Councils support the Fire Service.....

24 August 2007, 10:29am

Councils support the Fire Service in modernisation.

Local councils are in the vanguard of helping emergency services to get to the right place as efficiently as possible. How? By providing comprehensive information on addresses and streets which every council has to collect.

The information is then handled through the National Land and Property Gazetteer and National Street Gazetteer services, and sent to the newly establish Regional Fire Control Centres.

In the past when someone dialled 999 for the fire service the call could have gone to the most local Control Centre linked to each of the 46 local Fire and Rescue Authorities. Government is now introducing nine streamlined, amalgamated control centres, where a call will be moved to the first available operator. Underpinning this is the need to locate places nationally, and quickly through the sharing of the standard geographic information (maps and addresses).

Local Government's Improvement and Development Agency, has delivered a massive procurement project, called the Mapping Services Agreement, to ensure that Councils, Police, Fire, Passenger Transport Executives, National Parks and other local government organisations have access to the same geographic data, enabling them to co-ordinate their response to any large-scale incident ranging from an environmental disaster to a terrorist attack.

www.idea.gov.uk

GeoConnexion UK