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Bristol City Council set up a data team, Insight Bristol, in 2015, staffed jointly with Avon and Somerset Police
Permanent project revision
Revision 2026-08-25-bristol-baseline · effective 2026-08-25
Current revision. This is the snapshot used by the live entity page.
Created the first structured Evidence Passport with 22 claims and 10 source dossiers.
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add /evidencePassport — Added claim-level evidence mapping and source dossiers.add /revisionHistory — Established a permanent, hash-addressed baseline revision.The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-a2de878acab015ee
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Bristol City Council set up a data team, Insight Bristol, in 2015, staffed jointly with Avon and Somerset Police
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From 2016 it ran the Think Family Database
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a single view of a family drawn from around 35 council, police, health, benefits and school datasets
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including data on ethnic origin and criminal offences
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processed under legal gateways rather than consent
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Machine-learning models scored children for risk of sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation, and being out of education, employment or training
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Two of the three were switched off in 2023
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The database itself is still running
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The council's own page puts the database at around 55,000 families
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In 2021 it answered a freedom-of-information request saying around 450 children were flagged as at risk of sexual exploitation by the model
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at a precision of around 80 per cent
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the campaign group Big Brother Watch said about 90 of them may have been wrongly flagged
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The one surviving model, for risk of not being in education, employment or training, is entered on the UK government's Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard
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around 150 safeguarding professionals use the front-end report each month
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the score sits among more than 70 other indicators of vulnerability
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the record states there is no automated decision making based on it
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Council staff judged the two exploitation models not fit for operational use and stopped them in 2023
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An independent evaluation by the non-profit Social Finance, commissioned by Somerset Council in partnership with Bristol and published in June 2025
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called the risk-scoring models the weakest element of the project and said a lack of accuracy had undermined them
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staff reported that children who should have been identified as vulnerable were not listed in the results
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the same feeds still assemble under the same legal gateways
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records responses suggest neither the council nor the police kept a record of the decision to stop
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
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src-21cc8ef43151fb5cOperator's own service page. States Insight Bristol is a Bristol City Council data team set up in 2015 in response to the national Troubled Families Programme; that the Think Family Database holds information from approximately 55,000 families; lists the contributing bodies (Bristol City Council, Avon and Somerset Police, Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, SCWCSU, Barnardo's, NHS); and describes a surviving 'Risk of NEET data model'.
src-da72b54af61289adStatutory privacy notice for the Insight Bristol products. Lists the data categories held, including personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin and data relating to criminal offences and incidents; names the legal bases as legal obligation, official authority, social protection and substantial public interest, and enumerates the 'legal gateways' relied on; describes the Think Family Database, Children and Families View, Think Family Education app and the NEET modelling; and records the onward sharing to Avon and Somerset Police's Lighthouse safeguarding unit. Text extracted locally from the PDF; the hosted file is a scanned-style PDF that summarising fetchers cannot read.
src-561498af9ff7b169The UK government's public algorithm register entry for the one model still in use. Carries the ~150 safeguarding professionals a month figure, the 'over 70 other indicators of vulnerabilities' framing, the statement that there is no automated decision making based on the model, the precision-and-recall review commitment, and a Data Protection Impact Assessment created 01/11/2018 and last updated July 2024.
src-34debd022745f267Statutory public inquiry. Bristol was one of six case study areas. Section H.7 describes the Think Family Database bringing together 35 different datasets and the Insight team, funded jointly with the police, producing a weekly automated list of children at heightened risk of sexual exploitation, supplied to Avon and Somerset Police's Operation Topaz. The host returns HTTP 403 to every automated client tried (browser user agent, curl, and the UK Government Web Archive mirror); existence and wording established by exact-phrase search only.
src-617fc9f5322b5974Publication page for the independent evaluation: 'Somerset Council, in partnership with Bristol Council, commissioned Social Finance to deliver an independent evaluation of the implementation and impact of single view products being used in Bristol'. The linked PDF is glyph-subset encoded with no ToUnicode map, so its text could not be extracted; its findings are quoted here from the journalism that obtained and read it.
src-1e8b7205f4563affJoint investigation with WIRED, Lighthouse Reports and the Bristol Cable, built on hundreds of pages obtained under public records requests. Carries the Social Finance review's 'weakest element' and 'lack of accuracy' wording, the staff report that children who should have been identified 'were not listed', the 2016 launch by Bristol City Council and Avon and Somerset Police, and the finding that neither authority kept records of the decision to stop the CSE and CCE models by June 2023. Most of the article concerns Avon and Somerset Police's own force-wide models, which are a separate system and are not described in this entry.
src-0ea2b67e6e8c6784Carries the 2016 launch and that the database 'is still in operation today'; the Child Sexual Exploitation and Child Criminal Exploitation models and the risk factors feeding them; the council's 'not fit for operational use' conclusion and 2023 shutdown; the Children's Commissioner's response; and the council statement that it now uses no predictive analytics other than the NEET model.
src-9d5c846edd944188Carries the 55,000 families and approximately 35 datasets figures, the May 2023 shutdown date for the two models, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation's 2021 findings on bias and on 'legal gateways', and Cllr Christine Townsend's statement that the authority uses no predictive analytics beyond NEET identification.
src-dc8840e820011caeThe original exposure, built on Big Brother Watch freedom-of-information requests. Carries the three models, the roughly 450 children flagged as at risk of sexual exploitation as of June 2021, the council's stated precision of around 80 per cent, Big Brother Watch's estimate that about 90 may have been wrongly flagged, and the council's response that race is not an input.
src-848eb13bdf87e9cbNational government blog confirming Bristol's Insight Analytical Hub and the pre-existing Think Family Database, and a further targeted analytical product going live in November 2019 under the Safer Options programme.