The rediscovered treasure

Driven by external policy developments, including the Ministry of Justice Electoral Registration Data Standard, Blaby District Council undertook a programme of work to improve their Local Land and Property Gazetteer. External policy drivers also helped to raise the profile of the LLPG within Blaby and gained support for a rediscovery and reinvention of the gazetteer as the primary source of address data within the council.

A project team was established and a comprehensive review of the data flow feeding the LLPG was initiated. This review identified a number of unnecessary and/or duplicate processes that were hampering the continued development of the data resource. A project team was established with a project leader who reported directly to senior management, and a new LLPG custodian was appointed. Software options were explored and a decision to move forward with an existing solution was taken based on system stability and support. Staff training followed and the ongoing process of updating the LLPG, using newly created workflows, commenced.

Outcomes

In less than a year, Blaby District Council has turned around both the quality and applications of the gazetteer data within the Council. An independent review by the Exemplar Award panel of judges showed Blaby leaping a massive 273 places (out of a total of 348) in the analysis performed for the Awards 12 months prior to the 2009 judging.

Blaby has significantly improved the match between the LLPG and benchmark datasets, such as Council Tax and Non Domestic Rates, and has been able to extract data for the Coordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE) information system. Such is the confidence in the data, it has been used to populate a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system implemented in 2009.

Blaby also continues to perform well in other health checks, including the proportion of approved Basic Land and Property Unit (BLPUs) recorded as unclassified or with a poor relative positional accuracy.

Progress in Blaby is, however, ongoing, with regular meetings between departments and a monthly progress report submitted to senior management. The project team continues with its efforts to cleanse the LLPG, sending daily updates to the hub, and will further strive to address the positional accuracy of data which, in turn, will raise the value of the data to third party organisations such as the Fire Service.

Key benefits

• A streamlined NLPG data management flow, with a recognised project team supported by and reporting to senior management within the organisation.
• 100% match rate between the NLPG and Council Tax records, and 99.7% match rate with Business rates, up from less than 90% and 51% respectively in one year.
• Adherence to the Electoral Registration Data Standard Directive and adoption of the LLPG to populate a newly introduced CRM.
• Ongoing data cleansing with daily updates to the hub and improvements in positional accuracy.