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Introduction

The Welwyn Hatfield Digital Place Portrait delivers a transformative, user-friendly platform that enables stakeholders to explore and understand the region’s socio-economic, environmental, and infrastructure data.

With limited GIS and data science expertise within local authorities, designing an accessible yet powerful tool that simplifies data exploration and contextualises statistics against regional benchmarks is essential to enable informed planning and decision-making.

Challenges

Significant challenges were encountered, including:

Fragmented Data Sources:
1. Data scatters across multiple organisations such as Natural England, Historic England, ONS, and Ordnance Survey, with no centralised repository.
2. Siloed datasets needed to be located, accessed, and integrated into a cohesive framework.

Diverse Formats and Processing Needs:
Data was available in varying formats, requiring extensive digitisation, standardisation, and processing to ensure all datasets were consistent, usable, and presented in an understandable format.

Skill Gaps in Local Authorities:
Limited expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), data science, and statistics posed a challenge for integrating and interpreting complex data.

Limitations of Existing Tools:
Existing web maps and tools are not designed to allow planners to explore, curate, and interrogate data intuitively and effectively and require knowledge of basic GIS, data and statistics.

Contextualising Data:
Without comparisons to regional or national benchmarks, it was difficult to grasp the significance of individual statistics.

Solutions

The Welwyn Hatfield Digital Place Portrait tackled key challenges with a detailed approach, delivering an innovative, scalable, and user-friendly platform:

Data Integration and Harmonisation
Fragmented datasets from various sources were consolidated into a central GIS-based database. Automated workflows were developed to digitise, process, and standardise data, ensuring consistency and usability.

User-Centred Design
The platform features an intuitive interface, making complex data accessible to non-technical users. Interactive maps, charts, and statistics work seamlessly together, while regional and national benchmarks provide deeper insights to support informed decision-making.

Scalability and Adaptability
The design accommodates future functionality like scenario modelling and spatial analytics, with flexibility for use across varying geographical scales, from individual plots to the entire local authority.

Stakeholder and Community Engagement
A highly visual and interactive platform fosters engagement, providing an accessible evidence base that helps residents understand their area.

This comprehensive solution supports data-driven, sustainable planning for Welwyn Hatfield.

Results

The Welwyn Hatfield Digital Place Portrait delivers a strong return on investment by streamlining the creation of a digital evidence base. Consolidating fragmented datasets into a centralised GIS platform has significantly reduced the time and resources required for data collation and analysis, achieving notable cost and efficiency savings.

Bridging the Skills Gap
The platform empowers non-technical planning teams with an intuitive interface, enabling cross-sectoral analysis and decision-making without the need for specialised GIS expertise, effectively addressing skills gaps in local authorities.
Improved Community Engagement

By providing a visually engaging and interactive platform, the project enhanced the Local Plan engagement process. Residents can easily understand current conditions, opportunities, and challenges, fostering inclusivity and trust in planning initiatives.

Enhanced Usability and Scalability
The user-centred design, combined with regional benchmarks, ensures clear insights for evidence-based decision-making. The scalable platform supports future needs, enabling long-term value for the Council and its stakeholders.

An innovation-led social enterprise

The directory is brought to you by the Digital Task Force for Planning, a not-for-profit organisation. Our ambition is to promote digital integration and advancement in Spatial Planning to tackle the grand challenges in the 21st Century.
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