In December 2012, the British Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (BURISA) merged with LARIA, with both chairs signing an agreement to pursue BURISA's aims within LARIA. The final BURISA newsletter reflects on its 40-year history, acknowledging its achievements and the challenges that led to its closure, including a shrinking subscriber base. Key topics discussed include the cessation of DCLG regional statistics, updates on local information systems, and ongoing contributions from the census within the context of BURISA's legacy.

1. BURISA
December 2012
194
The British Urban & Regional Information Systems Association
BURISA merges with LARIA
On the October 12th at a half day
BURISA conference BURISA Chair,
Mike Haslam, and LARIA Chair Neil
Wholey signed an agreement under
which BURISA and LARIA will join
forces.
This opens the way for BURISA to
continue as an interest group within
LARIA and means that BURISA's
archive of newsletters and conference
material will continue to be available in
future through the LARIA website. The
full text of the agreement is available on
the BURISA website.
Contents
1 Announcement
2 Message from BURISA Chair:
Editorial
3 Forty years of BURISA
9 DCLG Regional Statistics
decision; Local Authority waste
management statistics
10 Local information systems;
BURISA website
11 Census update
12 URISA - 50 years on
15 Conference reports
16 Beyond 2011 update
17 Geoplace
18 BURISA/ LARIA Conference
report
20 B U R I S A a i m s ; B U R I S A
C o n t a c t s a n d B o a r d
Members;
Long URLs
Long URLs which stretch over more
than one line of text are replaced
with shortened versions via:
http://Tinyurl.com/
!

2. A personal message from Mike Haslam, last ever
Chair of BURISA.
As I said at the Conference - I have a mixture of
emotions - I am sad that BURISA cannot continue as a
separate association, but I am happy that its aims will
continue to be pursued within LARIA.
Having come to BURISA quite late in my career I have
to say that I wish I had discovered it earlier - the
enthusiasm and energy of the Board has to be
experienced to be believed.
It is a pity that our subscriber base shrunk so rapidly that
we were not able to continue as an independent entity. I
was disappointed at the low turnout for the Conference
in October - it was a very enjoyable event, with good
speakers and very relevant contributions from the floor.
If you are reading this and were not a subscriber to
BURISA or you are an ex-subscriber or a current
subscriber, then think about joining LARIA. Thank you
to all past and present members of the Board and to all
who have subscribed to BURISA. I wish you all well
and hope to meet you at future meeting of LARIA or
other organisations.
I hope that you all have a very happy Christmas and a
good New Year, even without BURISA!
Editorial
The announcement on the front page, the proceedings of
and photographs from the conference on October
12th ,the message above, the history of BURISA piece
and the well wishes from URISA all mark the end of the
quarterly BURISA Newsletter., Best wishes to BURISA
subscribers as they engage with LARIA.
BURISA 191 highlighted the DCLG consultation on
various proposed changes to statistics it collates relating
to housing, land use and regional matters. The BURISA
Board was particularly concerned at the potential loss of
regional statistic. DCLG has perhaps unsurprisingly now
formally announce its cessation of publication of
regioanl statistics. ONS and other parts of government
(see the item on waste statistics) however continue to
prefer regions as a unit of analysis over the patchwork of
Local Enterprise Partnerships. It is little consolation that
the UK Statistics Authority is to review the DCLG
decision.
BURISA 194 majors on the census theme of previous
issues with the latest information about the release of
data and requests from ONS for evidence concerning the
value to users of small area data as part of the the
Beyond 2011 Project.
There is feedback from three relevant conferences all
taking place since BURISA 193 organised by BSPS,
TWRI and BURISA/ LARIA itself.
Further information is awaited about the launch of Ian
white’s “History of the Census” not ow likely before
February 2013.
We publish the third and final part of an article from a
sister organisation - URISA based in the United States of
America, which commemorates its 50th anniverary.
There are further updates on Geoplace and public and
private sector local information systems.
The SUF user engagement website statsuserner
continues to be well used despite a temporary setback
due to the move of James Tucker from RSS to the
Statistics Authority. RSS has very recently announced
that he has been replaced by Dev Virdee now in post as
user engagement programme manager.
Dev will be part time, working the equivalent of three
days per week. Dev brings great experience of the
Government Statistical Service, with particular expertise
in regional and local statistics. He also has experience of
international statistics having been chair of an OECD
working party on territorial indicators.
Dev can be emailed on d.virdee@rss.org.uk . Until an
extension number is confirmed for him, Dev can be
contacted by phone by ringing the ONS switchboard 020
7638 8998 and asking to be put through. One of his first
tasks is likely to be the establishment on statsusernet of
a subregional statistics user community.
Finally congratulations to David Rhind, a former editor,
who was recently appointed as Deputy Chair of the UK
Statistics Authority with responsibility for promoting
and safeguarding the production and publication of all
official statistics across the UK. Professor Rhind took up
post on 1 July 2012 for a three-year term.
All best wishes to subscribers, Board members and other
contributors.
Cedric Knipe
BURISA Editor
editor@burisa.org.uk
BURISA 194 page 2 December 2012

3. BURISA 194 page 3 December 2012
FORTY YEARS OF BURISA
Alan Lodwick, BURISA Board Member since 1989
and BURISA Secretary, 1994-1999 and 2001-2010
This final BURISA newsletter provides an unrepeatable
opportunity to look back at the Association’s
development and achievements over its forty year
existence. It draws on material from the 193 previous
issues, from minutes of Board meetings and from
personal recollections of Board members.
The establishment of BURISA
BURISA was founded in 1972 with the help of a loan of
£200 from the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES :
an organisation which closed in the 1980s following
withdrawal of funding under the then government’s cull
of quangos). Its name was derived from that of a US
association, URISA, which had been established a few
years earlier and is still going strong (see elsewhere in
this and previous issues), now concentrating on
geographical information.
The Association’s establishment reflected the growing
importance being given to the use and analysis of
information by public bodies. Local Government was
about to be reorganised and “corporate management”
was the order of the day, while the 1968 Town and
Country Planning Act had for the first time required
local planning authorities to undertake surveys and keep
under review “the social, economic and environmental
conditions” in their areas. Also at this time, computing
technology had advanced to the point where it was
feasible for public organisations to contemplate its use
beyond basic financial applications to land and property,
transport and population databases and even forecasting.
BURISA’s first Editorial Board had seven members,
many of them close friends. They included Jeff Willis as
editor, then at the University of Liverpool but soon after
to move into local government on Merseyside to take a
lead in the development of information systems; Richard
Baxter of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form
Studies at Cambridge University and author of a classic
textbook Computer and Statistical Techniques for
Planners; and, David Rhind, then at the Experimental
Cartography Unit of the Royal College of Art,
subsequently Director General of Ordnance Survey
amongst many other senior positions and very well
known to subscribers through his regular involvement in
BURISA events, including our final conference in
October this year. The remaining members of the Board
were from local authorities together with a
representative from CES. There was also an advisory
board of three representing the Department of the
Environment (DoE) and the (then) OPCS.
The first issue of the newsletter appeared in October
1972, announcing that:
“The aims of the BURISA newsletter can be
summarised as "making public relevant information
about information systems". The establishment of this
newsletter comes at a time when information system
activity is accelerating in every local authority, when
urban research is more and more influenced by data
availability and public decision making is changing to
take advantage of twentieth century technology.”
and,
“It will fill the large gap between the professional
journals and the personal contact .. [and]…it will raise
the level of debate by identifying major trends of
thought, allowing users to understand each others
problems, comparing solutions, helping to exploit the
resources available in this country to the full and
providing short cuts to important sources of
information.”
It included descriptions of developments at Leeds and
Coventry Councils, two of the pioneers in information
systems development in local government. It also
contained an article on the GISP Report which had been
published a month earlier. This long awaited report, on a
General Information System for Planning, gave
guidance to local authorities on how to collect and use
information for planning purposes and gave a further
impetus to the local developments which BURISA
intended to report. Spatial Referencing was another key
topic that would return in future issues.
This newsletter was the only one ever to feature a
picture on the front page (reproduced in issue 130 and
this last edition). The content was typed and put together
laboriously. Sue Barrett, editor from 1976-1981,
subsequently described the “ghastly process of
assembling the typewritten text and getting it all to fit on
pages and pasting up. This was all done with scissors
and cow gum … with the headings put in manually
using letraset”. Word-processing, DTP and the internet
were not even on the horizon.
The 1970s
!

