Current Work

Temporary Accommodation & Rough Sleeping explorer

Public

Temporary accommodation now houses 135,580 households in England, including 177,530 children, and 4,793 people slept rough on a single night in autumn 2025, both the highest on record. In July 2026 Prime Minister Andy Burnham made ending rough sleeping his first pledge on entering office, and has since committed £442m towards getting everyone sleeping rough into accommodation by Christmas 2026. SDWH's explorer maps both, plus net council spend, across all 296 English local authorities: search by name or postcode, switch between TA rate per 1,000 households, TA total, net homelessness spend per household in TA, Band D council tax, and rough sleeping, and see how the different accommodation types drive the totals. An England-wide summary shows the household mix, net spend by type, a length-of-stay chart by accommodation type across five quarters, and local funding from the £442m package as it becomes public (11 of 296 authorities confirmed so far, sourced to local press).

Members Area

A members-only companion explorer reads this same demand against local dwelling supply: long-term empty homes as a short-term lever and brownfield land capacity as a longer-term one, by local authority. It converts TA households and rough sleeping into an illustrative stock requirement, decomposed by household type rather than blended into one figure, and adds individual brownfield sites plotted and clustered on the map, with capacity, planning status and links out to Land Registry and planning.data.gov.uk records.

Recent activity

• 21 August 2026: TA, Rough Sleeping & Land Supply explorer (v3.0, members)

  Interactive: adds supply-side data to the public explorer — long-term empty homes and brownfield land capacity by local authority, an illustrative stock-requirement table decomposed by household type, and individual brownfield sites mapped and clustered with capacity, planning status and Land Registry links.

• 20 August 2026: Temporary Accommodation & Rough Sleeping explorer (v2.0)

  Interactive: TA demand, cost, council tax, length of stay and rough sleeping across all 296 English local authorities, searchable by name or postcode, with an England-wide summary of the accommodation-type mix, net spend, a five-quarter length-of-stay chart (MHCLG table TA7), rough sleeping counts and the £442m rough sleeping package's local funding so far.

The Postcode Playbook

Postcode has become a key policy metric, which calls for a Postcode Playbook. In three weeks, government made “every postcode” the organising phrase across three instruments: machinery of government (No.10 North), public procurement (PPN 026 - social value) and impact investment (the Office for the Impact Economy). SDWH produces decision intelligence at postcode level: reusable geographic layers spanning parliamentary constituency, local authority, community lenders and care providers, with deprivation indices for all four UK nations.

Recent activity

• 7 August 2026: The Postcode Playbook (v1.0)
• 7 August 2026: Underserved territories explorer (Briefing #7, members)

  Interactive: the small-business market, deprivation and local lender coverage across all 361 UK local authorities, with a ranked priority list of the deprived, business-dense areas that no local lender reaches.

• 6 August 2026: Community Finance postcode explorer (v2)

  Two-way search from postcode to community finance provider and from finance provider to lending territory, incorporating local authority and parliamentary boundaries and deprivation indices for the UK.

Health and Social Care: inspections data monitor

A monitoring view of the Care Quality Commission's own published inspection and ratings data for health and social care providers in England: inspection recency, time since last inspection and rating bands by category, cross-checked against CQC's own published ratings count and consolidated from SDWH's CQC Constituency Explorer and Regulating in an AI-Native Society.

1. Every one of England's 56,616 CQC-regulated locations, searchable by parliamentary constituency or local authority: post code and select location by touching the map.
2. See at a glance which areas are overdue for reinspection against CQC's own target intervals, and by how much.
3. Drill into who actually owns each provider: ownership traced through Companies House filings, currently mapped for over 12,000 locations.
4. Local authority league table, cross-referenced against the current local government reorganisation.

1. Watch CQC's actual inspection activity unfold month by month since January 2022, area by area.
2. Today's 32,515-location inspection backlog, broken down by category and age, down to individual providers.
3. A 60-month projection tool: drag a slider to see what a faster inspection pace would take to clear the backlog.
4. Benchmarked directly against four reviews of CQC spanning around a decade.

Recent activity

• 27 July 2026: Health and Social Care: inspections data monitor (v1.0)
• 27 July 2026: CQC Constituency Explorer (members, experimental)
• 27 July 2026: CQC inspection time-lapse (members, experimental)

Regulating in an AI-Native Society

This briefing takes a practical look at one aspect of Open Data principles for a sample of 12 UK economic and social regulators, to compare how open they are to support AI-based queries by AI-native stakeholders. This is desktop analysis using free-tier AI agents places them in 4 tiers. The briefing contains a case study for one regulator, CQC, to highlight the important contrast between data privacy and open data. The companion data explorer, built entirely from CQC's own public data, is a parliamentary constituency-based search for CQC assessments.

