Dear readers.

At the risk of tempting contradiction from the deities that organise our meteorological circumstances — they’re a fickle lot — it rather feels like spring has arrived. The days are a bit longer, it hasn’t rained for over 12 hours, and the de-icer has been returned to the garage. It’s fun being British and awaiting — with eternal optimism — that day in June when an ice cream makes sense (especially in Devon), and the percentage of open-top cars and camper vans reaches its zenith on the already overloaded roads. I. Can’t. Wait!

(Important Notice: This email was started a couple of weeks ago - hence “spring” and general optimistic tone. In the meantime, a ceiling collapsed in the office building due to rain (!) and all things have been held up a touch as a result. Anyway, mustn't grumble…).

As regulars may recall, it was but two years ago that we decided it was time to move from our (perfectly nice) house — on which we had laboured for 10 years to do all the ‘things’ one might wish to make it ours/nice to live in/a generally pleasant place to spend circa 66% of our time. If there are any psychologists out there who can explain the nihilism/masochism that seems to infest the human mind at the point of reaching equilibrium — and insists on making life more complicated — I’d be all ears.

Aaaanyway — after a few false starts, sales falling through, a brief foray with a barn in a field, and some form of sanity (almost) prevailing, we found our new house in September last year. Yay! Empty and ready for more years of backbreaking fixer-upper-ing.

The brief intervening events went thusly: agreed purchase of new house, listed our house, agreed sale of house, agents mentioned squatters had taken up residence in the new (empty) house, completed the sale of our house, went on holiday (from which it was tempting not to return), came home ‘homeless’ and rented while waiting for the new place to be empty again — which happened 4 weeks ago. So, with insane optimism (picture grinning lemmings), we picked up the keys and began retrieving ‘stuff’ from its home in sheds, garages and the aforementioned barn. The kindly residents (squatters) had taken it upon themselves to remove all manner of useful things (fireplace, light fittings(!?), cooker, and various other accoutrements required for day-to-day living…). Here’s to the next 10 years — I’m off to find a hammer....and a coat and a torch.

Now, with that off my digital chest, on to things that might actually matter to you:

---

Updates:

NHS changes abound (as ever), and the database now reflects the recent shifts across Central Government, including the dissolution of NHS England — a report on which will follow in due course. We're also preparing for the annual elections (albeit some are delayed due to devolution and reorganisation — see the ‘Interesting’ section below).

As a result of boundary changes, this year brings 239 new wards/electoral divisions and 215 retired ones. These will start trickling into the live database immediately after the elections, as results are updated and new (and re-elected) folks are linked to their revised areas.

Much recent work has also focused on Social Care and Local Government, specifically Care Home Groups and Multi-Academy Trusts. On that note, we’ll soon release a new version of the Ofsted analysis, reflecting the changes in assessment criteria introduced at the end of 2024.

Local Government users may have noticed that the new Combined Authorities are now in the system. We’ve also linked councils to their respective Combined Authorities as parent entities — in some areas creating a 4-tier hierarchy of Parish > District > County > Combined Authority.

You can view a summary of our database updates and changes over the last 90 days here:

---

New:

Following the chunk of work mentioned on Care Home Groups, we now have an analysis of Home and Service Types and Total Beds across each group, now available to users. If you’d like access or a breakdown, just shout.

We’ve also been trialling a weekly alert service highlighting senior postholder changes across Local Government. This has proven useful to several users and is now available — so if you’d like to be included, or discuss other weekly alerts that may be valuable, let us know.

---

Interesting:

With the addition of four new Combined Authorities this year, we’ve put together a broader Local Government Devolution Report, including details of proposed new CAs for 2026. You can get your copy here

Seat Tracker — With the local elections in mind, a quick plug for our monthly seat tracker. This provides a monthly view of the number of seats held by each party across Local and Central Government. Might be worth a peek.

Finally — cue the trumpets — the number of articles we’ve published on PSN has now surpassed 9,000! Hats off to our editor-in-chief Alan for his tireless work on the digital side.

That’s it for the spring edition of the newsletter. Wishing everyone a very happy summer — and we’ll see you again in June to clog up your inbox!

James and team at Oscar

Receive our weekly summary spotlight emails highlighting changes across Public Services and our quarterly newsletters.

Sign Up Here