4. BURISA 194 page 4 December 2012
The second edition of the newsletter reported that the
launch of BURISA had been a great success and
subscriptions were pouring in. By issue six the
circulation had reached 1000 copies and was still
increasing.
These early editions emphasised technology and
methodology with a “Computer Forum” as a regular
feature. There was usually a profile of information
systems developments at a leading local authority, often
accompanied by an independent critical appraisal. The
profiles inevitably included a detailed description of
hardware which seem quaint now, with the “store” (i.e.
RAM) of an authority’s single mainframe computer
being measured in kilobytes. Indeed it is remarkable
how much was attempted and achieved with so little
computing power. Systems described in the newsletter,
which will be familiar to anyone working at that time
but which have since disappeared, include LAMIS, the
Local Authority Management Information System
developed by ICL, TRAMS, the Transport Reference
and Mapping System developed by TRRL, and GIMMS,
an innovative mapping package developed by Tom
Waugh at Edinburgh University.
Land and property systems and gazetteers and the spatial
referencing projects being sponsored by the DoE were
bread and butter to the newsletter at this time but the
scope of the content was remarkably broad. There were
regular articles about developments in Social Services
systems, and applications ranging from Health Services
to Fire Services. Information from Ordnance Survey
(OS) was reported, beginning a long relationship with
BURISA in which OS has continuously been
represented on the Board and provided regular
contributions to the newsletter. “Foreign Links”, as the
newsletter referred to them, were also important and
there were regular articles about developments in
Europe and North America.
The interest in BURISA’s subject matter at this time was
not only reflected in its large circulation but also in its
receiving many unsolicited articles and letters for
publication, both of which have become rare in more
recent years.
Rather surprisingly, the Census did not feature much in
the early days of BURISA although there was a joint
workshop with the School for Advanced Urban Studies
at the University of Bristol (SAUS) on “living without
the 1976 Census” which included an interesting early
debate about whether Censuses could be replaced by
administrative systems and surveys. The very last issue
of the decade, however, devoted most of its pages to the
forthcoming 1981 Census and local authority options for
“processing systems”.
BURISA was also active beyond the pages of the
newsletter. Its first conference took place in July 1974
over three days at the University of Warwick, and was
attended by 80 delegates. This was part of a much larger
event organised by PTRC (Planning and Transportation
Research and Computation Ltd) which also published
and distributed the newsletter at this time. A similar
conference followed in 1975. However PTRC
subsequently went into administration and after this
BURISA concentrated on less ambitious workshops, of
which there were many, often organised in collaboration
with other organisations. These included SAUS which
was to become an important partner to BURISA.
Bob
Finally, any discussion of the 1970s, cannot omit the
Bob cartoon which first appeared in Issue 34 of June 78.
It wryly described the frustrations and ironies of
everyday work in a Research and Information Unit in a
way which would have been all too familiar to BURISA
readers.
The humour for the Bob cartoons originally came from
Steve Brazier, of Nottingham City Council, who joined
the Board at this time and was for many years BURISA
Secretary. There were two main cartoonists, Bob Pierce,
a colleague of Steve’s (issues 34 – 48) followed by Sue
Leather of SAUS. Bob made an occasional re-
appearance between issues 105 and 127 but then
disappeared for good. This was a major issue for the
Board, the minutes of one meeting recording that “A
cartoon by committee session proved inconclusive. (i.e.
we failed to come up with a joke)”. Steve gives a fuller
and more amusing history in BURISA 104.
!

5. BURISA 194 page 5 December 2012
The 1980s
!
BURISA entered the 1980s as a well established and
very active organisation. It had a formal link with SAUS
at Bristol which remained responsible for administration
and for publishing and distributing the newsletter over
the whole decade. Sue Barrett, of SAUS, was editor in
1980 and was followed by Keith Chamberlain (Herts
CC, 1981-84), John England (Cleveland CC,
1985-1987) and Chris Elton (Derbyshire CC,
1987-1990).
The content of the newsletter was gradually changing.
There was less emphasis on computer hardware and
detailed descriptions of information systems and more
discussion of the development of data sources and their
use. BURISA’s scope broadened further with regular
articles on, for example, population and household
projections and housing information. The Census and
the SASPAC computer package inevitably became
important newsletter topics.
In the early eighties, BURISA instigated an Employment
Planning Forum, reflecting an increased interest in this
topic at a time when Britain was entering recession and
a period of high unemployment. The Forum met
regularly to discuss issues surrounding employment and
unemployment data and to encourage collaboration
between local authorities and central government (then
in the shape of the Manpower Services Commission) on
this issue.
The Chorley Report on the Handling of Geographic
Information, and the activities of the committees that
preceded it, also provided much material of interest to
BURISA. It led to the appearance of a new term in the
newsletter, ‘Geographical Information Systems’, with
many articles on GIS in the late eighties, although in fact
the subject had been central to the Association’s interests
from its inception. The new Regional Research
Laboratories established around this time to strengthen
GIS Research were another source of articles for the
newsletter.
Technology was not completely forgotten however. The
rise of microcomputers and their potential for data
handling and analysis was described in regular
newsletter articles. Another new topic was the use of
technology to provide information, such as Census data,
directly to the public using Viewdata systems (similar to
the also now defunct TV teletext and Prestel). This was
hardly the internet, but nevertheless shows the extent to
which technology had advanced. A final example
reminding us how quickly things change is an article
from 1989 describing the potential of CD-ROM as a
data storage medium and announcing the availability of
the Postal Address File (PAF) on CD-ROM.
Other BURISA activities throughout the eighties
included the continued organisation of numerous
workshops around the country on a wide range of topics,
often in collaboration with SAUS and other
organisations. BURISA also represented the UK on the
committee of the Urban Data Management Symposium
(UDMS) which organised annual conferences in a
different European city each year.
The “BURISA Book”
!