Recent activity

• 23 July 2026: Regulating in an AI-Native Society (v1.0)

  ~4,800 words · 3 figures and tables · 20 minutes · 35 references

Why Wait? Parliamentary accountability horizon scanner

Parliament rose for summer recess on 16 July 2026 and a new Prime Minister has entered No10 Downing Street, providing the ideal opportunity to look forward to what the accountability cycle looks like following its return on 1 September 2026. This horizon scanner profiles the 23 NAO Work in Progress notices due to report in autumn 2026, covering the departments and topics that will shape the next wave of Public Accounts Committee scrutiny. Each entry sets out the audit's scope and framing, links to related prior reports and recommendations, and, where available, an estimate of the taxpayer value at stake, filterable by review type and department.

Recent activity

• 19 July 2026: Why Wait? Parliamentary accountability horizon scanner (v1.0, Edition 1)

  23 Work in Progress notices · filterable by type and department

Financing for SMEs: what’s next for nations, regions and communities?

What combination of public financial management, capital market reform, data and market infrastructure investment would most efficiently expand lending to underserved SMEs? This briefing maps the Growth Guarantee Scheme's two categories of non-bank lenders (Regional Investment Funds and Community Development Financial Institutions), the £2bn expansion of the Nations and Regions Investment Funds, the funding model behind community lending to SMEs, and the market infrastructure (open finance, credit data sharing) that will shape whether government can meet its £1bn ambition for community lending.

1. The two categories of non-bank lender inside the Growth Guarantee Scheme. Regional Investment Funds and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) account for £308m of guaranteed loans, £1 in every £12 of GGS facilities, and are growing far faster than the banking sector.
2. Who really manages the Regional Investment Funds. A fund-by-fund breakdown of the Northern Powerhouse, Midlands Engine, Greater London, Finance Yorkshire, Finance East and North East funds, tracing risk capital back to the Development Bank of Wales, CDFIs and private fund managers.
3. The £2bn second phase of the Nations and Regions Investment Funds. Fund sizes, fair value movements and the four newly-procured fund managers for the South East and East of England funds.
4. How CDFIs actually fund themselves. Dormant assets, Better Society Capital, the Community Investment Enterprise Fund, the Community ENABLE Facility, commercial bank lending and Community Investment Tax Relief, and why CDFIs hold a cash buffer of roughly 60p for every £1 lent.
5. What it would take to free up £1bn for community lending. A discussion of seven possible funding mechanisms, assessed for scale, deliverability and reliance on private versus taxpayer capital.
6. The data and market infrastructure question. The FCA's Open Finance roadmap, the Commercial Credit Data Sharing regime and Bank Referral Scheme reform, and the digital divide this could open between banks and alternative lenders.

Recent activity

• 8 August 2026: Community Finance Toolkit, full pack (v3, members)
• 8 August 2026: Community Finance Toolkit, overview (v3)

  A companion series of eight short briefings on how UK community business lending works (CITR, GGS, CEF, the funding routes, where that lending reaches and does not, and a financial snapshot of the lenders).

• 7 August 2026: Underserved territories explorer (Briefing #7, members)

  Interactive: the small-business market, deprivation and local lender coverage across all 361 UK local authorities, with a ranked priority list of the deprived, business-dense areas that no local lender reaches.

• 6 August 2026: Community Finance postcode explorer (v2)

  Two-way search from postcode to community finance provider and from finance provider to lending territory, incorporating local authority and parliamentary boundaries and deprivation indices for the UK.

• 18 July 2026: Press coverage, “Growth guarantee scheme to unlock £2bn for small businesses”, The Times
• 14 July 2026: Financing for SMEs: what’s next for nations, regions and communities? (v1.0)

  ~7,800 words · 15 figures and tables · 35 minutes · 24 references

Innovation in government loan guarantees

A detailed side-by-side comparison of government loan guarantee schemes in the UK and US. Provides extensive analysis of pricing, risk and trading volumes in secondary markets and securitisations. Looks at how the UK government may be able to close the annual ~£1.1bn gap in the GDP-intensity of government guaranteed lending to SMEs relative to the US. Considers how a £12.5bn pool of institutional capital looking for productive UK assets interacts with the fragmented government guarantees programme of £6bn and a £347bn UK securitisation market in which SME lending barely registers. Indicates that there is an opportunity for innovation to establish a major UK institutional asset class that will attract finance needed to deliver growth agendas including the IT hardware plan and small business strategy. Provides a roadmap for feasibility and stakeholder engagement.

