Mark Say investigates how how the details of land and property can be used to improve public service delivery
The local gazetteer has taken its place among the prime digital assets of public authorities. There has been a widespread recognition of how the details of land and property can be used to improve service delivery, and an increasing number of organisations have launched initiatives that are now being held up as exemplars for others to follow.
It has been an evolutionary process that has recently moved on to a new stage with the creation of the National Address Gazetteer Database. Developed and managed in England and Wales by GeoPlace, a joint venture between the Local Government Association (LGA) and national mapping agency Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace went live in April 2011 and raises the possibility of authorities extracting even more value from their geographic information.
The predecessor of the National Address Gazetteer Database, the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), has been the prime tool for existing initiatives, together with the National Street Gazetteer (NSG). They have often been used to create new products for specific local services, some of which have been highlighted in the latest round of Exemplar Awards run by GeoPlace.
West Midlands fire service (WMFS) carried off the overall winner award for the creation of a new gazetteer named Chimp, which brought together a number of datasets into a single system.
The project involved creating or modifying more than 1m pieces of data to create a holding of 2.9m basic land and property units and 86,000 streets, along with more than 20,000 land and property identifier records to help correctly identify a location in an emergency call out. Using Chimp, all of the data was integrated into the brigade's new command and control system and its corporate gazetteer was extended across all of its business support systems.
The key result has been that the brigade is now better equipped to get crews to the right location more quickly, but it also has a valuable tool to support its long term planning. Chimp has already been used to manage more than 120,000 home safety checks in the West Midlands and in an area risk modelling project to support policy making.
Chimp has now been picked up by Staffordshire fire and rescue service and two others are said to be preparing to take it on.
In another case, Northumberland county council made use of the NSG in consolidating its 1,500 paper based traffic regulation orders (TROs) into a single database.
All the orders were scanned before being referenced against the NSG, following which the council surveyed all of its roads and reviewed each of the TROs. All of the information was placed in the new database, which was then used to create a layer in the council's geographic information system, so that anyone – including the public - could easily see the full details of the TROs on Ordnance Survey MasterMap. The database can also be used to produce reports and consultation documents.
Carl Dent, Northumberland's asset database manager, says the NSG was crucial in the validation of paper records and has become so in the introduction, revoking or updating of TROs. "In three years we have moved from a paper based system with lots of missing orders that relied on officers' memories to function to a full electronic system that is up to date and available to all," he says.
The National Address Gazetteer Database is going to add a new element to the capabilities in combining the NLPG with Ordnance Survey's address layer, the national dataset with addresses and their precise locations. It is also expected to gradually replace the NLPG as a basis for local land and property gazetteers.
Gayle Gander, marketing manager for GeoPlace, says that public authorities would not make direct use of the new gazetteer, but AddressBase products from Ordnance Survey through its public sector mapping agreement. This makes them free at the point of use for eligible organisations, although they have to pay for use of Royal Mail's Postcode Address File when utilising it in conjunction with the datasets.
A key feature is the provision of a unique reference number, described by Gander as a "golden thread", which makes it possible to find matches of a property in different datasets. This makes it possible to identify significant discrepancies, such as when the bins from an address are emptied but nobody there is on the council tax register or electoral roll. This could be used to correct a shortcoming in the delivery of a service, or to detect a potential case of fraud.
Equally important is that the information is now coming from all of the public sector, not just local authorities. Fire services and councils are already providing updates to GeoPlace, many on a daily basis, and Gander says that none of the information has gone more than a month without verification.
"Once embedded in local authorities there are all sorts of opportunities to do new things," he says. "Organisations are now testing it and we believe that in future it will be a core service offering for public authorities."
Two fire and rescue services, Hampshire and North Yorkshire, have emerged as early adopters. They are using the AddressBase Premium product from Aligned Assets, which includes details of non-addressable objects such as bus stops and park benches and can alert them to potential obstacles in an emergency.
How quickly others follow, particularly from local government, remains to be seen, as it may take time for councils and others to discover the value for the new products based on the National Address Gazetteer Database. But the long term trend indicates that public authorities are extracting more value from location based information, and the more detail it includes – and the closer it gets to real time – the more it is likely to be used.
This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the oin the Government Computing Network here.
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