6. BURISA 194 page 6 December 2012
One particular achievement at this time deserves special
mention. In the early eighties and partly in response to
subscriber feedback, the editorial board decided that
BURISA should produce a handbook on “the state of the
art” in urban and regional information systems
development. To this end BURISA assembled a small
editorial group with the aim of commissioning and
editing such a text. Individual chapters were written by a
team of over thirty contributors and the result in 1985
was “Information Systems for Policy Planning in Local
Government”, published by Longman. “Handbook”
might have been the intention but it doesn’t seem to be
an adequate description. This was a major text, over 400
pages long and divided into five main sections covering
Population, Employment, Land and Property, Transport
and Methods together with a context-setting
introduction. Each section was divided into several
chapters, each on a specific topic and written by an
experienced practitioner in the field.
This was indeed “essential reading”, as the publicity for
once correctly stated, and an invaluable reference source
for anyone working with data for public policy making
both in local government and other public sector
agencies. The book was written, assembled and edited
largely by practitioners working for local and central
government in their spare time and without the benefit
of e-mail to make for speedy communication. Arguably
it was BURISA’s greatest achievement. There is a need
for an updated equivalent today.
The 1990s
!
At the start of 1990, the BURISA Editorial Board was
twenty strong, with a further seven members from
Central Government and the private sector on its
Advisory Panel. There were changes in the production
and distribution of the newsletter which moved from
SAUS to the Anglia Institute of Higher Education (now
Anglia Ruskin University). This was also the base of
BURISA’s new editor, Dave King. Dave was BURISA’s
longest serving editor and successfully steered and
developed the publication through the whole of the
decade. Dave’s editorials would seek and encourage
comment from readers, but obtaining copy for the
newsletter was often difficult, a sign of the increased
difficulty for many employees of finding time for
voluntary activity such as writing articles. In another
sign of the times, in more ways than one, he introduced
a system of annual performance indicators for members
of the Editorial Board based on their success in
generating copy for the newsletter. Another short lived
attempt to encourage potential authors was the
introduction in 1996 of prizes of £100 for the best
submitted article by a student and the best article
overall.
Despite the difficulties, the standard of articles remained
high. The topics continued to reflect BURISA’s core
interests including the Census, geographic information
and employment data while more articles appeared on
household and population estimates and projections
reflecting the concerns of the time and the new editor’s
particular field of expertise. Dave King also introduced
more themed issues both on our traditional topics and on
new ones such as Information Strategies and
developments at European level.
The nineties also saw BURISA mark two milestones
with special editions. In October 1991 the 100th issue
was published and included a supplement with
retrospectives from former editors and both a backward
(1891) and forward (2091) look at the Census. October
1997 saw BURISA reach its 25th Anniversary. This was
marked by a dinner attended by several founding
members including Sue Barratt, Graeme Handley,
Richard Baxter and David Rhind and also by edition
130. This included a reprint of the first issue of the
newsletter and contributions from founder members.
In 1993, the Board decided to re-instate a major annual
conference based in central London and held in April or
May. This began a series of one-day conferences which
continued successfully for over fifteen years. The topics
covered in the nineties included unsurprisingly, the
Census and GIS, but also labour market information, the
use of the internet for data access and the measurement
of public sector performance.
All but the last of these conferences took place in
Church House, Westminster, a well located, spacious
and comfortable venue. The 1999 conference was held
at the International Conference Centre in Birmingham.
High profile keynote speakers and well known chairs
were an important feature of these events. The 1994
conference on performance measurement was a
particularly ambitious affair involving three parallel
sessions. While the conference was a success, the Board
decided not to return to this format in future years.

7. BURISA 194 page 7 December 2012
By the late nineties subscriber numbers had settled back
to between 400 and 500. A fall in numbers at this time
prompted the Board to employ an administrator to
manage subscriptions, distribute the newsletter and
generate new subscribers. At the end of 1998 the
newsletter was pleased to report that this had resulted in
a 15% increase in subscriber numbers which now stood
at 437. About 60% of these were from local government
with the remainder spread between academia, Central
Government, health organisations and consultancies.
2000 and beyond
!
Dave King remained as newsletter editor until 2001,
when work pressures for him and his staff made it
impossible to continue. Indeed it became clear to the
Board that is was unlikely that anyone in full-time
employment would now have the time to take on the
role of editor, especially given the effort required to
generate articles of sufficient quality. It decided
therefore to advertise for the role and offer a modest fee
for the production of each newsletter, hoping to attract a
recent retiree or someone wishing to undertake some
work from home.
The first editor appointed under this arrangement was
Jane Hardy who fell into the latter category. In fact
‘home’ was first of all in the US, where Jane had moved
for family reasons and subsequently France, before she
returned to the UK. However, electronic communication
and the web, together with Jane’s enthusiasm and
organisational skills, meant that this was no barrier to
her role. Jane was succeeded in 2004 by David
Landeryou, formerly of Wiltshire County Council, and
he, in 2009 by Cedric Knipe, previously at Cheshire
Councils. Both continued to successfully produce the
newsletter on time and to the high standards set by their
predecessors.
The well established themes continued to be covered by
the newsletter, with the Census not surprisingly coming
to the fore at the beginning of the decade. The very first
issue of 2000 began with an optimistic editorial entitled
“Integrated Policy Systems Revisited”. It cited the
recently formed Regional Observatories as evidence of
the growing interest and priority being given to the
development of integrated information systems, one of
the topics most frequently discussed in the very earliest
issues of the newsletter. The new (though by now, not so
new) Government’s concerns for “evidence-based
policy” and “information age government” were seen in
discussions of the report of Policy Action Team 18 :
Better Information (the PAT18 report), and the impact of
another of its policies gave rise to articles on the
implications of devolution for official statistics.
Articles continued to be focused on analysis and to be
more linked to policy issues, with technology very much
in the back seat. However, anyone interested in the
development of technology over the lifetime of
BURISA would certainly enjoy Richard Belding’s
Personal History of Computing in BURISA 185. Jane
Hardy also managed to re-invigorate the ‘news’ sections
of the publication, while the ‘look’ of the newsletter
became more sophisticated with colour introduced to the
inside pages to enhance the presentation of maps and
figures.
The BURISA Website.
Although BURISA had a web presence in the 1990s
through Anglia Polytechnic University, it wasn’t until
2000 that www.burisa.org ( now www.burisa.org.uk)
was registered as a domain name and serious efforts
began to establish a separate website. This was up and
running by 2002 having been developed by staff at the
ESRC data archive and originally hosted there. The
design was the same as can be seen today, though the
content has gradually expanded over the years.
Subscribers were issued with a password which gave
them access to recent copies of the newsletter in
electronic form.
One further sign of the times was the first sentence that
appeared on the home page stating that:
“BURISA officially stands for the 'British Urban and
Regional Information Systems Association', but we have
never let that bother us unduly!” This was another
recognition of the move from BURISA’s original focus
on systems and its planning roots to interest in the uses
of information across a broad range of fields.

8. BURISA 194 page 8 December 2012
A notable addition to the website in 2008 was a
complete archive of newsletters in pdf format. It had
long been a wish of the Board to have these scanned and
made available to subscribers, but the process took
longer than anticipated, one of the challenges being
locating a complete paper set, with certain issues –
rather like cigarette cards - proving particularly elusive.
The RSS and the Statistics Users Forum.
In 2000 the Board discussed establishing formal links
with the Royal Statistical Society and some initial
discussions were held about the Association becoming a
RSS Special Interest Group, though there were
implications for BURISA’s management and
membership structure. In 2004, however, the RSS
established the Statistics Users Forum (SUF) which
would be composed of representatives of various
statistics users groups and was funded initially by the
ESRC. The Forum would provide shared administrative
support and allow opportunities for the exchange of
views and expertise within the user community.
BURISA was invited to join (it was already a member of
the Statistics Users Council, the predecessor of SUF)
and did so in 2005. Membership gave BURISA use of
RSS administrative services and facilities as well as
offering associate membership of the RSS to subscribers
at a reduced rate. The formal link was very much
welcomed by the Board.
Conferences were organized every year except 2002,
covering not only on the usual topics of the Census and
GIS but also forecasting and projections, regional data
sources, data for local information systems and new
sources of data. Several were held at the Commonwealth
Institute, followed by events at the Natural History
Museum and the Royal Society as well as at the RSS.
By now, BURISA employed a conference organizer to
arrange the programme and to liaise with speakers and
the conference venue, and a modest fee for this was
factored into the budget. All of the conferences were
informative and stimulated interesting discussion. Until
2009, they were well attended, which was important to
BURISA as it was now relying on generating a small
surplus to subsidise its other activities.
The 2009 conference proved to be a turning point for
BURISA. It resulted in a significant loss and BURISA’s
finances, which had been healthy, started to become a
cause for concern. The organization had always sought
to have enough in reserve to cover at least one year’s
future activity and had easily managed to achieve this
until this point. Now, meeting the objective was in
question.
Budget cuts and pressures on employees’ time meant
that conference attendance had fallen below a financial
break-even point. The conference had also been a source
of new subscribers and this together with the impact of
budget constraints meant that subscriber numbers were
falling too. The Board looked for ways of reducing costs
and decided that a move to electronic-only production
was the only feasible option. The final printed copy of
the BURISA newsletter was published in December
2010. Thereafter, subscribers were sent a pdf copy by e-
mail.
However, subscriber numbers continued to fall, being
around 250 in 2011. Conferences, with a continued high
standard of content, were organized in 2010 and 2011
but failed to attract a sufficient attendance. It was also
clear that in the current climate individuals were not able
to give their time to support what was essentially a
voluntary self-help body. Despite efforts to attract new
Board Members, the Board Membership had aged with
the Association, to the point that by 2012, more than half
were retired. Early that year, therefore, the Board
decided that BURISA could no longer continue as an
independent organisation and that it would be wound up
at the end of the year. An agreement was reached that
BURISA would merge with LARIA (the Local Area
Research and Intelligence Association), which would
receive BURISA’s remaining assets and provide a
‘home’ for BURISA’s web archive of newsletters and
conference material. It is hoped that BURISA’s activities
will continue within LARIA as a special interest group.
This history has inevitably been selective. It has
mentioned by name a small number of individuals and
in particular, the founding members and the nine editors
who have ensured continuous production of an
informative, interesting and thought-provoking
newsletter over the last forty years. However, many
others have made substantial contributions to the
organization including the Board Members, Chairs,
Business Managers and Secretaries of the Association,
its webmaster and web developers, those who have
given it administrative support, the conference
organisers, conference speakers and participants,
newsletter contributors and of course the newsletter
subscribers. With the help of these people, BURISA has
been a remarkably long-lived organization which has
benefited many in carrying out their jobs and as a
friendly, informal network. It can be proud of its
achievements and that, over its forty years, it has
continued to meet the objectives set out in the first issue.
!

