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The crisis more than ever demonstrated there is a very clear need for data in real time (or as near to real time) as possible to help inform decisions. It showed that problems-to-be-solved can’t be solved by the data one organisation holds alone: inevitably joining-up data from other sources is required. It also told us that without greater data collaboration our routes to creative, scalable solutions will remain limited.

The UK’s unusually fragmented approach to public sector data means often we talk more about how data is not shared or is not available than how it is more seamlessly used to understand common needs or meet shared objectives.

For example, City Hall is using aggregated data from Vodafone, O2 and Mastercard payments to add to our view of the observance of lockdown restrictions and add our understanding of the health of local economies.

There are three key things to note in this: Looking between late-February and mid-March, we see that the drop-off in footfall happened earlier and was much sharper in London than the other cities. Looking between early-April and mid-June, we see that the small and the medium-sized cities experienced less of a decline than London and the other large cities, and they also started to recover from this earlier. Looking between mid-June (when non-essential retail reopened) and Saturday 4 July, we see that while the trajectory is upwards everywhere, the small and the medium-sized cities have seen a much sharper climb back up towards normal.

There are three things potentially playing into this: City centres of large cities tend to have less residential and industrial space and are often concentrations of office jobs, which have been and still are being done from home. This limits how many workers are in the city centre compared to before.  Larger cities, especially London are more reliant on public transport than their smaller counterparts. With public transport still limited in both capacity and use for public health reasons, it is now harder for people to travel into the centres of these cities. Due to their size, larger cities have more options for going to the pub or shopping beyond the centre and it may be that this has further reduced footfall in the city centre.

This and our other analysis on the topic suggests that we are unlikely to see large-scale changes in footfall and a ‘return to the normal’ in the city centres of the largest cities until office workers are welcome to and do return. 

Last Sunday, April 19, with the capital’s roads bereft of traffic and the sun high in the sky, 39,889 trips were taken on London-based Santander Cycles — or, as most of us still tend to call them, 'Boris Bikes’. That was the busiest day of the year for bike rentals so far, according to Transport for London. And this past weekend was almost as busy: 37,995 on Saturday 25th, and 38,756 on Sunday.

While tube usage is down 93 per cent and bus usage is down 74 per cent, Boris biking (which requires more manual contact than either of those transport methods) appears to be soaring. Our anecdotal evidence (at least) suggests that insufficient knowledge about how the disease can spread across surfaces could be an important driver of the higher leisure usage we are seeing.

In New York, demand for the city's bike-share programme in the last week of March was down by 71 per cent compared with the same week the year before, according to a group of software developers and data explorers working with data feeds from NYC's Bike Share system. In Paris, where there are strict rules on when and where you can exercise, usage of public Velib bikes has fallen by 75 per cent year on year. 

Self-employed people in the North and Midlands are more likely to be in insecure, lower-paid roles at high risk from economic shocks

Cities in the Greater South East are more likely to be able to shift to working from home

The jobs that could be more easily done from home – such as consultants or finance – are concentrated in cities in the Greater South East (see the figure below). Assuming some sectors could completely shift to home working if necessary, up to one in two workers in London could shift to working from home. Meanwhile in Reading, Aldershot and Edinburgh over 40 per cent of workers could too.