Completing an Authority Merger in Somerset

Initially, the Local Government Reform work started in late 2022, when the announcement of the new local government areas was made. Government policy, in previous years, has favoured the process of merging a local authority over splitting them. There has been broad support in the creation of unitary local authority areas covering large populations, on local demand. On April 1^st 2023, vesting day saw these deliverables come into place.

Tranche 1 entailed all deliverables being in place for Vesting day, which was the day that the new authority came into being a legal entity, on April 1^st 2023. One of the tranche 1 deliverables was the construction of a single LLPG and single street naming and numbering service, with an associate policy and an alignment of charges etc.

The Challenge

There are difficulties in merging any authorities. Uniting four district authorities and a county council is inevitably a big challenge. Pulling together the split responsibility between the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) and Local Street Gazetteer (LSG) was a large element of this challenge.

There was a short timeframe for this work, meaning it needed to be achieved efficiently and without waste. The pragmatic decision to use the supplier already already hosting 3 out of 4 LLPGs was made, which attests to the efficiency of the authority. The process was completed in around 18 months from start to finish, while the piece of work itself took place mainly over a period of 8 months within that timeframe.

The Process

The process itself was a learning curve. To understand how this process came about, it is important to remember the breadth of work undertaken.

• Initially, the different custodians worked with their supplier to manage the consolidation of the data and focus the transition into a single application.
• All other data was used to reconfigure all of the interdependencies from the authorities, back into one.
• This allowed connectivity through change only files, and how these were exported out, where some applications only needed to use data from previous predefined district boundaries.
• Others needed data from the new unitary boundary.

Previously, there could only be a full export based on tabular data, but through the new database these can be exported through spatial boundaries. Essentially, these spatial exports can be used to manage the data moving forwards, and eventually into the back-office applications throughout the authority.

Alignment of policies and fees

In preparing for one authority/one policy, Somerset learnt from other authorities who had been through a similar process, such as Dorset, and these previous experiences were absorbed to ensure maximum efficiency in this transition.

Having a single Street Naming and Numbering (SNN) policy was at the forefront of this. Each of the four individual authorities previously referred to different legislation and had different charges. As a result, an entirely new policy had to be written, and this also meant formally adopting of the legislation as Somerset Council.

There was a required two-week window of advertising this before the legislation could be adopted, and the policy adopted. This also meant standardising SNN pricing across Somerset as there were differing services in different authorities but agreeing a standard pricing from day one eliminated any issues.

One of the direct benefits of the new LLPG was the ability to feed directly to partners’ services such as the Waste Partnership. This ensures that residents have bins and recycling collected from the outset and has seen a drop in customer queries as a result. In particular, ensuring continuity of service as much as possible while the changes went through.

The variation agreement came about in November of 2022 Which meant that the testing, work, the live testing and system compatibility with the back-office elements, they only had a period of roughly five months. All the legacy cross references were maintained, however the newer UPRN ranges and new cross reference ranges were implemented as well. The new set of UPRN ranges and USRN ranges were provided by GeoPlace and implemented from April 1^st.

The impact on the USRN has been smaller. Where previously the USRNs were divided between the district, and the district would have created the street based on the USRN range, and fed it back into the county council, it is now instead a single list of USRNs managed by the council in its entirety. The same officer who managed this for Somerset County Council continues to maintain it under Somerset Council. From that perspective, it hasn’t been changed too drastically. The USRN is used predominantly in highways, In terms of the ratio of work undertaken, there was roughly a 60:40 split with their supplier undertaking the slight majority of the work. Where the supplier presented the data management for the transition, the authority then carried out testing to ensure efficiency and workability. The communication between the supplier and the authority itself was efficient and positive, leading to a more successful transition.

Going Forwards

The next big element to tackle will be revenues and benefits system. Despite this being a vast amount of work to tackle, the advantages are extensive. Data can be automated backwards and forwards into those applications, whether that be the UPRN, or cross reference data; trying to automate that and make it as seamless as possible is the goal. With proper data warehousing, where those cross references come from revenues and benefits and feed back into the gazetteer, they also feed back into things like the electoral register and similar elements. Moving forward, the goal is to deliver a single GIS service. The gazetteer data will be fundamental in how this is managed throughout the business.

Conclusion

One of the key successes in this work came from the positivity and the motivated group of people engaging behind it. While the restructure continues, the pragmatic personalities behind the project were a forefront to its success.

Being forthcoming with the procurement process also made the process a lot easier, with contracts that could navigate over into a single contract. Without this, it would have potentially had to go to tender which would have extended this project substantially. If undertaking this piece of work again, a broader timescale would have arguably improved the process.

With one LLPG and one system, the UPRN is now being fed directly into electoral services, land charges, environmental health, planning, with the desire to have it eventually fed into all of the back-office systems. The beginning of this transition comes through making sure the UPRN is ideally a mandatory field in any application required. As of yet there haven’t been any big procurements to push this into new back-office systems, but the desire to achieve this indicates that they are on the right path.

Overall, the success in merging these authorities into the efficient and functioning authority they have today is a credit to the hard work undertaken by the custodians in consolidating the data.