Reaping the benefits of authoritative addressing

At Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, end users and support staff are united in their praise of the NLPG. Service staff fully appreciate the power of having GIS-data aligned to authoritative addressing to help them make better decisions. In particular, staff in planning are benefiting from being able to confirm properties alongside local, map-based constraints and to maintain the integrity of processed claims.

Staff in the ICT department welcome the significant savings generated by the initiative in IT resources. As a result, the council has now integrated systems from planning, building control, housing, estates, environmental health, plus council tax and non-domestic rates, and it is working on linking remaining systems. The authority’s next step is to transfer the benefits directly to the public by placing linked information online for clients to search by address.

Councillor John Redfern, Cabinet Member for accessible services said:

"The creation of a definitive database of addresses has saved the council a great deal of time and money while enabling us to speed up service delivery. This has to be good news for service users and the taxpayer generally. Now, we’re going to transfer the technology to our website so that customers can search addresses for services such as planning, building control and land charges. One of the key aims of the NLPG was to join services together, and there is real evidence that this is happening."