The Leicestershire Statistics and Research Online website provides easy online access to a wealth of age, ethnicity, crime, economic, education, health, housing and benefits statistics for small neighbourhoods, presented as tables or thematic maps.

The site was initiated by Leicestershire Together, the Leicester Partnership and the LeicesterShire Economic Partnership.

Nearly 500 registered users are now using the site and contributing case studies to show how the site is helping to influence policy, planning, service delivery and funding bids.

The site has been improved with a more intuiative search functionality, better meta data, clearer thematic and interactive mapping, multi-column tables, a new area for qualitative research articles, and links to a growing variety of area profiles.

Increased use of the site is fuelling growing demand for new data to be added. Since 2006 new data has included road traffic accidents, average house prices, synthetic lifestyle estimates (on areas such as obesity and smoking), and incidents or arson provided by the Leicestershire Fire & Rescue Service. 2007 saw the addition of the data on levels of physical activity from Sport England.

The service has also been recognised nationally by the Department of Communities and Local Government, who studied 69 projects around the country during 2006. In a survey of the other project managers the website appears in the top 10 list of best systems.