Portal to the future?

This month Dr Alex Gibson shares his thoughts on the work to progress the Coastal England Small Area Data (CESA) data portal. The portal will provide access to data collected during an ESRC-funded research project to create an evidence-based and policy-orientated classification of English coastal communities. It is hoped that this work will support ongoing research into the policy needs of England’s coastal communities.

From the outset, we were keen to ensure that data collected over the lifetime of the coastal classification project would continue to be accessible and available once the research project finished. We strongly believe these data, and a variety of metrics derived from them, could be invaluable for future academic research and also support policymaking at both a local and national level. From this, the idea for the Coastal England Small Area Data (CESA) Portal was born: an innovative, engaging and easy-to-use online resource providing access to our final classification and all the data relating to the socio-economic characteristics of England’s coastal and non-coastal communities which we collected during the course of the project.

The portal
The portal makes available as wide a range as possible of (mostly) open-source small area data relevant to coastal and non-coastal local authorities and communities. However, as the data were collected as part of a project developing a national but very granular classification of England’s coastal fringe, there are some limitations to the kind of data that is available. Firstly, whilst we came across some interesting and important local and regional datasets – collected, for instance, by local fishermen’s organisations or similar ‘special interest’ groups – if such data were not available on a consistent basis nationally then they had to be excluded. Secondly, we decided early on that England’s statistical geography of Lower layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs), of which there are 33,755 covering the country as a whole, provided the most appropriate scale of analysis. If data were not available at this level, we elected to exclude them. Such constraints notwithstanding, the portal currently will contain many hundreds of variables covering a wide variety of data categories.

Scaling up
Until now, the portal has been used by the research team to share data internally, support our engagement with stakeholders as we developed the classification, and as a means of sharing what we have been doing with a wider audience. The task now is to develop a stand-alone interface that makes it easy for any interested parties to find, access, interrogate and map data. It is hoped that the huge amount of small area data we can make available will help users build an understanding of specific coastal communities and investigate the extent to which they share or diverge in terms of their social, demographic and economic characteristics. This has the potential to deliver real world impact making it possible to identify, for the first time, coastal communities across England which face, and are tackling, similar challenges.

Our ambition is that the portal will help overcome the challenges presented by coastal communities often constituting a small part of larger administrative and political units. This has led to these communities’ particular concerns often being overlooked because most policy-relevant data relate to these larger units. A focus on granular data specifically relating to coastal communities provides an opportunity for sharing insights between areas that have no administrative or political links. Our hope is that, in time, the portal will help users identify and learn from projects and initiatives in different parts of the country addressing similar structural challenges to those they face locally.

Co-creation and collaboration
From the beginning, we used a pilot (Beta) version of the portal to consult, engage and collaborate with external stakeholders. This has helped us understand policymakers’ needs better. Over the past year key stakeholder groups have spent time familiarising themselves with the interface, exploring the discovery tools within the portal and engaging with the data that has been collected to date. Feedback and user experience will inform the final version of the portal as we populate it with the full range of data collected during the coastal classification project.

Making a difference
Having stakeholders involved in the project from the beginning has been a useful and effective way to engage with the wider policy community. Feedback to date suggests that the portal has the potential to influence and improve policymaking in the UK by making data available to local authorities and central government policy makers who want to understand more about the disparate challenges faced by coastal communities. A rich seam of granular data draws attention, for instance, to localities with challenging employment opportunities due to a dependence on industries (notably hospitality) offering predominately low-paid and often part-time jobs. Elsewhere the issue may be low educational outcomes, or poor health outcomes, or an inadequate supply of social housing in an environment of high rents due to competition from holiday lets. Essentially, there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ English coastal community; the portal will make available the data needed for local authorities and others to better understand the particular challenges faced by specific coastal communities.

We expect it to be particularly useful to those councils with more limited research capacity. It could also make a difference to charitable organisations or local community groups who want to access data about their locality. As a ‘one stop shop’ platform, the portal will give such users access to empirical data to support their more qualitative understanding about their local communities. It will also offer comparative insights as to how their communities compare with other coastal and non-coastal communities, for instance to support funding applications for specific interventions and initiatives. Additionally, it holds significant value to the private sector, informing development and investment decisions, since the data are able to highlight, for example, labour and skills availability, gaps in service delivery and resources and the impacts of climate change on developable land.

Portal to the future?
A new version of the portal will be released in early autumn 2026. In addition to enabling users to download data collected as part of the coastal classification project, the portal will incorporate a range of tools for directly analysing, interpreting, tabulating and mapping those data. This will be a snapshot of currently available data, but we are actively seeking funding to ensure that the data can be updated in the years ahead and, as a game-changer in terms of ease-of-use, to incorporate an AI-powered natural language interface to the data.
We are committed to making the data as accessible as possible to users and are keen to learn more about how the portal is being used, by whom and how. If you would like to tell us more, please email englishcoastalclassification@plymouth.ac.uk