The NLPG vision made reality

The Best Performing Authority is awarded to the authority, which has the highest points score based upon a number of different parameters. The award in 2007 is a reflection of the efforts made by Huntingdonshire in maintaining and improving its gazetteer. Huntingdonshire scored maximum points, matching its gazetteer 100% with centrally held Council Tax and Non-Domestic Rates registers; by returning change-only updates (that’s new houses, demolitions etc.) to the central NLPG hub on a daily basis and for updating its gazetteer to the new 2006 British Standard.

Huntingdonshire has been at the forefront of NLPG best practice for a number of years, completing the first cut of its gazetteer in 2002 and has been the recipient of several awards since that time. By the end of 2007 the council had no less than 29 applications supported by its LLPG, with eight more in the pipeline. These include some which are dynamically linked, some which are synchronised and others which receive daily change only updates. Huntingdonshire remains true to the principal and vision, with addresses being created once but used many times right across the authority.

In addition to the NLPG hub, Huntingdonshire’s LLPG is being used by Cambridgeshire County Council for its call centre, in strategic planning for schools, for customer feedback and by Trading Standards. Beyond this, and the subject of a separate case study in this booklet, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire & Rescue Service are now using the Huntingdonshire LLPG – a forerunner to its wider use by fire services across Britain.

Huntingdonshire’s LLPG has had a direct impact on the council’s service delivery and its internal processes for some time now, and it continues to improve year on year. By joining up processes, improving efficiency and providing better services to citizens and businesses, Huntingdonshire has proved an exemplar of best practice and an outstanding example of the NLPG vision made reality.

Outcomes

Huntingdonshire is continually moving on, opening up the possibilities of sharing its data to transform business processes and facilitate collaboration. The Huntingdonshire LLPG now has more than half a million cross references to other datasets. Every department within the council and increasingly external organisations, via the NLPG hub, can now leverage the richness of this data asset. The recent exercise with the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Fire and Rescue Service also highlighted the fact that Huntingdonshire’s LLPG had gone far beyond the Postal Address File (PAF), proving that the NLPG project has succeeded in providing greater detail than any existing dataset. Such is the rigour of the process that many are now beginning to realise the potential to add further data, which will be useful to many different organisations, including utilities, and the emergency services.

Key benefits

• Recent data matching exercises have proved the value of the NLPG vision and concept, and will inspire similar authorities to follow suit.
• The achievement of a 100% match with Council Tax and NNDR has generated exceptional confidence in the data at a local level.
• Third parties outside the council are beginning to see the value and the possibilities of adding further data to facilitate and support a wide range of activities.