Last October, before the government’s autumn budget, I wrote a blog making a case that the UK is at an inflection point in housing and health. Pointing to two ongoing and widespread challenges:
· GPs overwhelmed with non-clinical requests for support from patients related to housing
· Increasing numbers of local communities facing reduced GP provision due to new housing development
I argued that past governments have regarded housing and health as separate and unrelated issues, provisions and departments (ironically as the NHS was established by a housing minister and advocate), requiring separate budgetary lines and separate policy approaches – ignoring the impact housing has on health or recognising housing as a social determinant of health. We’re now at an inflection point where, while we recognise and better understand the relationship between housing and health, little is being done to link the two in planning or policy.
One of the challenges to aligning housing and health is a lack of meaningful data to drive our understanding of the links and to inform effective policy initiatives. This applies to the private sector as well as government. A research initiative at TRUUD was recently established to understand how investment in real estate impacts health in local areas, and tested a new model that can provide investors with a better understanding of the health and societal cost and benefit implications of developments in their asset portfolio. The project’s head of real estate investment commented
“Our research tells us that urban investors want to act on health but there is a lack of meaningful data to inform early appraisal and asset management decisions.”
Earlier this year I was excited to learn about a company that is addressing this challenge. CoPlug is a small London-based startup that is generating data and tools that can powerfully inform the way we design and develop homes and places.
I sat down with CoPlug’s founder Darshana Chauhan to learn more. Below is my interview with Darshana.
Please tell me about your background and interest in spatial data
I am a qualified architect, urban designer with a specialisation in smart cities and data analytics.
In my 14 years of professional experience, I have used spatial analytics to support a wide range of projects from planning of new towns in Bhutan and China, developing methodologies in estimating population based on satellite imagery in Nigeria to analytics of road networks and social infrastructure in the UK to support strategies and business cases. Spatial analytics is an established industry but not yet accessible to a wide range of users to unlock answers to complex questions of our urban environments. I am keen to change this.
How did your role in local government develop this interest?
My interest in building a data led location insights platform was triggered by the opportunity to present a conceptual smart city tech solution to IBM prior to 2015. The majority of the stakeholders involved in designing smart city solutions at the time were technical software engineers. I saw a big gap in the need for domain experts to drive the design of tech based smart city solutions. Hence, I upskilled myself with a mid-career masters in Smart Cities and Data Analytics at UCL while working at Hackney Council. With prior experience of working in consultancies, working in local government brought me closer to the wide range of data that was generated within organisations. Data that had not yet been analysed apart from generating performance metric for managers. With my knowledge base in building technical products, I was better able to see how these datasets could be used to unlock complex decision making and better management of services, infrastructure and assets.
What were the obvious challenges and opportunities you encountered in your role that pointed to the need for better data on local populations and areas?
The profession of urban planning and design has heavily relied on professional knowledge built up over a number of years. This often leads to decisions that may be subjective, led by perception or at the very best calculated on a excel spreadsheet. These limitations are opportunities to provide a data driven approach to planning that is objective, evidence based and when coupled with qualitative research, has the potential to unlock decisions at speed and scale with accuracy that has not been made possible before. For example, the questions of where must we better prioritise funds, resource and capacity, has a direct impact on the social, economic and health outcomes of communities. A data driven approach enables decision makers to bring together insights across multiple siloes at a granular level to access up to date evidence and make decisions with precision and confidence to support pro- active planning for the communities who may benefit the most.
Can you give some examples of circumstances where the lack of spatial data obstructed good policy making or actually harmed people?
There can’t be any ‘spatial’ planning without ‘spatial’ or location data. The important questions of where demand is coming forward, how many people may need services in the future, how do be better manage resources to meet growing demand at a micro and macro level, are fundamentally location based questions. A practical example of this issue is access to standardised geolocated housing data across the system. While developing our product, we came across GP practices who were unable to grapple with the sudden increase in registrations of hundreds of new residents as they had no means to estimate the cumulative impact of new housing being built in their neighbourhoods. With timely access to up-to-date housing data, such bottlenecks can not only be avoided but give enough lead time for service providers to build up their resources and optimise their services to manage demand.
