Milestone’s Similarity Reporting Service
Set realistic goals by understanding the
role of town/city
The aim of Milestone’s Similarity Reporting is to enable towns and cities to better understand their position and performance within the national hierarchy.
It is widely recognised that towns and cities have distinct and important roles within their local hierarchies, and that a town’s vitality and viability is dependent upon it fulfilling its respective role successfully.
In planning guidance, Central Government has stressed the need for towns and cities to have an understanding of networks and hierarchies in order to evaluate what is acceptable scale and use within a town or city’s boundaries.
A better understanding of a town’s role within both the national and regional hierarchies undoubtedly means that strategies can be more meaningful and have a greater likelihood of successful implementation. Without such an understanding, it is entirely possible for towns and cities to underperform in terms of their role within the regional and national hierarchies, and for stakeholders and investors to either have unrealistic aspirations or to underestimate a town or city’s potential.
Milestone harnesses the breadth of its data to enable users to gain an understanding of the extent of the similarity of a town or city to others nationally. It offers two approaches to this:
- identifying the 10 most similar towns or cities according to a range of criteria; and
- ranking the town or city against other named towns or cities nationally.
Questions that can be answered through Similarity Reporting...
- What is the town’s position within the local, regional and national hierarchies, and is its current position within the planning framework appropriate in the light of this?
- What is the extent of variance between the town’s performance and that of national, regional and peer group benchmarks?
- Is the strategy for the town appropriate in the light of the existing local hierarchy, and its performance relative to benchmarks?
- What are the particular areas of under and/or over performance of the town?
- What is its point of difference and what opportunities are there to enhance its long term performance?