1. The UK's guarantee intensity gap. The UK runs government-guaranteed business lending at 0.063% of GDP; the US runs at 0.128%. The government’s plan for small business announced increases in the use of guarantees which, if fully utilised, would narrow this gap.
2. The lenders, arrangers, and institutional investors already active in this space. 85 distinct lending institutions have been identified across the three UK schemes; the briefing maps their concentration and cross-scheme participation.
3. The interest rates paid by borrowers and the spread absorbed by intermediation. The briefing analyses the SBA's published interest rate caps and the implied margin between borrower cost and investor yield, illustrating how secondary market liquidity narrows that spread over time.
4. The default and recovery history that underpins investor confidence. Using twelve annual cohorts of a leading SME lender between 2014 and 2025, the briefing sets out cumulative default rates and recovery rates.
5. The cost of capital when business loans reach the capital markets. Based on Funding Circle's tenth securitisation (SBOLT 2026-1, priced May 2026), the briefing sets out the credit ratings, tranche structure, and spreads achieved: senior notes rated A by Fitch at approximately 5.2% all-in, illustrating the yield compression a packaging structure achieves relative to direct lending rates.
6. The scale and mechanics of a working secondary market. The US Small Business Administration's 7(a) programme has operated a secondary market for government loan guarantees for 35 years with $10–12bn in annual trading volume, premiums consistently at 110–114 cents on the dollar, and transaction counts doubling to 26,000 per year over 2021–25.
7. What the UK could learn from the US. How the US has combined rate caps for borrowers, reduced personal guarantee dependency, higher guarantee fee income, and higher intensity of guarantees to GDP, through a combination of standardisation and transparency.
8. Why guaranteed loans are currently excluded from securitisation and what it would take to change that. The GGS guarantee is non-transferable and personal to the accredited lender. The FCA's 2026 consultation paper proposes significant simplification, recognising that current rules are ill-suited to new asset classes. Government and regulator intentions to overhaul SME data are in consultation stage.

Recent activity

• 26 August 2026: Press coverage, “British Business Bank’s small business loans hit £4bn”, Financial Times
• 26 August 2026: Growth Guarantee Scheme: June 2026 update (v1.0)

  ~950 words · 4 min read · 2 figures

• 29 June 2026: Innovation in government loan guarantees (v1.0)

  7,800 words · 21 charts and tables · 30 minutes

Governance in an AI-Native Society

SDWH Board Briefing #1 (draft, v1.0): as AI distributes analytical capability beyond large institutions to customers, citizens, suppliers and other stakeholders, how should governance itself evolve? A working draft setting out five governing principles, a board question set, and a maturity model moving from “governing AI” towards “governing organisations operating within an AI-native society.”

Recent activity

• 17 July 2026: Governance in an AI-Native Society (v1.0)

Analysing trends in performance audit timescales and impact

This analysis is relevant to anyone tracking value for money and the parliamentary accountability cycle, using data integrated from the NAO, PAC and HM Treasury. It tracks the full accountability cycle from NAO WIP notice to Treasury Minute, surfacing duration data across all stages, highlighting where delays accumulate and identifying patterns by department and subject matter. It also summarises trends in performance audit impacts using the NAO's 2025–26 annual report (published 30 June 2026): in the 2025–26 financial year the NAO reported financial impacts of £2.6bn based on its 5-stage self-directed methodology, half the impacts reported in the previous year, which was an all-time high featuring 3 impact unicorns (£1bn+ claims).

Recent activity

• 30 June 2026: Hindsight review of parliamentary accountability, cut-off date 30 June 2026
• 30 June 2026: NAO impact trends

Predictive model for government accountability cycle

The oral hearing at the Public Accounts Committee for Accounting Officers marks the apex of an accountability cycle that starts with the NAO publishing a work in progress (WIP) notice and ends with a Treasury Minute setting out the government's response to the PAC report. This experimental tool predicts the date of the oral hearing for all current NAO WIP notices, using a comprehensive dataset of completed accountability cycles, median time delays, and a self-learning algorithm. It also functions as an indicator of the NAO's planning cycle, showing how far ahead publication dates are determined and what that implies for the overall duration of the cycle from WIP notice to Treasury Minute.

1. Predicts PAC oral hearing dates. Uses timing patterns from completed accountability cycles to generate a forecast hearing date for every live NAO WIP notice, updated as new data becomes available.
2. Visualises all prevailing WIP notices. An infographic displays the expected publication window for each WIP notice, overlaid with the median time delay and the predictive algorithm's output.
3. Reveals NAO's planning horizon. By mapping WIP notice dates against eventual publication dates, the model provides insight into how far into the future the NAO's publication plan is determined at any given moment.

Recent activity

• 5 June 2026: Predictive model for government accountability cycle (v1.0, members)