Use your gazetteer to detect missing local tax revenue

Every planning authority has a Local Land and Property Gazetteer that can answer these questions. In each record there’s a UPRN, a Unique Property Reference Number, that’s a golden thread for identifying properties and linking cross-departmental information.

UPRNs can be added to existing records in any department. Many councils are doing this already, using UPRNs to get their council tax and non-domestic rates in sync with intelligence from across the authority.

Several authorities have done just this, including:

• North Somerset Council - £7,000,000 recovered from one complex, commercial site and ongoing revenue collection of £175,000 each year
• Leeds City Council here and here - discovered £92,826 additional annual revenue
• Bath & North East Somerset - collected an extra £320,000 in business rates from data matching
• Salford City Council - reduced their outstanding council tax queries by 43%
• A consortium across Wales - identified over £850,000 missing revenue, a return of 7:1.
• Barnsley Council – found an additional rateable value for all new premises in the region of £170,000
• Huntingdonshire District Council – data matching identified back charging of £230,000 with additional annual income of £50,000.
  

GeoPlace is here to guide you in how to get more from using UPRNs to identify missing revenue streams. It’s your data already, so all it will cost you is officer time.

Below, watch our introductory video and download our guide on ‘How to detect missing revenue’. They will walk you through how to compare and link datasets in order to detect anomalies and find sources of missing revenue.