In its 2005 report entitled ‘Transformational Government’, the Cabinet Office states that: ‘data sharing is integral to transforming services.’  Huntingdonshire District Council has certainly proven this to be true.   The council has been able to use its new integrated data and GIS to improve a range of council services and make significant, annual cost savings. 

Huntingdonshire is a predominantly rural area covering 90,952 hectares in the East of England.  The District Council serves a population of over 160,000 people and has a strong commitment to providing high levels of customer service. 

The Challenge

 For many years, Huntingdonshire District Council operated four separate geographic information systems (GIS) and had at least five separate address data sets in use in various departments.  Often the same name and address data was held in different formats in different systems, making it impossible for the council to do any kind of corporate-wide data analysis.

 “We had islands of technology and silos of information dotted around the council,” explains Dan Horrex, Information Manager at Huntingdonshire District Council.  “None of it was shared and much of it was duplicated.  As a result, we just weren’t deriving the benefits of GIS.” 

 As a first step towards improving its use of data, the council focused its attention on improving the quality of its data.  It matched data from its five existing data sets to create a new Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG).  Through this process, it resolved over 30,000 data inconsistencies.  

 Next, the council then matched its LLPG to the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) to correct a further 5,000 discrepancies and allocated unique property reference numbers to 20,000 new properties.  It then supplemented this address data with additional information from all areas of the council.  Through this process, Huntingdonshire District Council gained one centralised, accurate source of data.  However, it still needed a way to make this data available to employees across multiple departments, in a format that they could easily use and understand.  In short, it needed a new corporate approach to GIS. 

Solution and Capability Delivered

 The council carried out a thorough evaluation process and tested GIS solutions from six separate vendors, before selecting a suite of products from ESRI (UK). 

“ESRI is the market leader for GIS and its products scored highly in our evaluations,” says Joe York, GIS manager at Huntingdonshire District Council.  “The ESRI solutions also offered strong integration with other technologies already used within the council.  The alternative GIS solutions would have required bespoke interfaces, which would have been a large expense.”

The council identified two categories of GIS users: power users, who would create, maintain and analyse data; and viewer users, who would access the data to support their work or respond to customer enquiries.  To meet the needs of these two groups of people, it implemented solutions from ESRI’s ArcGIS suite, including a multi-functional tool for editing and analysing spatial data, and an Intranet-based GIS for distributing maps and geographic data easily throughout the council. 

These ESRI GIS solutions gave Huntingdonshire District Council the ability to unlock and fully exploit the information contained in its LLPG.  Council employees can now use the Intranet browser to easily and instantly access data on everything from trees and dustbins to planning applications. 

 “The beauty of GIS is that it takes our textual address data and visualises it,” says David Lloyd, LLPG manager at Huntingdonshire District Council.  “For the first time, we could lever out all the wonderful information about our district to users.”

 The implementation of corporate-wide GIS led to a dramatic increase in the use of geographic data.  When the LLPG was first created, there were only two services that were using it actively.  Now there are at least fifteen different applications that use the LLPG dynamically and another thirty that link into it regularly via GIS.  

 “All departments can use the data, but they don’t need to have staff to maintain it,” says Lloyd.  “GIS gives us the ability to interrogate different data sets and enables us to easily comprehend a whole range of different issues relating to a single property.”

 “The GIS is fully dynamic,” adds York.  “As soon as a member of staff makes a change to a property or piece of land, other employees in other departments can see it straight away.” 

The Benefits

 The use of GIS has led to efficiency gains and service improvements across a large number of different departments.  The time that the council has saved from not having to maintain five separate data sets has, alone, led to savings. 

 “GIS is used extensively throughout the council,” says Horrex.  “I estimate that at least 50% of council workers couldn’t do their jobs without it now.”

 Some of the main applications of GIS within Huntingdonshire District Council include:

 §          Collecting council tax revenues

In recognition of the quality of its LLPG, Huntingdonshire District Council was selected to be one of the pilot authorities in the Valuebill project.  Launched by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), this government initiative aims to speed up the valuation of properties. 

When Huntingdonshire District Council compared its new LLPG to the national data records used by the Valuation Office Agency, it found that there were several discrepancies.  Some properties were missing altogether, while others were assigned to the wrong parish code.  “By using GIS and our LLPG to help us identify and correct these discrepancies, we have been able to increase revenues by £180,000 per year,” says Horrex.  “This figure is made up of £174,000 from business rates and £8,000 from council tax.”

