Bristol City Council

A database launched in 2016 holding records on close to half a million Bristol residents, with child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation risk models flagging children at risk; the child criminal exploitation model was introduced in 2019.

Stopped around the time the Social Finance review was completed (the article gives no exact date; it says neither authority kept records of the decision to stop 'by June 2023') after council staff judged the models not fit for operational use, with recent victims of sexual offences scoring below burglary perpetrators. No records of the decision were retained. Reviewers from Social Finance could not retest the models because the source code and model variables could not be found. That combination, a discontinued predictive system with no decision record and no recoverable model, is itself the finding worth recording.

Recorded for Bristol City Council, which ran the database. Avon and Somerset Police has its own record for its separate risk-scoring system.

Update, November 2026. Liberty Investigates (25 June 2026) reports that Social Finance, commissioned by Bristol City Council and Somerset Council, found the database useful and able to lead to timelier responses but called the risk-scoring models the 'weakest element', and linked their fall in quality to police having stopped using Bristol City Council data, which left the models relying on police data alone. The article says Bristol City Council still uses a model to identify children at risk of becoming NEET and that the council says it uses no other predictive analytics. Avon and Somerset Police's own data science page says its exploitation models were built for Bristol City Council and shared back. The status of discontinued refers to the child sexual and criminal exploitation risk models; the article does not say the Think Family Database itself has been closed.