Few local authorities are ready for the launch in September of the
online National Land Information Service but without it many of
Tony Blair's initiatives to put government services online will
falter, writes Nick Huber.
Plans to create the UK's first national database of land and
property are propelling e-government towards a make-or-break
crisis.
Industry experts have warned that attempts to deliver efficient
online services to the public will be set back substantially if the
National Land Information Service (NLIS) is not up to scratch when
it is launched in September.
Crucially NLIS will depend on the National Land and Property
Gazetteer (NLPG) for its index of land and property for the whole
of the UK. This is a public private partnership - a model being
widely used across public sector IT.
In addition to extending online access to Land Registry data and
reducing waiting times for property conveyancing, the NLPG will
also provide a foundation for how government delivers services,
drawing together unwieldy address and property databases.
Other national initiatives - including legislation from the Lord
Chancellor's Department to pave the way for electronic conveyancing
- also depend on having a national database of land and
property.
The idea is that government and citizens will have online access to
the same data, from any place and at any time.
But last week Computer Weekly revealed serious concerns among local
authority IT managers about whether NLIS would be ready to be
publicly launched in September.
Only about 10% of councils are fully connected to NLIS, according
to figures from the supplier of the NLIS hub - a two-way connection
for sending and receiving information electronically. In addition,
only about 20% of local authorities have created their own local
gazetteers and are linked to the NLPG.
The origins of the NLPG date back to the Doomsday 2000 project in
1991 - a bid to provide online and up-to-date information about
land and property in the UK.
NLIS - a joint venture between the Land Registry and the
Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) - was set up earlier this
year to provide integrated information on land and property in
England and Wales. Scotland will be served by its own version, the
Scottish Land Information Service (Scotlis).
However, to create a national land and property database local
authorities have first had to create their own local
databases.
A supplier, Intelligent Addressing, is responsible for helping
councils to tighten up their local address database and weed out
inaccurate data. The firm also has responsibility for the creation
of the local data-matching process as well as the creation of the
NLPG on behalf of Local Government Information House (LGIH), a
subsidiary of IDeA.
Property industry professionals and solicitors will submit
pay-as-you-go requests to NLIS through channels provided by private
companies. They will pass on information requests to the NLIS hub,
run by US information specialist MacDonald Detwiller and Associates
(MDA).
MDA will send the information electronically to the relevant
agency, such as the Land Registry or local authority, before
passing it back through the channel, and eventually to the property
buyer.
The principle is to give business and the public access to a
one-stop shop of land and property information. But delve a little
deeper and the reality is more complex.
While one fifth of local authorities have created their own
gazetteers, about 30% of councils are still creating the database.
The rest have to submit a plan about how they will create their
local gazetteer.
Local authorities have no statutory obligation to produce a local
gazetteer so the prospect of having a workable service by September
looks remote to many industry observers. It could take up to five
years for local authorities to incorporate all their address files
or data sets into their local gazetteers, according to Intelligent
Addressing.
The company has already created a national land and property
gazetteer of its own which includes data for the whole of England
and Wales.
Progress on the NLIS service has also been modest. According to
recent figures from MDA, only 10% of local authorities have a full
electronic connection to the information hub.
But at the less advanced end of the scale about three-quarters of
local authorities still send and receive property searches on
paper-based systems.
The creation of a local land and property gazetteer is a formidable
technological and administrative task for councils. Local
authorities may have anything from 50 to 200 data sets of
addresses, stored in several departments and often with inaccurate
or duplicated data.
The local government IT managers' group Socitm last week questioned
whether the September deadline for the launch of NLIS was
realistic. And while it supported the drive to introduce a national
address set it also attacked the way the NLIS and NLPG project had
been handled.
"The first thing we knew was when our chief executives were written
to by the Improvement and Development Agency," said Robin Carsberg,
Socitm president.
Industry consultants estimate the cost of creating a local
gazetteer at a minimum of £100,000. This would include software for
data matching, a separate database to hold the information plus
staff time and a project manager to oversee the initiative.
"As soon as you start to run into problems it could be two or three
times this figure," said Robert James, a partner at White Wulf
Consultants and a former manager of the Postal Address File.
But Andrew Larner, head of Information Age Practice and director of
LGIH, remains bullish about the future of NLIS and the
all-important national gazetteer. He said it would provide a fund
of about £200m to help cover IT and planning costs and added that
councils would make significant cost savings by standardising their
address files.
Suppliers such as Intelligent Addressing believe that both the NLPG
and NLIS will take time to mature. "We are moving from the stone
age to the 21st century in a matter of a few years," said Michael
Nicholson, chairman of Intelligent Addressing, "You can't do it
overnight."
The case for local land and property gazetteers linked to a
national database in a standardised format is not in doubt. It will
play an essential role in the drive to spread and improve
government services delivered online.
But the scope and ambition of the project will pose formidable
challenges to local authority IT managers and the private sector
suppliers co-ordinating the project. Some councils are already
lagging behind and even suppliers involved in the project privately
admit that it could have been handled better.
How the system will work
Property industry
professionals and solicitors will submit pay-as-you-go requests to
NLIS through channels provided by private companies. They will pass
on information requests to the NLIS hub, run by MDA, which will
forward the information to the relevant agency, such as the Land
Registry or local authority, before passing it back through the
channel to the customer.
1. IDeA - Improvement and Development Agency
2. LGIH - Local Government Information House
3. NLPG - National Land and Property Gazetteer
4. NLIS - National Land Information Service
5. Scotlis - Scottish Land Information Service