9. BURISA 194 page 9 December 2012
DCLG regional statistics decision
In a written statement to parliament, Secretary of State,
Eric Pickles said that from October 2012, his department
would no longer collate and publish data on a regional
level and instead would gather data based on business-
and council-led local enterprise partnership boundaries.
Pickles said: "The continuing use of the former
government office regional boundaries no longer
provides a coherent framework for assessing public
policy.
"Many of the Government's policies now use alternative
local geographies. Publishing statistics at a regional
level is no longer necessary or informative, and we see
little point in producing statistics at taxpayers' expense
for their own sake."
The move follows a consultation on changes to the
statistics gathered by the Department for Communities
and Local Government published in January this year.
Following the launch of the consultation, Professor Sir
Peter Hall, Bartlett Professor of Planning and
Regeneration at University College London, said that
the proposal was "almost unbelievable".
Hall questioned the legality of the proposal, as the UK
government is under a legal obligation to provide
regional statistics to Eurostat, the statistical office of the
European Union. "It would virtually destroy European
research on regional performance," he said.
However, in his statement , Pickles said: "Ministers
reject the notion of a 'Europe of the Regions' where
nation-states and national Parliaments are sidelined, and
replaced with distant regional governments answerable
only to a federal European super-state. Dismantling such
arbitrary, unelected regional administrative structures
will assist in that goal."
Following the launch of the consultation, Professor John
Tomaney, Henry Daysh professor of regional studies at
Newcastle University, said that regional data is
"valuable and widely used". He said: "We have a long
time series of data on regional performance which is
extremely useful for measuring progress over time."
We understand that the UK Statistics Authority is to
report on the DCLG decision and consultation process.
Local Authority Waste Management Statistics for
England – Final Annual Results 2011/12
Final estimates of local authority collected waste
generation and management for England and the
regions, including a new experimental analysis of
greenhouse gases and Local Authority collected waste.
Headline results
In 2011/12, 43 per cent of household waste was
recycled. Although this is the highest recycling rate
recorded for England, the rate of increase has been
levelling off, with 2011/12 being the lowest year on year
increase for ten years.
Household waste generation was 22.9 million tonnes,
continuing the year on year fall seen since 2007/8. This
amounts to 431kg of waste per person.
Local Authorities recycled, composted or reused 10.7
million tonnes of the waste they collected. This
amounted to more than was landfilled for the first time
since records began, although an increase in incineration
may have partly accounted for the change in landfill.
Statistics are available at regional and local authority
levels.

10. BURISA 194 page 10 December 2012
Fluent Technology
Local Information System - Origin
Origin is a tried and tested, web-based local information
system and data observatory solution platform designed
specifically for local government and focuses on
providing all the necessary tools for maintaining,
analysing, collaborating and presenting information at a
local level to partners and the general public.
Origin delivers local information systems that streamline
the handling of enquiries from the public, reduce the
time spent on the production of statutory returns and
deliver real-time collaboration on defining policy
initiatives.
Clients are realising significant staff time savings in
managing enquiries and in producing routine reports.
One county council has recently reported an £80k per
year saving on staff time managing enquiries from the
public. Another client has reduced the time required to
produce it’s JSNA report by more than 50%.
ORIGIN is in daily use throughout councils in the UK,
with over 1000 users and holding millions of statistics.
Customers are experiencing the below benefits:
• Save thousands on staff time spent answering
information requests
• Encourages the public to use self service to answer
enquiries
• Save on the cost of analysts for reporting
• Provides evidence for policy making
• Drives the Localism agenda forward
• Reduces the time spent on JSNA
• Identifies performance issues in the community
• Provides correlation analysis to identify patterns in
community behaviour.
ONS Crime, Regional and Data Access Division
update
Since the last issue of BURISA the Regional and Local
Division within ONS has been amalgamated with other
divisions to form the Crime, Regional and Data Access
Division.
The NeSS team has been focussed on preparation
work for the second stage release of Census data
which started on 22 November.
Sub-National Reporting has published the Region and
Country Profiles for the environment, which provide
essential statistics for the regions of England and the
constituent countries of the UK (Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland). The tables provide a wide range of
environmental, housing and transport statistics to
compare the countries, regions and local authority
areas.
Area Based Analysis has produced:
· The six monthly update to the Local Profiles,
which aim to help local authorities use official
statistics to better understand the economic, social and
environmental picture for their area. The Local
Profiles are split into the following themes: child
poverty, demography, employment, economic context,
enterprise, environment, housing, inclusion and skills.
· The six monthly update to the LEP Profiles,
which help to provide an economic, social and
environmental picture of Local Enterprise
Partnerships. There are two LEP Profiles, a LEP
Comparator Profile and a LEP LA Comparator profile.
The LEP Comparator Profile enables official statistics
to be selected and compared between LEPs along with
a selected local authority within England. The LEP
LA Comparator profile enables official statistics to be
compared for each of the local authority areas within
each LEP in addition to statistics for all LEPs.
· Two articles on individual insolvency. The first
insolvency article looks at regional and local
differences for individual insolvency over time for
England and Wales. The second article looks at
characteristics of those individuals becoming insolvent
in 2011 at the regional and local authority level.
BURISA website
The BURISA website is
www.burisa.org.uk
The site includes access to the archive of back issues of
the BURISA Newsletter and contact details for the
retiring BURISA Editorial Board and conference slides.
Discussions are continuing with the LARIA to establish
BURISA website content as part of the LARIA website
Meanwhile Jenny Boag will continue to maintain the
website.
webmaster@burisa.org.uk
.

