What are we doing?
We want to build a model which forecasts the local (Bath and North East Somerset) population.
Why?
Lots of local services need population forecasts ranging from the NHS in submitting annual planning reports, to economic development and planning policy teams who want to understand the implications of policy on the local population.
There’s also the small matter of trying to develop more sophisticated models to understand future trends in social care demand.
Surely someone more qualified than us has done it already?
Well, yes. Lots of people are already doing population forecasting, the ONS and GLA amongst other august bodies, but these models often constrain to a high geographical level and neither do they account for local factors, particularly housing growth.
Third party suppliers of population forecasting also exist, but they have a cost implication and can often be timely to refresh (housing growth estimates change regularly).
We will be making contact with relevant local experts throughout the process, including schools capacity planners, planning policy officers and local academics with an interest in the work.
Oh, and another thing, we want to keep it open source and derived from open data as much as possible (and aim for a good alternative where we can’t). We hope this will make it useful for other people and that they in turn might help improve the model.
So what next?
We will try to keep updates coming regularly on here detailing components of the work and useful stuff we learn along the way. We will be aiming to test different elements of the model, so will be running small experiments on components as they develop, we will also aim to share our learning from these.
The next post in this series looks at the outline model.
I want to get involved…
Cool, drop us a line on research@bathnes.gov.uk or ping me @jonpoole on twitter.