North Wales Insight Partnership: turning insight into collective action
Across public services, there is more data, evidence and engagement than ever before. Yet too often, insight remains fragmented — held in silos, disconnected from decision-making, or difficult to translate into collective action.
The North Wales Insight Partnership has grown in response to that challenge. Operating as an informal partnership, it brings together Public Services Boards, local authorities, health, Natural Resources Wales, the third sector and universities to change the way insight is used across the region.
Turning diverse evidence into shared judgement
The Partnership has a simple but ambitious purpose: to turn diverse forms of evidence into shared judgement that partners can use to act together.
It treats data, evaluation learning and lived experience as complementary — not competing — sources of insight. Quantitative indicators help identify trends and inequalities. Community narratives surface lived realities, barriers and assets that formal datasets often miss. By aligning these forms of evidence, the Partnership supports better problem framing and more inclusive decisions.
Enabling the five ways of working
This approach directly supports the five ways of working set out in the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act:
- Long term: building cumulative understanding over time, rather than reacting to short-term pressures
- Prevention: identifying root causes and system conditions, not just symptoms
- Integration: connecting wellbeing goals across organisations and places
- Collaboration: creating shared evidence that partners can own and act on together
- Involvement: ensuring community insight informs judgement, not just consultation outputs
A social innovation platform for the region
Crucially, the Partnership functions as a social innovation platform. It does not deliver services itself; instead, it changes how the system works by improving how insight travels across organisational boundaries and into decision spaces.
That shift helps innovation become more inclusive, scalable and sustainable — supporting partners to move from isolated projects to a shared learning system for North Wales.