11. BURISA 193 page 11 September 2012
The geographical concentration of industries and
industrial specialisation of local areas.
Richard Prothero and Cecilia Campos, Regional
Economic Analysis Branch, ONS
ONS has published a series of articles investigating both
the geographical concentration of industries and the
industrial specialisation of local authority areas in Great
Britain.
These articles provide interactive data tools and maps as
well as analysis and advice to users wishing to examine
the local industrial structure of their local areas. They
should also be of interest to those interested in policy
areas such as business clusters, agglomeration, spatial
inequalities or local economic development.
To view the articles, go to:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/regional-trends/regional-
economic-analysis/index.html
The first article, 'The Geographical Concentration of
Industries’, highlights those industries that display
geographic concentration, as opposed to industrial
concentration, and briefly explained why it occurs and
its implications. The degree of geographical
concentration of industries was measured using three
indicators: the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, the
locational Gini and the Maurel and Sedillot index. The
indicators were computed using employment data for
Great Britain at local authority level derived from the
Business Register and Employment Survey and micro-
level data derived from the Business Database Structure.
These results are available down to a 272 industry split.
The article also includes a section entitled ‘Interpreting
the results’, which aims to provide guidance for users
wishing to examine the full underlying results from the
analysis.
A second article, ‘The Spatial Concentration of
Industries’, explores further those industries that display
a concentration of employee jobs by examining the
different spatial patterns of this concentration; and it
discusses the relevance of a spiky economic geography
to policy. The article also includes data and tools that
allow the user to more fully investigate the spatial
concentrations for different industries, as well as a
section providing some guidance on how to use the tools
and interpret the results from the available data.
The tools include:
· Reference data tables with calculated Gini
coefficients and Moran’s I indices for each industry and
location quotients for each industry, local authority and
region.
· An excel tool that allows the user to choose from a
drop-down box a specific industry and obtain a list of
those local authorities, and regions, which have the
highest shares of employee jobs within that industry
compared to their local shares of total GB employee jobs
(via calculated location quotients). As an example, table
1 shows the 10 local authorities in Great Britain with the
highest location quotient in professional, scientific and
technical activities section. It is shown that six of them
are located within London with the other four in either
the South East or the East of England regions. This list
can be expanded to all local authorities in Great Britain.
This tool is available for all the industries down to three-
digit code of the SIC (2007).
. Google maps that help visualise the spatial
distribution of employee jobs across the country, by
showing the location quotients at local authority level
for all industries down to three-digit code with more
than 25,000 employee jobs. Users can choose to view
only one area and they can embed the current view – the
chosen area and industry – in a website. The specific
selection can also be shared with other users by email,
twitter and facebook.
The maps can be viewed at:
http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/LQ/
Locationquotients.html
A third complementary article, 'Industrial Specialisation
in Local Areas', analyses data on an area by area basis to
investigate each area’s industrial specialisations. A
number of measures of industrial specialisation have
been calculated to provide a means of measuring the
similarity, or otherwise, of industrial structures between
areas. In addition, location quotients have been
calculated. These allow for a more in-depth analysis of
local specialisations.
The article illustrates how the results can be used to
inform analysis, and it also provides some context on the
issue of specialisation. The article includes a number of
easy-to-use tools. One of them allows the user to
choose a local authority and then see a list of those
industries in which it has a relative specialisation (as
measured by location quotients). A second tool provides
an indicative illustration of local authorities with a
similar industrial structure via calculation of the
Krugman index.
Census update
The key points to note are:
• 2011 Census population and household estimates at
output area geographies and wards were due to be
published on 23 November
• 2011 Census estimates of the number of people who
have a second address outside of the local authority
where they usually live in England and Wales was
published 22 October.
• 2011 Census Key Statistics tables at local authority
level for England and Wales will be published 11
December, via the ONS website
• 30 January 2013 will see the issue of all of the 2011
Census Key and Quick Statistics tables at output area,
ward, parish and parliamentary constituency
geographies
• 2011 Census geography products were released on 30
October 2012.

12. BURISA 193 page 12 September 2012
•
URISA’s 50 Years as an International Organization
Greg Babinski URISA
CONTINUED
The future of URISA as an international
organisation
Professional papers and publications, hampered by
high printing costs and slow postal mail five decades
ago, can now be distributed amongst colleagues
worldwide instantaneously, via the Internet and PDF.
Indeed the concept of what a publication can be has
changed dramatically. PDFs and MS Word documents
can be developed, reviewed, and commented upon on
an international collaborative basis. Today
professional publications can be supplemented by
source documents, including in spreadsheet, database,
imagery, or source programming code form.
And the development of urban and regional
information systems and GIS has truly become
international. GIS is recognized by the U.N., I.M.F.,
World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and other
international organizations and philanthropies as a key
technology for planning, monitoring, and managing
development projects on every continent.
Recently there has been renewed interest outside of
North America in forming new URISA Chapters or
affiliations. There is almost no country anywhere
where GIS development is not in progress. This
represents an opportunity for URISA to return to its
original goals and to effectively support the
international urban and regional information
community.
The following section outlines possible initiatives and
policies that are designed to build upon URISA’s
current programs, but further advance the original
goals of the organization through a broader
international focus.
Education:
The U.S.-biased focus in URISA educational offerings
should be addressed. While they attract many non-US
students, the following actions can be taken:
· Establish a policy that authors of URISA
Workshops and the ULA avoid U.S.-specific content
and case studies, if these would minimize the
Workshop value outside the U.S.
· Solicit non-U.S. authors for the URISA
Workshop Development Committee (WDC) and ULA
Committee.
· Charge the WDC and ULA to review existing
educational material, identify U.S.-focused case
studies, and report on the feasibility to either a)
replace the material with general, non-national focused
case studies, or b) create modular non-U.S. national
case studies. This might be modeled on the current
pilot effort by SSSI to create Australia & New Zealand
appropriate case studies and content for URISA’s GIS
Program Management workshop.
· Charge the WDC and ULA to work with SSSI to
report on the feasibility of jointly developing
international educational content.
· Where U.S.-focused content or case studies are
replaced in existing Workshops or the ULA, consider
moving the existing content and case-studies to an
appendix, to retain the value of the original content.
URISA should proactively promote educational
offerings outside the U.S. No URISA workshops have
been offered outside of Canada, the Caribbean, and
Australia. In addition to on-site instructor-led
workshops, URISA should develop a strategy to
leverage educational offerings around the world via
URISA-Connect webinars. Actions that URISA can
take include:
· Offer the ULA in Canada in 2013. If successful,
repeat every two to three years.
· Offer a URISA Workshop Week (a week of
URISA workshops at a single venue) in Canada in
2012 and the Caribbean in 2013. If successful, repeat
every two years in each region.
· Actively pursue opportunities to offer the ULA
and URISA Workshops in the UAE, in cooperation
with the recently formed UAE Chapter.
· Explore a pilot project to translate one or two
URISA workshops into a major non-English language
(Spanish, Chinese, etc.). This would involve creating
dual-language Workshop material to facilitate
presentation by English speaking authors to audiences
that are not all English-proficient.
· Develop a policy to license URISA Workshops
on a limited basis outside North America at reduced
rates to organizations willing to pay instructor
honoraria and travel expenses.
· Market the ULA and URISA Workshops outside
North America.
· Market URISA-Connect webinars outside North
America.
Publications:
As indicated above, the URISA Journal has a good
record of including international topics and authors.
The GIS Professional in its current form is a newer
publication. It has included Canadian and Polish
articles and authors. However, non-North American
content and authors are rare. The following
suggestions could leverage the GIS Professional to
enhance its international standing:
· Solicit volunteer content editors for Canada, the
Caribbean, and outside North America.
· Solicit article sharing agreements with BURISA,
SSSI, and EDMS.
· Consider an annual ‘International Edition’ of the
GIS Professional that would focus on GIS Practitioner
articles outside North America.

