Objectives

Data sharing is a key area for many public authorities and one which has major advantages and challenges for all partners. JiN was developed to address the issue within Nottinghamshire as part of the regional JUPITER project (Joined-Up Partnerships In The East midlands Region).

Initial members of JiN are the Government Office for the East Midlands, Nottinghamshire Police, Nottingham City Council, Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service.

The main aims are to assist in improving community safety, preventing and detecting crime and reducing anti-social behaviour, although it is by no means restricted to these areas of work and it is hoped that a wider selection of data sets will be included in the future.

The JiN partners have created a central data hub where data is cleansed, depersonalised and stored. Aggregated data is then available on a web-based platform in the form of user-definable maps via a GIS facility (geographic information system). For more detailed analysis, partners can access full cleansed data by contacting the JiN data hub.

The data sets can be then matched against each other to examine the geographic relationship of, for instance, school truancy, criminal damage and minor arson. There are many benefits to this approach:

• Pooling of resources and knowledge across many organisations
• Encourage sharing of best practice
• More effective policies and strategies due to organisations being better informed
• Performance management against set strategies
• A combined data management and research capability is more cost effective
• Partners' policies and strategies can be aligned more consistently

It is becoming increasingly important that information held by organisations is used to ensure that their resources are targeted where they are most needed. With the current emphasis on Partnership working, it is important that all agencies involved in partnerships are prepared to share information between them. Many of the problems associated with the Data Protection Act are circumvented by JiN as only depersonalised data is shared. To allow certain personal data to be cleansed and aggregated to output area level, a "Data Sharing Protocol" has been approved by the Chief Officers of Partner organisations.

The protocol is available to download from the Resources page.

The document is an agreement between JiN and the partner agencies, as to how and what information can be shared and under what conditions. The protocol does not "override" any of the legislation, but does provide a further control for JiN and allows us to process data about individuals in order to depersonalise it.

Data sharing goes beyond the strategic level of JiN's data hub as, under controlled circumstances, personal data can also be exchanged between relevant agencies.