Equitable Warmth: Mapping and Optimising Warm Bank Access for UK's Vulnerable Populations

Leveraging spatial analysis and web technologies to enhance equitable access to warm banks across the UK, looking at accessibility and 'warm bank deserts'.

The project “Equitable Warmth: mapping and optimising warm bank access for UK’s Vulnerable Populations” aimed to leverage spatial analysis and web technologies to enhance equitable access to warm banks across the UK. Focusing on the Warm Welcome Campaign’s goal, this project evaluated the accessibility of warm banks (churches, libraries, mosques, sports-centres) at the small-area and community level and identified ‘warm bank deserts’ where services are critically needed. 

The project constructed an interactive web dashboard highlighting the warm bank deserts on the map. The dashboard showed the small-area accessibility to warm welcome spaces for local communities. The dashboard can visualise the accessibility of Warm Welcome spaces for several ‘target inclusion groups’ identified by the Warm Welcome Campaign based on data on poverty and deprivation, including lone-parent families, black communities and people with disabilities. 

The dashboard has been used by Warm Welcome staff and over 100 local partners (such as local authorities) to identify places and population groups with limited accessibility to warm spaces. The data analysis showed that from October 2024, 62% of people living in the UK have access to a Warm Welcome Space within a 30-minute walk from their home. The dashboard allowed the campaign and its wider partners to interactively explore levels of access in different parts of the country, enabling insights such as areas of high access – when compared with polling data on awareness of warm spaces, that can be used by the campaign team to target awareness-raising activities. Additionally, the dashboard allows visualisation of underserved areas where accessibility of warm spaces is low enabling target partner engagement and community mobilisation in those areas to improve awareness and access to help tackle loneliness and social isolation, for those living in fuel poverty during the cold winter months. 

Warm Welcome compared data from UCL’s dashboard and insights from nationally representative polling. They have turned the metric used in the data analysis as a key target to rally wider partners and supporters, including funding, towards making a 100% pledge.

The project team would investigate how reduced winter payments and increasing energy prices impact the demand and usage for warm welcome spaces.