13. BURISA 193 page 13 September 2012
· Explore a pilot project to translate an issue of the
GIS Professional into a major non-English language
(Spanish, Chinese, etc.).
· Seek a regular column in Geoconnexion
International Magazine (www.geoconnexion.com) similar
to the regular URISA column in ArcNews.
The development of new URISA books, compendiums,
and Quick Study guides is currently on hold. It is likely
that many publications in our current on-line catalog
suffer from the same U.S. content and case study focus
that characterizes many of our educational offerings.
As URISA launches development of new publications in
the future, it should apply a policy to avoid U.S.-specific
content and case studies, if these would minimize the
publication’s value outside the U.S.
Conferences:
The URISA Caribbean Conference has been both
professionally and financially successful since its launch
in 2001. This event is not limited to Caribbean
participants, but much of the content focuses on regional
issues and GIS development. Held every two years, the
next Caribbean Conference is scheduled for 2012. The
event is sponsored by URISA’s Caribbean Chapter and
benefits from the active involvement of Chapter
members.
URISA should consider a URISA Canada Geospatial
Conference, to be held on alternate years from the
Caribbean Conference. Conceptually, this event would
be sponsored by the four Canadian URISA chapters and
provide a focus on issues specific to Canada.
On a more long-term basis, URISA should look for
opportunities to organize or co-sponsor conferences
outside North America.
Policy
URISA should affirm its interest in appropriate policy
issues outside the U.S. The Policy Advisory Committee
should be tasked with including a Canadian, Caribbean,
and non-North American member. It should also be
tasked to make some effort to monitor appropriate policy
matters outside of the U.S.
MOU’s and Liaison with Allied International
Organizations
URISA’s MOU with SSSI should be a high priority to
ensure that we maximize the mutual benefits between the
two organizations. We should actively engage SSSI to
coordinate between our two Boards or Executive
Committees on a quarterly basis. We should compile the
successes and failures of the MOU so that when it expires
in 2015 we can ensure that the renewal supports a
continued successful relationship.
We should try to reestablish our liaison with BURISA
and pursue a liaison relationship with EDMS.
The Marketing Committee should be charged with
developing a list of other potential international allied
organizations with which we could try to develop liaison
relationships. An example of such an organization is the
Asia GIS Association, which holds an international
conference every two years, with all publications and
proceedings conducted in English.
Future International Chapters and Affiliations
As indicated above, URISA recently welcomed a new
Chapter in the United Arab Emirates. Within the last
year, individual URISA members have initiated
discussions regarding potential new URISA chapters,
affiliations, or cooperation with groups in Taiwan,
Turkey, and Poland. Similar discussions may take place
in the coming months in Ghana, Colombia, and Brazil.
A challenge will be to have an appropriate organizational
framework for individuals and organizations interested in
formal association with URISA. The variety of
international options might include:
• Formation of a new chapter by URISA members
in a region, nation, or group of nations outside North
America.
• Affiliation of an existing organization in a
region, nation, or group of nations outside North America
as a URISA chapter.
• Affiliation of an existing organization in a region,
nation, or group of nations outside North America
with URISA via an MOU similar to that with
SSSI.
• Affiliation of an existing organization in a
region,nation, or group of nations outside North America
with URISA via exchange of liaisons.
Leadership and Decision Making
Recently URISA’s Bylaws were changed to ensure that at
least one Board member is from outside the U.S. at all
times. In practice, this will likely be a member from
Canada, which is by far the largest national
representation within URISA from outside the U.S.
However, as URISA pursues an international focus with
new vigor, we should not be surprised if in practice there
is often more than just one non-U.S. representative on the
Board. URISA should consider the following
suggestions to be pro-active in encouraging participation
in URISA leadership and decision-making:
• Charge the URISA Leadership Development
Committee (LDC) with broadening its scope beyond
North America to look for future Board candidates farther
afield than in the past.

14. BURISA 194 page 14 December 2012
• Chapters themselves can influence the
direction of URISA. The Chapter Relations
Committee (CRC) is the working group that links
URISA leadership with its chapters. The CRC can
play a key role by anticipating new international
chapters and developing mechanisms for supporting
them as they start out.
• The CRC should prioritize liaison activity
with the Caribbean and UAE chapters, not only to
support them in general, but also to refine ways and
means for URISA to effectively support members and
chapters outside North America.
• Charge the Strategic Planning Committee
with addressing the issue of individual URISA
members who are not represented by chapters. Within
Canada and the U.S., individual members who reside
in states and provinces without a URISA chapter can
at least assume that the Board represents their interests
at large. The URISA Board needs to advocate for the
interests of members outside North America as well.
New URISA Initiatives
New URISA initiatives provide an opportunity to
include an international focus from day one, from
planning and approval, through implementation and
operations. URISA is considering a major new
initiative that will include publications and educational
offerings, as well as new direct services to individuals
and government organizations at the national, regional
and local levels. URISA is developing this program
with an international focus and will be seeking
participation from chapters and members worldwide.
A Final Question before Considering Action:
But for those who study and work at the local,
regional, or national level, aren’t there issues that are
uniquely specific to individual nations, provinces,
states and local areas? What is the relevance of an
international organization to addressing these sorts of
issues? URISA supports and can continue to support
those who need to address local issues in a number of
ways:
• Articles and presentations about local or
regional programs and projects will always have a
place in URISA conferences, workshops, and
publications. They provide a means of gauging the
success or viability of new technology or management
methodology in a real world environment.
• URISA chapters and affiliated organizations
already provide the perfect venue for focus on local
conditions, policies, funding, and business drivers.
When URISA was originally formed, there were no
chapters. Chapters evolved both to address the travel
and technology related impediments that existed
during URISA’s early years and as the perfect
environment to discuss regional, provincial, and state-
specific issues.
• Those who come to the URISA events of the
future will continue to analyze what they see and hear
in terms of their own unique local conditions.
Conferences will continue to showcase local projects,
but the programs and audiences will be much more
diverse, the solutions presented more varied, and the
discussions among attendees more intense. Those who
return from the URISA conference of the future will
be much more likely to have a unique solution from a
surprising source to apply to their own local business
problems.
• Those who attend URISA educational
offerings and consult new URISA publications in the
future will find fewer localized case studies but more
rigorous exposition of basic principles and
methodologies. The diverse body of students,
interacting with the instructor and with each other will
cast the learning within their own unique local
situation.
URISA’s new international focus can provide a unique
opportunity for geospatial professionals to maximize
effectiveness in their own local environment.
A Goal and an Action Plan
What did the founders of URISA International
envision when our organization was in its early years?
Did they even conceive that URISA would continue to
exist five decades on? Whatever their vision, if they
were with us today they would very likely assume that
the international participation in URISA would be
much higher than what it is today. North America
represents 6% of the world’s population, but 99% of
URISA’s membership.
Earlier this year URISA’s Board set a goal for itself
that within a decade, 50% of our members will be
from outside of North America. That would result in a
URISA that is much different from what it is today,
but it would likely be a URISA that is much more
dynamic and relevant as the organization progresses
through the 21st Century.
The section titled ‘The Future of URISA as an
International Organization’ provides many suggestions
on how we might enhance our international relevance
while creating a more dynamic organization for our
current North American focused membership, thus
helping to achieve our 50% membership goal.
At the beginning of this paper I posed the question
whether URISA’s current standing as a professional
and educational organization attracts international
members and participation, or if international
members and participation are the basis for URISA’s
stature within the community. As for the world’s best
universities, I believe that the answer for URISA is -
both.
However we got to where we are now, every URISA
member, as geospatial information professionals, will
benefit from a broader and more inclusive
international focus of the organization. This broader
and more deliberate focus will also ensure that every
geospatial professional and those with an interest in
urban and regional information systems throughout the
international community will find value in URISA, its
programs, and the professional relationships that it can
enable.
The future of URISA International is to be faithful to
its past and to Article II of its constitution as drafted
many decades in the past.

