Future of e-government may turn on land register success
- Posted:
- 00:00 02 Aug 2001
- Topics:
- Databases
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.
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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