How did Coplug get started?
Coplug was started with the mission to make location insights accessible to all, including users who are not data experts, to enable organisations to make smarter and value driven decisions. Parity of access to high quality, trustworthy evidence base is key to unlocking decisions for a wide range of organisations from a small service provider who owns a pharmacy shop or a SME property developer, local communities to large organisations such as energy network providers to NHS organisations with a large portfolio of assets.
What kind of data have you curated and how did you do this?
We have curated a wide range of datasets across multiple government departments such as the NHS, DWP, DFE, HMRC, Land registry, third party datasets and local datasets from our customers. We use location as a glue to bring together these datasets and attach a range of insights derived from these datasets to every location. Datasets are reviewed by domain experts across Public Health, Town Planning, Real Estate, Energy and such others to ensure the best possible insights are derived from them. Lets talk about the product, SidM - how would you describe its key benefits?
Sidm Systems provides access to a wide range of location insights across 1000+ datasets for any area or site. This allows users to
1. Segment populations within defined enabling services to be targeted to communities that may need them the most. For example, during Covid 19- insights from Sidm Systems were used to find key areas of overcrowding to develop a risk score and target public health interventions.
2. Find the best site or area to open a new health/ education/sports/ energy centre by assessing gaps with a combined analysis of access, capacity and target communities in the area
3. Forecast demand coming forward from new housing and existing population on local services.
4. Estimate future resource, workforce, space capacity requirements
5. Undertake Scenario planning and asset prioritisation to target funding, resource and capacity.
Can you describe a circumstance where the product changed an outcome for a user - eg an Integrated Care Board or Local Authority – and ultimately for a local population?
Sidm Health has supported a range of strategic planning use-cases within healthcare.
Some of the examples of the applications are
- Demand forecasting for over 400 GP practices across multiple ICS based on housing growth to feed into primary care individual and strategic business case
- Evidence base for ICS wide endoscopy strategy to better understand where new services may be required in the future and how best should the existing services be optimised
- Evidence base for maternity services planning for hospital trusts to feed into business cases
- Evidence base for S106 and CIL contributions, estimating the activity, space and cost requirement on healthcare due new housing growth.
Do you see the product becoming more accessible to both organisations and individuals - eg community groups engaging with a planning application, local residents seeking to understand the implications of a planning application?
This goes back to the mission of Coplug as a company. Coplug was started with the mission to make location insights accessible to all, including users who are not data experts, to enable organisations to make smarter and value driven decisions. We are working on a version of the product that operates at an individual site level and it’s catchment area to provide a range of statistical and map based insights across existing facts, emerging trends, forecasted demand and AI recommended insights. We believe this will help a range of organisations including community groups to understand where growth is coming forward, the type of communities and local infrastructure it may impact and provide a transparent data driven approach to bring together stakeholders across the ecosystem.
One of the challenges I raised at the start of this blog has been addressed by CoPlug in a news update on GP shortages:
“Sidm Health has ranked over 1,200 Primary Care Networks (PCNs) and found that focusing solely on GP data overlooks key factors that influence healthcare access, such as age demographics, workforce distribution, and language barriers.
Our analysis highlights that out of the top 10 PCNs with poor GP-to-patient ratios, seven are more deprived, while three are above the England benchmark. A holistic analysis of GP ratios, nurse shortages, age demographics, and language barriers offers decision-makers a more complete view of workforce pressures and access needs”
Robust data contributes so much to our understanding of benefits and harms, opportunities and challenges that communities face when developing new homes and places. Thanks to Darshana Chauhan for opening my eyes to what is available and how it can be deployed for public benefit.
Clare Delmar
Listen to Locals
21 March 2025