15. BURISA 194 page 15 December 2012
Both URISA and BURISA recognized that international
participation in our organizations would be beneficial. I
plan to attend the AGI conference in Nottingham in
September and I hope I might meet some BURISA
members at that event to discuss the topics I have
outlined in this paper. As envisioned by those who came
before us many decades ago, I look forward to contact
and cooperation between BURISA and URISA - two
organizations with pride in many past accomplishments
and great potential as future partners.
Greg Babinski, MA, GISP
URISA President 2011-2012
Extract from a letter from Greg Babinski, URISA
President
It was with relief that I read in Issue 193 of the
BURISA Newsletter of the plan for BURISA to merge
with the Local Area Research and Intelligence
Association (LARIA). Many times over the past
months I have worried about the continued existence
of the spirit of BURISA.
I think that both in the UK and the US we are learning
that the reasons for organisations change with the
times, and we have to change to respond to changing
environments and to align with the communities we
support. It looks like BURISA has succeeded in
making that transition.
One last thought about the ‘U’ in URISA and
BURISA. Within the last 2 years the UN reports that
for the first time in history, more than 50% of the
world’s population now lives in cities. Further, the UN
predicts that by 2050, 70% will live in urban areas.
What BURISA and URISA have each accomplished,
and what we each continue to do, is important as the
world becomes more and more urban. We still have
valuable work to do, as 2 billion more people move
into urban areas in the coming decades.
On behalf of URISA, best wishes to you, BURISA and
all its members for a successful transition and a
vigorous future.
Making Best Use of the Census
A successful event run by TWRI Policy and Research
took place in York in October. Councils, agencies and
academics came together to hear about ONS’s plans
for analysis, outputs and dissemination of the 2011
Census. Local authority, health and academic
representatives presented their perspective on the
opportunities and challenges that Census data
provided.
The event was chaired by Professor Ludi Simpson,
President of the British Society for Population Studies.
Jenny Boag from Falkirk Council provided a view from
local government. She expected that 2011 Census data
would provide opportunities for more and better
profiling using a GIS based system including equalities
profiling and the opportunity to make use of new data,
e.g. national identity, type of central heating.
Jake Abbas from Yorkshire and Humber Public Health
Observatory explained how Census data was used to
inform the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and raised
the challenges presented by current changes taking place
in the NHS, i.e. the introduction of Clinical
Commissioning Groups and defining and mapping their
boundaries. Looking forward, he also mentioned the
profiling of acute trust catchments and the importance of
being able to provide data at a range of levels.
Professor Tony Champion from Newcastle University
stressed the importance of the Census to academic users
to improve our understanding of UK society and how it
is evolving, providing contextual information on
populations of interest and a benchmark for other
surveys to ensure that they represent the total population
of an area. He illustrated the benefits of the Census
using his previous research on migration and how he
would use the 2011 Census to, for example, analyse
further the relationships between social and spatial
mobility focusing on the experience of immigrants and
to monitor cities and the changing nature of urban
regions. The importance of responding to opportunities
for providing information to central and local
government for policy and planning purposes was also
stated to emphasize its value. Ensuring opportunities for
more joined up local intelligence and analysis was in
evidence, given the reduction in resources available
across all sectors.
Office of National Statistics (ONS) provided results
from the first release of Census data on population and
household estimates and details of when future data
would be released. The importance of realising the
benefits of the data was stressed and ensuring easy
access to data. ONS explained how results would be
presented in a range of ways e.g. short stories, scholarly
articles, reports so accessible to all users which would
include data visualisations, podcasts. The importance
of promoting analysis and stimulating further analysis
was stressed. The various channels available to access
ONS Census data were explained, along with the
opportunities for keeping in touch with progress.
Presentations were also given on accessing 2011 Census
data using NOMIS, UK Data Service’s InFuse and
SASPAC.
The final presentation was on Area Profiling by Dr
Kadhem Jallab, TWRI Policy and Research who talked
about the merits of fact cards and area profiles from
Census data and the importance of planning and
prioritising requirements with partners.
Presentations from the event are available on the TWRI
Policy and Research website
www.twri.org.uk.

16. BURISA 194 page 16 December 2012
BSPS Conference 2012 Report
University of Nottingham
10-12 September 2012
The 2012 BSPS Conference, was the best-attended
annual conference for many years, with over 250
participating and with 128 submitted papers presented.
Additionally, 2012 saw some innovative formats for
sessions, which BSPS is keen to repeat and expand on in
future years.
A training session for local authority demographers was
again led by Piers Elias, who tackled sex ratios,
population pyramids, and where to find ONS data.
Pia Wohland contributed on how to calculate healthy life
expectancies for local authorities.
The session on qualitative methods organized by Jo
Sage and Elspeth Graham was supplemented by a
qualitative panel session, intended to encourage rigorous
qualitative and mixed-methods research by identifying
and discussing the challenges and opportunities that
these methodologies present for population researchers.
Ben Wilson and Valeria Cetorelli suggested and
organized a session on event history analysis (aka
survival analysis), which included four short
presentations and gave those participating the
opportunity to take part in a detailed discussion, with the
aim of sharing knowledge and experience of the method
and techniques.
A fringe meeting was held on the Monday evening on
social media and population studies, rather later than
planned due to a very late-running dinner, but much
appreciated by those who attended.
There were two plenary sessions.
In the first plenary, Professor Peter McDonald
(Australian National University & President of the
IUSSP) provided the audience with a comprehensive
history of the International Union for the Scientific
Study of Population (IUSSP) and the Population
Association of America (PAA). However, the body of
this lecture touched upon a wide range of issues that
remain highly relevant for contemporary demography.
The second plenary covered the 2011 Census.
With the first UK census results still hot off the press,
conference gave an extended plenary session to two
excellent and knowledgeable speakers.
Danny Dorling of Sheffield University focused on the
headline results of population growth, and how sure we
could be of them.
Glen Watson, Director of the Census and soon to
become ONS Director General, focused on taking the
census. All in all, the 2011 Census can be described as
the best since 1981, and perhaps the best ever.
By the time of the next BSPS conference, to be held at
Swansea University 9 – 11th September 2013, we will
know of challenges to census results if any materialise.
But we will also hear of extensive analysis of the results
which will be released with increasing detail of
population characteristics during the intervening twelve
months.
Reports on the two plenary sessions and the full
Conference programme and all abstracts can be viewed
at the BSPS website at:
h t t p : / / w w w 2 . l s e . a c . u k / s o c i a l P o l i c y / B S P S /
annualConference/2012/Home.aspx
Beyond 2011 update
The ONS team led by Alistair Calder is conducting a
series of workshops to update stakeholders on progress
on the Beyond 2011 project. The aim is to report with
recommendations about future census taking options
prior to the next General Election in 2015.
Alistair is reporting on option evaluation.
Of particular interest to BURISA subscribers will be the
request for evidence to support a business case
particularly for frequency of outputs and their
availability at lower levels of geography. Users are being
asked to respond to the following questions.
• What is the minimum level of accuracy at national,
regional, local authority, MSOA, LSOA and OA levels
for overall population attributes?
• If ONS did not provide data at lower levels what
would you do instead? Can you estimate the financial
consequences?
• How much would you be willing to pay to continue to
get the same level of local population and housing date
as provided by the Census?
• With options that provide more frequent attribute data
at higher geographic levels, how does the benefit of
greater frequency compare with loss of local detail?
• How has the analysis of small area information derived
from Census data helped in business decisions?
For health and local authority in particular
• What plans have you got in place for analysis of 2011
Census data to inform changes in spending allocations?
• How does small area population data help inform
decisions on planning, economic regeneration, transport,
housing, education, social services and other services?
Evidence based replies should be sent to
neil.townsend@ons.gsi.gov.uk
Neil can provide more background to the request.

