the census?

Call me crazy, but in helping the UK government ‘join-up’ its data management on an ongoing basis, the private sector might be able to save money and resources, enhance security and better empower local communities to allocate resources.

Food for thought, anyhow…

* ‘Congratulations’ (I hope – my Welsh is more than a little rusty).