Challenge
Collating and analysing disparate data sets is vital to inform official public policy.
However, this raises some key challenges:
- Accessing property data from a number of different sources.
- Using address information from multiple systems without a unique identifier.
- No single data source when answering policy questions.
- Rematching data each time analysis needs to be made.
Solution
National Energy Efficiency Data-Framework (NEED) is a framework for combining data from existing sources to provide insights into how energy is used and the impact on energy efficiency measures for different types of property and households.
By utilising the AddressBase Premium product, data is address matched once, each record is assigned a UPRN and is then used many times. The original data can still maintain the unique identifiers that link back to the original systems.
Result
Within DECC, outputs from NEED have already been used to inform a number of important policies designed to benefit the UK, including:
- Estimates of savings from insulation measures to inform the development of Green Deal and Energy Companies Obligation policies.
- Consumption by income and tenure to inform Fuel Poverty policy.
- Consumption by property attributes to inform development of heat policy, including DECC’s Heat Map.
- Compare My Energy (Energy UK tool).
"This is a great example of how a government department is bringing together a number of datasets to enable consistent cross referencing of data – informing policy, increasing collaboration and reducing duplication of resources."