g-governance: Advantage, local govts

Rob Finch
Improvement and Development Agency (IDEA)
London, UK


80% of council services can be correctly provided or monitored with access to geographic information
Local authorities in the United Kingdom have a massive job in providing services to their residents. From refuse collection through social services to education, councils have to demonstrate they are performing efficiently to justify the council taxes they charge and the subsidies they get from the central government.

The quality of information these local authorities have can make or break the smooth running of day-to-day services that an average Briton expects. Council workers need to know who lives where in order to deliver better services. In fact, it was estimated that 80% of council services can be correctly provided or monitored only with access to geographic information. The information available to authorities to identify where people live was historically of variable quality. A nationwide drive to improve the situation is slowly, but significantly, changing all that though.

Local Government Information House (LGIH) is a government company owned by the Improvement and Development Agency (I&DeA). It was set up by local authorities to act as a gobetween with the private sector to support their information technology needs. Steven Brandwood, programme manager for LGIH, who helps councils, police and fire services to get to grips with these issues says, "We purchase geographic information for local governments in a digital mapping format.

We help local authorities standardise information collection - concentrating on street and address. We purchase a map, which allows this information to be displayed in a standard way."

According to Brandwood, the authorities faced immense challenge before LGIH came into being. They had to buy in supposedly more accurate information from the private sector, which was based on a standardised and formatted version of the information originally produced by local authorities! Obviously, this service came at a premium. Brandwood says: "An additional problem is that, when databases are maintained independently, they can drift apart. The local authority might name the flats in one building as - 1, 2 and 3, while social services might know those flats as A, B and C. But then from Royal Mail point-of-view, it doesn't matter how many flats are behind the letter box and historically it was the Royal Mail database that was used."

Another flaw was the number of addresses that were simply missing when the last census was taken costing the councils considerable amount of money. According to Brandwood, local authorities in Westminster and Manchester identified a significant number of missing addresses. Because each council's grant-based funding from central government is based partially on the population size from the previous 10-year census, the financial ramifications were enormous. Councils could be providing services to more people, but without receiving the funding they were due.

According to Brandwood, another task of LGIH is establishing information- sharing agreements between local authorities. The solution was a system of local single registries - called the Local Land and Property Gazetteer. This is linked to a larger National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG). This NLPG maintains data groups using referencing based on land and property units and linked to addresses. It uses historic and alias addresses to help identify properties. In turn, this allows all records to be mapped and getting them linked to the records.

"We went through these lists with local authorities to match datasets together and gave them a reference number. This made use of customer relationship management techniques much easier to bring together the delivery of local services like education and social services," Brandwood explains.

"Mapping provides a national grid reference for the address, so when all services use these maps, one can use the same information across the public sector and look for an address, bring it up on a map and use this tool to track customer relationship management."

Under the auspices of the LGIH's Mapping Services Agreement, the gazetteer services can be procured centrally - which has obvious cost benefits. This gazetteer hub collects data from the 376 local authority gazetteers on a regular basis (the majority are done at least monthly). NPLG then runs a series of checks on that local data, validates it and uploads it to the central gazetteer where it is available to other organisations."

Getting 376 local authorities signed up to the same system is an impressive achievement. In just five years of use, the NLPG is already paying dividends to local authorities and the British taxpayer. Using bulk purchasing power to procure the services and support for geographic information, rather than for each local authority separately saves authorities more than £100 mn per year, based on list prices.

And for comparison's sake, the cost of the operations at LGIH is a drop in the ocean - around £ 800k to cover the entire programme cost. So the cost benefit is fairly clear.

In terms of savings, the National Land and Property Gazetteer and LGIH carried out a study with the Centre for Economic Business Research (CEBR), a leading independent business consultancy. The study found that just by reducing duplication of effort and enabling access to address information, local governments could potentially save up to £ 54 million per annum.

CEBR worked out that the investments local authorities needed to make were relatively low, but the cost: benefit ratio was hugely in favour of investing in the systems. They calculated that for £ 1 spent, local authorities made £ 3.30 in savings.

But authorities benefit in other ways too. Brandwood says: "Authorities are now trying to handle simple requests at the first point of call (as far as possible), rather than sending it through to the specific specialist areas.

And it's not only local authorities that benefit. The central hub mechanism makes information available to police, fire authorities and county councils. The LGIH is also talking to government and NHS about access to the service. It could be a valuable resource in the private sector as well.

How local authorities benefitted from the NLPG

Environmental protection at Surrey Heath Borough Council The location of trees that are protected by "preservation orders" is vital to residents putting in planning applications. Now, using the council's "My Protected Trees" website, they identify individually protected trees, including aerial photographs of their sites. Behind the scenes, the council created a database of 40,000 land units with unique reference numbers in order to ease the system which was previously based on manual checking. Dartford Borough Council Mapping out the borough in Dartford and uploading weekly data to the NLPG allowed the council to make some key changes, including better location of polling stations for elections and identifying properties where the tenants were not paying their council tax. As a result, an extra £12,000 in taxes was collected by the end of 2006. Portsmouth City Council Portsmouth faced a situation where it had 10 address lists and 40 data sets associated with its geographical information system, which was judged to have only 55% accuracy and integrity. Streamlining these systems boosted the accuracy and integrity to 95% and allowed the council's First Point Contact Team to handle far more enquiries, freeing up the specialist services. It also saved an estimated £150,000 by reducing duplication of effort and boosted the council's confidence in its data.

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