Poverty Plus
Responding to the cost-of-living crisis
Astrosat are making data free to all charities because that’s our social responsibility – and we’re leading the way!
During the pandemic innovation was key to protecting people and the societal infrastructures that we depend on while frontline workers and volunteers risked their lives. From tests and vaccines to contact tracing tools and even our own initiation to using space technology for the social sciences, Isolation Plus, everyone put their best foot forward and we need to do the same again now.
Each year millions of people in the UK struggle to afford household energy bills or find themselves choosing between heating their home and feeding their family.
Poverty Plus leverages the strengths of space data in combination with publicly available ground data to identify communities already suffering from or susceptible to poverty. We’re providing the information needed to support local authorities, civil voluntary organisations, and charities find those most in need so that our society and all its members emerge stronger than ever before.
The Poverty Plus Tool
Central to Poverty Plus is a machine learning model developed by Astrosat to predict fuel poverty levels for neighbourhoods across Great Britain, originally developed to address certain problems that make the official data inadequate for this purpose. Data sources include the UK census, indices of multiple deprivation, household gas and electricity consumption and satellite-derived estimates of building age and residential energy efficiency. The model has been validated and refined using a variety of comparisons and has been peer reviewed by an independent expert.
But fuel poverty doesn’t account for all poverty. We need more information to tackle the wide range of factors that can force individuals and families into financial instability. That’s why we’ve added an additional 18 datasets on physical and mental health, economic and employment vulnerability, and social and geographic isolation from a range of sources including our own proprietary data sets and data from censuses, the Office of National Statistics, and individual government departments.
All this data is displayed in our proprietary data visualisation platform ORBIS. Providing a map of the data allows us to display the most vulnerable areas clearly for quick analysis, while the in-map data analysis side-bar provides more context for full reporting.
For charities: If you’re part of a charity registered in Scotland, England, or Wales you can sign-up for free 6-month access for you and 9 of your colleagues.
For government agencies, local authorities, energy companies and media: contact us for a free quote
