Notes
Note that all the "layers" used in this tool come from different data sources (see below). That means that often complex factors have been simplified into individal values per small area (MSOA). The source data for layers can be incomplete, out-of-date, contain errors, or be based on predictions and approximations so all values should be seen as indicative estimates rather than precise and/or accurate.
Each "layer" may have specific units relevant to the data source (e.g. MW or number of chargepoints) but these are turned into unit-less "scores" before being weighted so that a "total score" can be calculated for each MSOA.
Names/boundaries
We used the House of Commons Library's list of MSOA names (March 2022) to give names to each MSOA. We used MSOA boundaries EW BGC, Output Areas (December 2011) Boundaries EW BGC, Local Authority Districts (December 2021) GB BGC, Output Area to Lower Layer Super Output Area to Middle Layer Super Output Area to Local Authority District (December 2020) Lookup in England and Wales, and the Local Authority District to Combined Authority (December 2021) Lookup in England v2 from the ONS (licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021).
Transport accessibility
The "Transport accessibility" layer builds upon MSOA to MSOA journey times created by Tom Forth (Open Innovations) using Open Street Map/Open Trip Planner and an arrival at the MSOA centroid by 08:30am on 10 September 2019. For each MSOA a score is calculated by scaling the area of the 15 minute car accessibility for each MSOA centroid.
ULEVs
The number of ultra low emission vehicles (ULEVs) per MSOA is estimated from licensed ultra low emission vehicles by postcode district as of the 3rd quarter of 2021 using our Postcode District to MSOA estimator tool.
Home charging points
The Department for Transport provide experimental statistics on the number of grants awarded for the installation of electric vehicle charging devices by MSOA as of October 2021. We use this as a best proxy for the relative number of home charging devices by MSOA.
Public chargepoints
We use data about chargepoint locations from the National Chargepoint Registry to estimate the number of existing public chargepoint sites per MSOA. Note that a single chargepoint site may contain multiple charging stations of different ratings. The National Chargepoint Registry can be incomplete, out-of-date, or contain errors as it is the responsibility of individual providers to keep the data updated.
Grid capacity
Grid capacity is estimated at MSOA level using Northern Powergrid's Distribution Future Energy Scenarios 2021. We used a reference year of 2030, the Steady Progression scenario, and calculated substation-level capacity from peak utilisation and peak demand. We then used a mapping from substation to MSOA to find the largest capacity substation connected to an MSOA to use as a representative value.
Distribution centres/Supermarket/Warehouse/Car park capacity
We extracted polygons for each of these types from a GB extract of Open Street Map using GDAL tools. Open Street Map may be incomplete and may not have polygons for each layer type but it is a resource that can be improved over time. Distribution sites do not have a specific type in Open Street Map so we extracted all polygons with *Distribution* in the name whilst dropping any that are amenity=loading_dock or power=generator. Supermarket polygons are those tagged shop=supermarket and warehouses are tagged building=warehouse.
For car parking capacity we extracted polygons with amenity=parking. In cases where capacity=n is set we use the provided number of spaces. For car parks with no capacity set we estimate the capacity using: spaces = (1/0.34) * 0.0145 * area * building:levels. This linear relationship between area and capacity was determined by plotting all GB car parks with known capacity against areas (multiplied by the specified levels for multi-story car parks) and fitting a straight line - there is quite a lot of scatter in the distribution so final values are only indicative.
Brownfield sites
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities maintain a dataset of individual local authority Brownfield Land Registers (OGL v3). This gives a centroid location and area (hectares) for each brownfield site. Note that the data from individual local authorities may be out-of-date, incomplete, or inaccurate. We last updated the layer on 31st March 2022.
Credits
Visualisation © Open Innovations 2022.
Icons - Bootstrap (MIT licence)