A shared mapping tool, OneMap, has been launched by the Social Housing Innovation North East (Shine) partnership to make it easier for housing providers across the northeast of England to collaborate, plan and deliver services.
OneMap is a shared geographic information system (GIS) that brings together open-source data, publicly-licensed datasets and partner-owned information to create a powerful, location-based decision-making tool.
It includes property-level data such as EPC ratings, build year, construction year and home type, alongside layers covering ASB, demographics, deprivation indices, flood risk, climate hazards and environment.
The OneMap project is the result of collaboration between some of Shine’s members, comprising Believe Housing, Bernicia, Darlington Borough Council, Gentoo Group, Karbon Homes, North Star Housing, Places for People and Thirteen Group.
The concept for OneMap was first developed in just five days at the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival in July 2024. Since then, the prototype has been turned into a fully-functioning application using ESRI’s ArcGIS Online platform.
Lynsey Darby, GIS specialist, Believe Housing, said, “OneMap is an easy-to-use tool, specifically designed for collaboration between housing providers.
“Without knowing where other housing providers’ properties are, it’s too easy to end up working in silos, unintentionally creating invisible boundaries that affect customer experience and service delivery.
“OneMap helps break down those barriers and enables us to build targeted, cohesive plans based on accurate, shared data.”
OneMap is already being used to coordinate multi-provider investment programmes, particularly in areas where multiple housing providers operate within a single estate. In other areas, a pilot employability project led by Believe Housing, Bernicia, Karbon Homes and North Star Housing is using OneMap to identify areas where women aged 50 to 65 are most likely to be out of work, using deprivation and health data to guide funding bids and outreach.
Matt Forest, CEO, Thirteen Group, said, “As a former geography teacher, I love this cartographic collaboration – it’s exactly the kind of thing we had in mind when we formed the Shine partnership.
“In our region you can have six or seven different housing providers owning homes in an area as small as one square kilometre, which is challenging when you want to deliver investments and services in a coordinated way.
“OneMap gives us a full picture of stock ownership across the region. That intelligence means we can join up our plans and make better decisions.”
