Understanding Welsh Places
Understanding Welsh Places (UWP) is a bilingual website that presents information on the economy, demographic make-up and local services of more than 300 places in Wales in a quick and easy format.
Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of where we live, who lives in our communities, where we get our food, and where we access our local services.
For better or worse, the pandemic has meant most of us are getting to know our immediate surroundings better than we may have before. We may be noticing for the first time how much we have on our doorstep, or noticing what our places are missing.
We believe in empowering communities by giving them the tools they need to make change, and we have listened to what communities have told us they wanted to see in this next wave of new data. We think it should be the norm for people to have a greater say in how they shape their communities.
Currently, a lot of statistics collected about Wales are only available on a local authority level and, too often, town communities are overlooked by public policy, because of the difficulty in accessing data at that level.
The December 2020 update includes:
- The rollout of over 70 new place descriptions so that the story of each place is clearly summarised as much as possible by people living and working there
- New variables for each place including data on access to services, access to green space, broadband availability, numbers of public toilets, numbers of generative businesses and mental health statistics, all of which will be crucial to how Wales builds its future after Covid
- The addition of new Population Flow maps showing migrations and daily trips within Wales and across the border to England
Understanding Welsh Places already allows people to explore and compare statistics on different towns, including information on:
- Population, age distribution, ethnicity and national identity
- The number of primary and secondary school places per person
- The industry of employment, commuting distances and qualifications
- The number of hospitals, GPs and dentists per person