Improving efficiency and service delivery through vision and action

The London Borough of Haringey started work on its LLPG in October 2002 with a clear set of objectives. From the beginning, the project team recognised the potential of the LLPG as a single, authoritative, complete and up to date source of BS7666 compliant address data for the whole council. Over the following four years the project team has sought to ensure buy-in from all the business units across the council who use address based information and to raise the profile of the LLPG at every opportunity.

Progress was swift with Haringey matching their Local Land Charges, Council Tax and Electoral Roll to the NLPG extract and making their first submission to the NLPG hub in March 2004. By the summer of 2004 the council were making monthly updates. Linking to other systems either directly or through regular updates to locally held address datasets has been preceded by extensive data cleansing and matching.

Haringey was one of 20 local authorities selected to take part in a pilot with NLPG and the Valuation Office Agency. The pilot is associated with Valuebill, where the VOA is linked live to the NLPG. They matched Council Tax and NNDR datasets to the NLPG and found a high match rate for residential property and a lower match rate for commercial property in every case. Matched files and non-matched files sent from the NLPG have been used to make further improvements to the gazetteer.

Outcomes

A number of applications have now been linked to the LLPG including Local Land Charges, Council Tax (including NNDR data), Electoral Registration data, Social Services e-Care, Planning, Building Control 37 and Enforcement, Housing together with the Council’s CRM system.

The use of the LLPG has improved collection of revenues by identifying new properties for taxation helping to protect against fraud by preventing the use of bogus addresses. The LLPG has enabled online planning applications to be made over the Internet using the correct addresses. Many of the Council’s services are now enabled through the council’s website.

In line with the Government’s vision for ‘Shared Services’ Haringey has made significant steps to ensure that the UPRN is being used to facilitate the joining up of services between departments across the council and with external partners such as the Emergency Services and the Primary Healthcare Trust.

‘Inspire joined-up services across departments, local authorities and intermediaries through shared values and goals as well as shared infrastructure and data...’- Sir David Varney (Dec 2006); Service Transformation.

Key benefits

• The vision of address data maintained once and used by many is being realised with a massive reduction of duplicated effort.
• The LLPG is now the trusted source of property and address information for the whole of the council and considered to be a valuable asset.
• The council is now in a position to share its data with partners to release further efficiencies and improve service provision.
• The LLPG has improved access to information, internally, in support of the decision-making processes and externally, through easier dissemination of information to the citizen and commercial interests.