17. BURISA 194 page 17 December 2012
GeoPlace update
Gayle Gander
Using local knowledge for national benefit
On 25th October, with an estimated 1500 years’ worth of
addressing and street data expertise gathered together in
one room, the GeoPlace annual conference and
presentation of the Exemplar Awards was the place to be
for anyone interested in the creation and usage of core
geographic reference data sets.
The event was aimed at local address and street
custodians within local authorities who have the
responsibility for creating and maintaining local
versions of the data. With the introduction of the Public
Sector Mapping Service Agreement (PSMA), the work
that address Custodians do has a wide impact across the
whole of the public sector as all parts of government can
now use the AddressBase™ range of products; the
national output of the local compilations of data.
Maintaining these local datasets isn’t easy. Through a
process which is under the control of an elected Group
of regional Custodian chairs, local address and street
datasets are subject to continuing improvement criteria.
Improvements in data provide huge benefits and
opportunities not just to local authorities but also to the
growing number of PSMA members that are using the
data to support their work.
The Data Co-operation Agreement (DCA), which is
linked to the PSMA, brings local government together
with GeoPlace under a data supply and service
agreement. Under this agreement, there is a collective
responsibility to ensure that levels are maintained and,
wherever possible, continue with improvements to
support innovation and efficiency and service delivery
across the public sector.
And this is the crux of the conference. It is the annual
opportunity to get Custodians together in one room to
hear from, and discuss these data improvements with
their elected representatives as well as with GeoPlace.
There is plenty of good news.
The synchronisation between Council Tax and the
Address gazetteers has continued to improve and we are
now pretty much at 100% synchronisation across the
whole country. That is a massive achievement. The NDR
sync is now an astonishing 91%. It was only a couple of
years ago that we were talking about trying to get to
70%. So, there have been huge strides to bring in what is
a complicated data set, in synchronisation with local
gazetteers.
Additionally local authorities have worked to bring
together AddressPoint/PAF with individual local
gazetteers. We are now at a National link rate of around
about 99%, which again is a massive achievement,
considering that work on this area only started about 18
months ago. This has really contributed hugely to be
able help the migration of organisations from PAF based
address products through to UPRN based address
products.
Take up of the AddressBase products by central
government is continuing apace;
• The DWP are now adopting a UPRN for their
data warehouse, this is a huge strategic step forward as
DWP manage massive levels of government transactions
with the public
• Tell Us Once have been a long-time supporter of
the UPRN and are now committed to using AddressBase
at the core of their transactions, across the public sector
• The Electoral Registration Reform Program is
building on the matching work that started under the
core project and they see that the UPRN is vital to the
long term rolling management of the Electoral Register
• The Department of Energy and Climate are using
the UPRN in their energy certificate work
• The National Police Systems that were managed
by the NPIA are taking AddressBase
• The Department of Education is rolling
AddressBase out to over 20,000 schools as part of the
Schools Admissions Program
• In Wales, Welsh Government is building UPRN
in to the direct electronic information transfer program
and this, in turn, has driven outstanding improvement in
the quality of local address data within Wales
• And in Scotland a UPRN is used as part of the
National Identity Card Program and the Citizen
Account.
News of this usage of ‘their’ addressing datasets caused
a real buzz within the delegates. It’s exactly what they
wanted to hear and take back to their Chief Executives.
The conference continued with a series of afternoon
sessions ranging from; Promoting address and street
data within authorities, working together with
AddressBase, using the current data entry conventions
and data transfer formats to public rights of way in the
NSG.
Outputs from the conference can be seen at
http://tinyurl.com/geoplace263
This year’s winning projects from the Exemplar Awards
can be seen at
http://tinyurl.com/geoplace253

18. BURISA 194 page 18 December 2012
Report of BURISA/LARIA Conference 12 October
2012
After forty years, BURISA will cease to exist as a
separate organisation. The Association will merge with
LARIA where its activities will be able to continue. To
celebrate this forty tear event BURISA, together with
LARIA, held a free half day Conference at the Royal
Statistical Society. Copies of all the presentations are
on the BURISA website (www.burisa.org.uk).
Appropriately, given BURISA’s interest (some might
say obsession) in the Census, the overall theme was
the Census and several of the speakers were from the
Office for National Statistics. The day was chaired by
Mike Haslam, Chair of BURISA.
Mike welcomed everyone and introduced the day. He
said that it was both a sad and happy day – sad
because BURISA was coming to an end, but happy
because the ideals and activities of BURISA would
continue within LARIA.
Emma White, Head of Policy Analysis 2012 Census
Outputs, opened the day. Her topic was “2011” Census
Outputs”. She spoke about the importance of census
data and briefly described the 2011 Census. She talked
about the first results – population and household
estimates. The population of England recorded by the
Census was 53.0 million (Wales 3.1 million). Females
made up 51 per cent of the population. She described
the timing of subsequent releases, and how to get the
numbers (see the slides for details). In conclusion she
talked about maximising the benefits and benefit
realisation quantification.
Emma was followed by Craig Taylor, a member of the
Census Analysis team at the ONS. His theme was
“Census Analysis Plans”. He gave an overview of the
ONS Census analysis programme and described the
type and formats of analysis. He spoke about the
dissemination plans – ONS want to promote analysis
and stimulate further analysis. They will also provide
guidance to users on analysis work associated with the
Census. There will be a forum to encourage discussion
with users and producers of analysis.
Next up was Callum Foster from ONS who spoke
about “Accessing ONS Data”. He answered the user
question “How and when can I get my hands on the
Census data, and what tools will I be provided with to
help me access and use the data?” he explained the
channels and the functionality that would be available.
He described the API (Application Programming
Interface) Service which allows access to the API, and
supports and encourages use of the API and
collaboration between users.
The final speaker from ONS was Alastair Calder,
Head of Stakeholder Engagement, who spoke about
“Beyond 2011 – The future of publication statistics”.
He set out the reasons for change in context. He spoke
about the alternative statistical options and described
the research plans and the (long) timescale. He
highlighted the risks and issues (what could possibly
go wrong?). Finally he described the next steps. He set
out a number of possible data sources including the
NHS Patient Register, the Electoral Roll (for 18 and
over), the School Census (for five to 16 year olds and
DVLA (and several others).
The last speaker in the main session was Keith
Dugmore of Demographic Decisions who spoke on
“The Census: A Private Sector Perspective”. He gave a
view from commercial users of the Census. He
ventured views on which 2001 Census outputs have
given the most value. He wondered whether 2011
plans will meet commercial users’ needs and priorities.
He also had some ideas about some innovative ideas
for the Census and beyond. He quoted Jeremy
Bentham “Utility – That property in any object,
whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage,
pleasure, good or happiness......it is the greatest good
to the greatest number of people which is the measure
of right or wrong”.
Then, looking back over 40 years of BURISA, David
Rhind gave an enjoyable and informative potted
history of BURISA – pioneer of the information
society. He used the cover of the Newsletter as a series
of metaphors:
• Demonstrates serious but not solemn
approach in BURISA;
• Technology-focused but primitive compared
with now;
• Forward-looking and practically orientated;
• Outward looking and international from the
outset (PDP 9 computer);
• Everything was expensive (£3,000 for a 3 Mb
disk c 1971).
In conclusion, he said that BURISA was a pioneer in
focusing on the sorts of issues now central stage – re-
use of data, exploiting new technologies etc. It
certainly helped LAs to understand what was possible
and going on elsewhere so contributed to the public
good. Individuals mattered hugely at the time. It was a
community where he learned a lot and made many
friends.
He also said:
“Thank you to everyone who has been a part of
BURISA”
Neil Wholey, Chair of BURISA then welcomed
BURISA formally to LARIA and he and Mike Haslam
signed the formal agreement.

19. BURISA 194 page 19 December 2012

20. BURISA?
BURISA is an association for people with an
interest in the development, management and
use of information supporting services to the
public. It covers planning, housing, health and
many more fields in government and other
public services as well as the academic and
commercial worlds.
BURISA aims to promote good practice in the
development and application of information
systems; and to improve communications
between information analysts, policy-makers
and other information users at national, regional
and local levels. It seeks to achieve these aims
through its newsletter, website, conferences and
workshops.
The association’s interests include the Census,
demography, surveys, administrative data
sources, geographical information systems,
research methods, projections, forecasting and
data visualisation.
Formed in 1972, BURISA is an informal, non
profit making unincorporated association with
its own constitution. It continues to be
innovative and active, led by a Board, which
meets regularly. BURISA is affiliated to the Royal
Statistical Society through the Statistics User
Forum..
BURISA ISSN 1369-1848
What was
BURISA Board
Chair: Mike Haslam chair@burisa.org.uk
Vice chair: Michelle von Ahn michelle.vonahn@burisa.org.uk
Secretary: Mark Pearson secretary@burisa.org.uk
Business Manager: Mike Marlow business_manager@burisa.org.uk
Editor: Cedric Knipe editor@burisa.org.uk
Subscriptions Manager Keith Donaldson subscriptions_manager@burisa.org.uk
Jenny Boag, Falkirk Council; Alan Lodwick; Keith Dugmore, Demographic Decisions; Pete Lee, Office for National Statistics;
Clare Hadley, Ordnance Survey; Denise Lievesley; Dr John Shepherd, Department of Geography, Birkbeck College; Ed
Swires-Hennessy; Nicola Underdown; Keith R Woodhead; Sarah Hardwick, Steve Denman,John Garnsworthy
BURISA contributions and publication timetable
All articles are the responsibility of the author(s). The inclusion of any article does not imply endorsement,
by BURISA or any of the organisations represented on the Board, of the views or opinions expressed, nor
of the methodology.
BURISA Website: www.burisa.org.uk Webmaster: webmaster@burisa.org.uk
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