Refreshing Understanding Scottish Places for a new era of town data
Across Scotland, more people now live in towns of between 1,000 and 50,000 people than in any other type of settlement. Those towns are where services are accessed, high streets are debated, and the impact of policy decisions is often felt first. Understanding Scottish Places (USP) was created to help make sense of those places.
Developed by Scotland’s Towns Partnership with the University of Stirling and supported by the Scottish Government, usp.scot provides a national data platform for Scotland’s towns. It supports local authorities, community groups and national agencies to understand how places compare, how they relate to one another and how they are changing over time without falling into the trap of labelling some towns as simply better or worse.
Storm ID has been the digital partner alongside USP since its original launch in 2015. More recently, we've worked with Scotland’s Towns Partnership to deliver a significant refresh to the platform: bringing in the latest census data and upgrading the underlying technology.
This project brought together everything we enjoy about working with long-term public-sector partners. It was exciting to help Scotland’s Towns Partnership modernise the technology, refresh the data and enhance the experience without losing what users already value.
What is Understanding Scottish Places?
USP is designed around a simple idea: help people understand the shared characteristics and relationships of towns, rather than produce a single index or ranking.
The platform brings together three main elements:
- A town typology
Every town is grouped based on a set of social, economic and demographic indicators. This helps users see which places share similar profiles, even if they’re in different parts of the country. - Town inter-relationships
USP looks at how towns are connected through work, services, shopping, education and more. That interdependency is critical when planning investment, transport, or service redesign. - USP Your Town Audit
A structured way for local partners to add their own local intelligence – things you won’t find in a national dataset – and build a richer, ground-level picture of their place.
Practitioners can:
- Look up an individual town, explore its profile and download a summary.
- Compare towns with similar characteristics across Scotland.
- Combine national data with locally gathered information to support funding bids, strategy documents, and practical town centre projects.
Over the years, USP has become a familiar reference point for people working on towns policy and practice across Scotland. But as time moved on, both the data and the technology needed to catch up.
Why a refresh was needed
When we started this latest phase of work, USP was still providing value but it was increasingly constrained by its foundations.
- The site was running on older census data, which meant it couldn’t fully reflect post-pandemic changes, demographic shifts and new patterns of work and travel.
- The application was built on .NET 4.5, a framework that reached end of life in 2016, limiting options for performance, security and maintenance.
- Scotland’s Towns Partnership wanted to strengthen the insight the site provides. The latest updates now almost double the underlying evidence base, expanding from around 32,000 to more than 65,000 individual data points, and add links from each town page out to OS locality boundary maps, giving users clearer spatial context for the data.
Together, we shaped a scope of work around four main streams:
1. Data updates
- Integrate the latest census and interrelationship data.
- Add new data measures, including green metrics, new house price values and health indicators.
2. Features and platform upgrade
- Upgrade the backend from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8.
- Add reciprocal links to related tools such as Connect to Care and the Wellbeing Dashboard.
- Link to locality boundary maps.
3. Content changes
- Add more towns and update time periods.
- Retire interim “change over time” data that no longer aligned with the new datasets.
4. Migration and maintenance
- Migrate and maintain comparison graphs from the existing website so that existing users still feel at home.
Our role as digital consultancy
Our job was to take that ambition and turn it into a robust, future-ready digital platform. That meant bringing together infrastructure, backend engineering, data integration and other improvements as one coherent programme of work.
Setting up for sustainable change
The first step was to put the right foundations in place:
- We set up new Azure environments, allowing work to progress safely while keeping the live service stable.
- We aligned the deployment process with our standard DevOps practices to make future updates more predictable and less risky.
This gave Scotland’s Towns Partnership confidence that the upgrade wouldn’t be a one-off “big bang”, but the start of a more sustainable approach to ongoing improvement.
Upgrading the technology stack
Moving USP from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 was a substantial technical shift. Our engineering team:
- Modernised the application codebase and dependencies.
- Refactored legacy components where needed so they would work smoothly on .NET 8.
- Ensured that APIs, authentication and data access patterns remained robust, secure and maintainable.
The result is a platform that’s significantly more performant, easier to support, and ready for future enhancements.
Making the new data work
The heart of USP is its data, so the data refresh needed careful handling. We worked closely with Scotland’s Towns Partnership to:
- Evaluate the new census and interrelationship data against the existing data model, identifying any gaps, missing values or inconsistencies.
- Design and build new data sources where required.
- Integrate new datasets with the information that needed to be retained, ensuring continuity for existing users and their historic comparisons.
To support this work, we created and iterated prototype views of the new data tables. These internal tools helped developers and stakeholders visualise the updated datasets early, reducing misunderstandings and rework later on.
A stronger evidence base for Scotland’s towns
The refreshed Understanding Scottish Places platform delivers several important benefits:
- Up-to-date evidence
Town profiles are now grounded in the latest census and interrelationship data, helping decision-makers respond to how places really are today. - Richer insight
New measures, from green metrics to housing and health indicators, help build a more rounded picture of town life. - Better spatial context
Link out to new locality maps for the boundaries of each town, providing improved visualisation to make it easier to understand how geography and connectivity shape opportunities and challenges.
Tweedbank in the Scottish Borders is one of Scotland's newest towns.
Photo credit: Scotland's Towns Partnership
A future-ready platform
With a modern .NET 8 backend and refreshed infrastructure, USP is ready for further development as Scotland’s towns continue to evolve.
For Scotland’s Towns Partnership and their stakeholders, that means a stronger evidence base to support policy, planning and local action. For Storm ID, it’s another example of how we help public-sector partners modernise important data platforms without losing the value of what’s already there.
If you work with or care about a town in Scotland, whether in local government, community development, economic growth, health or the third sector, USP is there to help you tell the story of your place.
Visit usp.scot, look up your town, explore its profile and compare it with others across the country. And if you’d like to talk about how Storm ID can help refresh and modernise your own data platform, we’d be delighted to start that conversation.