WIREDGOV

Putting the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) at the heart of Council service delivery can save between £15 and £24m a recent local government report revealed. The NLPG exemplifies one of a range of uses of geographic information that leads to productivity increases in local service provision.

'The Value of Geospatial Information to Local Public Service Delivery in England and Wales', published by the Local Government Group seeks to examine the economic impact of the use of geospatial information upon service delivery. The report also highlights the role played by the NLPG in many of the key service delivery areas provided by Local Government.

The adoption of geospatial information resulted in an increase in GDP of approximately £320m higher in 2008-9 than if geospatial information hadn't been adopted. The report suggests that this could be expected to rise to £560m by 2014-5.

The report coincides with the release of a new brochure 'Save money and deliver better services to citizens' sent out to every local authority, which outlines how the NLPG can help local authorities:

• save money
• deliver better services
• know where customers are and which public services they are using
• reduce waste and duplication
• make evidence-based decision making
• make better use of location-based intelligence to transform service delivery
• work with partners
• comply with legislation.

Applications of the NLPG are numerous and the principle behind its use is simple. The NLPG can provide a single source of accurate addresses and precise geographic location for all Council departmental systems. Maintaining one source of addresses is both efficient and cost effective and the report cites some specific examples. More importantly it opens up opportunities to join up services and the systems used to deliver them. The report features a number of specific application case studies enabled by the NLPG such as, street cleaning, asset management, incident tracking, flood damage alleviation and crime statistics.

The full report from the LG Group can be accessed from:
http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=12079357 or
http://www.consultingwhere.com/reports.html.

The Save money and deliver better services to citizens can be accessed from the NLPG website , www.nlpg.org.uk

PR Contact: William Allbrook, Tel: +44(0)1666 826641, Email: william@allbrook.net

Intelligent Addressing contact: Gayle Gander, Head of Marketing, +44(0)207 747 3500, E-mail: ggander@intelligent-addressing.co.uk, www.intelligent-addressing.co.uk

Notes to editors:
The NLPG is a joint venture between all local authorities in England and Wales, the Local Government Information House, part of the Local Government Group and Intelligent Addressing Limited.

Intelligent Addressing is an information management specialist and data provider, focusing on land and property data, particularly addresses. As well as being the joint venture partner with local government in the development of the NLPG, IA also manages the national datasets for local government; the NLPG and the National Street Gazetteer (NSG). Data is an essential yet high-cost resource to maintain. IA helps organisations find, utilise and manage the information that they need and provides services to any organisation that depends on the accuracy, manageability and versatility of its information.

Local Government Information House is part of the Local Government Group. LGIH concentrates on core projects that have maximum benefit for the whole of local government. To this end, LGIH focuses on geographical information-related projects, as the standardisation of this type of data affects more than 80 per cent of what local government does. LGIH acts as an intermediary between the public and the private sector enabling it to negotiate with private companies on behalf of local authorities in order to provide key parts of a technical infrastructure for improved service delivery.

Local Government Association is the single voice for local government. As a voluntary membership body, funded almost entirely by the subscriptions of our 422 member authorities in England and Wales, we lobby and campaign for changes in policy and legislation on behalf of our member councils and the people and communities they serve. We work with and on behalf of our membership to deliver our shared vision of an independent and confident local government sector, where local priorities drive public service improvement in every city, town and village and every councillor acts as a champion for their ward and for the people they represent. www.local.gov.uk/association