New dashboard shows the geographic distribution of social investment.

Through our data workstream, we’ve been testing what can be achieved through crowding in our data for shared analysis. We’ve taken the postcodes from across SIF members’ investments to evaluate the distribution of social investment across England, Scotland and Wales – including how it maps onto the Government’s levelling up agenda.

Our analysis has found that 43% of social investment deals have gone to Levelling Up Priority 1 areas – a total of £521m across almost 2000 deals. It’s also shown that while areas of higher deprivation have received a proportionally higher number of deals, they have received a lower value of total investment compared with more affluent areas. There’s plenty to unpick here – and it demonstrates that the picture of how social investment has been deployed can shift depending on which metric you use as a lens. We plan to expand this analysis to generate deeper insight into the geographic spread of social investment – identifying those areas that we have been less successful in reaching and asking why this is the case.