§          Optimising refuse collection routes

Every couple of years, Huntingdonshire District Council reviews the routes taken by its refuse collection vehicles and takes steps to optimise them.  “In the past this always used to be a paper exercise, with someone sitting in the truck taking notes about the route and time taken in each street,” explains York.  “With over 50 vehicles in the fleet, that was an awful lot of trucks and routes to follow.”

 Since then, the council has used GPS to automatically track the routes taken by its vehicles.  Data on routes and timings is fed back to the council’s GIS, where each round is displayed on a map of the district, along with information about the number of bins and travel time.  Refuse managers can see how specific rounds are growing with the addition of new houses and can use the maps to optimise collection routes.  When wheeled bins were recently introduced, the whole process of shipping them out was planned using GIS, to ensure cost effective distribution. 

 §          Processing planning applications

GIS is used in the planning department to help provide a better service to customers.   Residents can now access the council’s GIS from its web site to check the status of their planning application.  They either conduct a search for a specific property or can zoom in on a section of a map, such as a specific parish or street to gain an overview of all planning applications in their area.  The site also includes the facility for residents to comment on or object to planning applications online.  The service attracts over 4,000 users each month.

 Known as ‘Public Access’, this planning application initiative helped Huntingdonshire District Council to perform strongly against the criteria set out in the government’s Pendleton Report.  The council achieved 20 out of a possible 21 points for providing improved customer service, and was awarded additional funding as a result.  

§          Managing the environment

GIS doesn’t just record and display information relating to properties, but to land and environment features as well.  For example, Huntingdonshire District Council is currently using GIS to record tree preservation orders.  It is deploying a mobile GIS solution from ESRI (UK) to plot the precise locations of old and protected trees in the region. 

 In the environmental health department, GIS has recently been used to help build up a full picture of potentially hazardous land in the district.  The team pulled together paper-based maps and reports going back to the 1900s and identified old gravel pits, dumps and other potential sources of contamination.  This information is now made available via the Intranet to all users in a digital map format.

§          Providing prompt customer service 

GIS and the LLPG are used in the council’s telephone call centre, to help customer advisors respond quickly and accurately to enquiries.  “GIS and the LLPG are at the forefront of our service delivery in the call centre,” says Horrex.  “A map or picture is much easier to understand than text-based lists.”  The team handles calls on everything from abandoned cars and faulty street lighting to commercial waste and council tax. 

“Using GIS, customer advisors can, for example, identify the precise location of fly tipping along a rural road that may be several miles long,” explains Horrex.  “This saves us time and money, as the waste collection team can then locate the dumped rubbish much more quickly.”

Huntingdonshire District Council is in no doubt about the value that its corporate-wide GIS capability has delivered.  “We have calculated that Huntingdonshire District Council saves in the region of £100,000 every year, and brings in additional revenues of approximately £180,000, thanks to its use of GIS and integrated land and property data,” says Horrex.  “And on top of this, we are able to deliver improved services to customers across multiple departments.”

The Future

Huntingdonshire District Council has received a number of high-profiled awards in recognition of the ways in which it has improved its use of council data.  These include two separate Exemplar Awards from the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) for Local Government. 

 In the months and years ahead, the council plans to build on this success and continue to use GIS to help it deliver improved customer service and reduce costs.  For example, it is currently developing a new way to manage information relating to land searches.  “This is a very paper-intensive and manual process at the moment,” says Horrex.  “When people move house and request searches, almost every department in the council has the potential to contribute information.  By using GIS, we will be able to cut through all the different layers of data in a matter of seconds and significantly improve our speed of response to residents.”

 At present, the council is building new offices, which will include a new customer call centre.  Once opened, the facility will provide customer service representatives with access to the GIS to enable them to respond easily to enquiries on any public service provided by the council. 

 In addition, the council plans to make more GIS information available to the general public via its web site.  Residents will be able to access an interactive online map to report faults and problems, such as fly tipping and road defects.   “We have got a lot of ideas and will be concentrating on making them all happen,” says York. 

 He concludes: “We have a good working relationship with ESRI (UK).  It gives us the support we need and has all the right GIS technology, from desktop solutions to mobile and online solutions, to meet our needs well into the future.”
 
“We have calculated that Huntingdonshire District Council saves in the region of £100,000 every year, and brings in additional revenues of approximately £180,000, thanks to its use of GIS and integrated land and property data.  And on top of this, we are able to deliver improved services to customers across multiple departments.”  Dan Horrex, Information Manager, Huntingdonshire District Council.