Our story

A mission to make the difficult possible

In 2007, the deaths of Baby P and Fiona Pilkington shocked the nation not only for the cruelty involved, but because they could have been prevented.

For us, these cases were another heart-breaking sign of an under-pressure, under- funded social care system that was failing people when they needed it most. And as people who wanted to use technology to make a positive impact, we knew we needed to act.

The system for coordinating help was broken

We’d been helping government agencies support vulnerable people since 2001, when the Victoria Climbie case was still making headlines. So we’d known for some time that the system for coordinating help when people needed it most was broken.

We’d also realised that serious case reviews were the tip of the iceberg. These systemic problems had also led to an all-time high in the number of children in care and households living in temporary accommodation. Yet resolving them by joining data between agencies was (and often still is) put in the ‘too difficult’ box. 

Social care needs support more than ever

More than 10 years on, the need for social care professionals to make an impact is bigger than ever before. The Government’s austerity programme has hit the most vulnerable in society the hardest, as all forms of support have been rolled back. And time-poor professionals are struggling under the weight of ever-growing caseloads.

Over the same period, technology has advanced at an unprecedented speed. But its main use has been to make money, not solve society’s fundamental problems. And nearly 20 years after Victoria Climbie, vulnerable adults and children are still dying.

At Xantura, the status quo shocks and frustrates us. But it also galvanises us to keep going. Because the more public sector professionals can access the right insights, at the right time, the more lives can be changed or even saved.

The solution? Use data to help people work together better

It was in this context that we founded Xantura in 2008, with a mission to make the difficult possible.

Our first project as Xantura was on effective partnership data management for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The aim was to see if it was viable to bring data from partners with common clients together at a local level. The high-level blueprint and set of principles that came out of this work have been the basis of our OneView platform ever since.

At around the same time, the Government cancelled two relevant programmes: ContactPoint (designed to consolidate children’s safeguarding data across English councils) and the NHS Programme for IT.

There were many reasons for this, including concerns with information governance and the complexity of technology. But cases like Baby P reinforced how important it was to overcome these objections – and start changing lives through data.

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