The SAVVI team in Scotland is focused on enabling better use of data to tackle vulnerability and improve outcomes for individuals and communities. By supporting local authorities and partners to identify, understand, and respond to vulnerability more effectively, the team helps ensure services are better targeted and coordinated.
What is SAVVI?
SAVVI stands for Scalable Approach to Vulnerability Via Interoperability. It’s a national initiative designed to help councils and their partners identify and support people before they reach a crisis point. Rather than waiting until families are facing eviction, bankruptcy, or relying on food banks, SAVVI works to enable and support preventative and proactive interventions.
The process begins with defining the purpose and remit of the work, followed by identifying those at risk through data-driven rules. It then moves to assessing needs, offering or signposting support, reporting outcomes, and improving the process over time. This cycle ensures transparency and continuous learning.
Why SAVVI?
We know that finding people or households who may be vulnerable often means drawing on data from many sources. We also know that working through the legal, ethical and technical obstacles to data sharing can be time consuming and difficult.
SAVVI addresses long-standing barriers such as legal uncertainty around data sharing and fragmented data held by multiple agencies (e.g., councils, DWP, HMRC, Social Security Scotland). By creating clear standards and processes, SAVVI helps organisations “connect the dots” and build a full picture of vulnerability at a person or household level.
The approach is already being used in Scotland to tackle rural child poverty. Future work could expand to other areas like school readiness, mental health, and even risks from fire or flood. Ultimately, SAVVI aims to enable earlier, smarter interventions that make a real difference in people’s lives.
SAVVI in Scotland
The Improvement Service has secured Scottish Government funding to establish a dedicated SAVVI team for Scotland. This team are now in post and include a Transformation coach, an Information Governance expert, and a Technical Data lead. Their role is to help councils navigate the legal, ethical, and technical challenges of using data to identify those at risk. SAVVI works collaboratively across local authorities, service delivery teams, and data officers because no single organisation holds all the data on vulnerability- and none can tackle it alone.
What are we working on?
As well as providing ongoing advice and support to local government in Scotland, the SAVVI team is progressing work on two pilot projects.
Pilot 1: Rural Child Poverty
The first Scottish pilot is focused on income maximization as a way to tackle child poverty in rural areas, where identifying families before crisis proved particularly challenging at a data zone level. The pilot established consensus on risk factors, but progress was slowed by uncertainty around legal gateways. That work is ongoing and is currently exploring new legal gateways through which Scottish local authorities can receive more comprehensive DWP data on Universal Credit.
The case study is available here: How SAVVI is Tackling Rural Child Poverty in Scotland | iStand UK
Pilot 2:
Pilot 2 will run alongside the existing Pilot (and indeed, there may be cross-over between the two). The nature of the vulnerability and harm that will be addressed in the new project are yet to be decided. As we are seeking alignment with current national priorities, we hope the pilot will impact - either directly or indirectly - on child/family poverty, complementing UNCRC, Fairer Future Partnerships, or Whole Family Support initiatives.
We appreciate that this is a complicated area of work and are keen to enter into early discussion with as many authorities as possible. This is likely to include areas that don't yet have a clear idea of precisely how the SAVVI approach would be applied in their area but want to learn more.
Meet the Team
Fi Caryl, Technical Data Lead
My role focuses on technical foundations: checking that data are fit for purpose- things like formats and shared identifiers - designing systems and standards for secure sharing, and applying rules to generate cohorts of people who may need support. Essentially, creating a behind-the-scenes framework to join the dots between agencies and ensure data flows where it’s needed.
Helen Cannings, Information Governance Lead
I’ll be playing my part in the team by helping with the information governance and data protection stuff around data re-use and sharing, in a joined-up way. To me, the appeal to me of the SAVVI approach is its focus on getting the data bit right for prevention and early intervention.
Celeste Berteau, Transformation Coach
As the Transformation Coach of this team, I’ll be facilitating partnership working between different organisations to work through the SAVVI process – defining the problem they need to address, identifying which data is necessary to address it, and supporting the implementation of the advice provided by the technical and information governance experts on the SAVVI team.