It’s been far, far too long since putting pen to paper - finger to keys(?) - or indeed whatever the contemporaneously aligned nomenclature is for regurgitating thoughts into the digisphere.

I should add here, for colour, that I have a strange two fingers typing style that somewhat resembles a frenetic woodpecker that can’t quite break through the bark of its chosen domicile - colleagues have often, and naturally entirely supportively, commented on this strange attack on the keyboard before and it’s fun to note I now get grief from two angles; my 12 year old daughter looking at me with bewilderment at the use of a strange thing with keys and numbers - “why not just use voice to text, dad” - my response being; my brain doesn’t work that fast and I’m old - which, in fact, seems the suitable excuse for most things.

Besides, there is something cathartic about tapping away as fast as my two fingers will permit to try and get the latest whimsical nonsense recorded for posterity.

Anyway, whatever the terms and means, my apologies for tardiness of what should be a quarterly installment of all things Oscar. It appears this year you will only be hearing from us but twice; summer and winter (I can hear the cheering from here).

Which, if I may veer into meteorology for a second, does rather reflect the year to date. Especially if one conflates “winter” with “rain - and then more rain” and summer with “blistering, scorching and ground baking heat” - which does rather seem to have covered it across the 2026 seasons to date.

In fact, I’m typing this on the somewhat momentous day of another Prime Minister deciding that perhaps it was time to pass on the baton (‘poison chalice of state’!?) to a new incumbent whilst essentially melting into a small pool due to the perennial challenges of working from the upper levels of a seaside Georgian building in a heatwave.

Air con? - nah, it’s listed mate! - anyway, rain will be upon us before you can say “there’s sand on my ice cream”.

That's probably enough of that; I’ll save the DIY and domestic updates for the next edition and will move on to the stuff that might actually be of use and interest:

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Updates:

First and foremost, after some of the usual ward changes (153 new ones this year), the Councillor election updates were completed in timely fashion by the ever fabulous Local Govt team.

This meant all postholder changes done within 3 weeks of the elections across the ~5000 seats and the leadership updates completed by early June. They are now systematically working through the new cabinet and committee responsibility updates post AGMs.

It was quite the year for change and there’s a link to the report in the “interesting” section below summarising the elections - worth skipping down to if you - like me - are a fan of data and Local Gov.

I should add that, of course, the national devolved Government election updates were also made - in fact, I recall Sue doing those over the weekend following election day.

Outside of political updates, the broader team has been very busy working through updates across Healthcare, notably ingesting some more benchmarking feeds to check Dental practice coverage and also busily reflecting the ICB changes and the resulting alignment of GP Practices to their new parent Boards.

Updates in the round across the database are covered in the following table:

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New:

Few new bits hot off the respective presses to report:

We’ve added a new org type under ‘Schools’ - being ‘Education Provider Groups’ - as distinct from MAT’s, these organisations can also represent or indeed run Schools, often Private or Special Schools and felt like a worthy addition to the database taxonomy.

Given the levels of seismic changes occurring, being planned and yet to occur across Local Government, we’ve created a living doc recording the various goings on of both reorganisation and devolution.

This is just as handy for us as it is hopefully for you and we’ll be updating it as we go. You can find it here.

Finally, after discovering we are putting out a lot of content in various places and formats, we have - perhaps sensibly - decided to centralise all our news, analysis and other flavours of interesting content into one place - cunningly entitled the “content hub” - you can see it here.

I shall not sully you with details of the various commercial and advertorial options available, suffice to say, there are some if you care :)

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Interesting:

As mentioned above (and with much fervent keyboard tapping meantime), we have put together a report on the 2026 Local Government elections, showing the levels of change and outcomes as well as a summary of our ongoing councillor research processes.

You can grab your copy here.

The year to date has also seen us focusing on our new ‘data and intel’ stack - that’s just words I hear you say. True, but, we have been at pains to look at adding new scalable layers to our technical set-up with a view of being able to deliver new and exciting insights and updates to our users.

Some of these kindly folks have been receiving our new BETA daily digest messages which are replete with summaries of news, postholder, organisational, spending and market change every 24 hours.

If you’d like to be one of these (guinea pigs), just let me know. Or - and if you’ve read this far down - you fancy seeing what I mean in the form of pictures and arrows, have a look here.

Speaking of tech, regulars will note my lack of reference to AI in this message thus far (one of my favourite topics of the past few years). So there, I mentioned it.

That’s it for now. I hope you all have an amazing summer and we’ll be back in touch with some updates and a side order of frivolity when the nights outlast the days and we are mourning the warmth and reaching for our coats.

Plus, you never know, the next missive may become manifest via some thaumaturgic conversion of brain waves into the written form through the medium of modern technology. Such are the times in which we live.

James and all at Oscar:
Adam, Richard, Alan, Maria, Rebecca, Sheryl, Sue, Alison, Melanie, Ali, Nicola, John, Keri, Claire, Shan, Eirian, Rhys, Jenni, Nathan, Leanne, Paul and, of course, Oscar BOT

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