Huntingdonshire District Council Win Award....

08 November 2007, 5:35pm

Huntingdonshire District Council Win Award for Best Performing Authority

A team from Huntingdonshire District Council picked up the prestigious national award for ‘Best Performing Authority’ at the 2007 Exemplar Awards. The award recognises the efforts made in improving the Council’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) the central repository of land and property information that underpins all service delivery. Everything the Council does from collecting Council Tax to refuse collection requires an address and it is the Council’s continued efforts in improving the quality of their address gazetteer that has led to its recognition as the ‘Best Performing Authority’. The team from Huntingdonshire were also highly commended in another category NLPG-‘Most Creative Use’ for its work with Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Fire & Rescue Service.

The NLPG is a key government led initiative to improve efficiency and service delivery. The sharing of accurate address information across local government departments, emergency services, national and regional government is a vital component in the drive to facilitate and improve efficiency and service delivery. The NLPG makes this possible through linking local authorities’ Local Land & Property Gazetteers via a central hub, which validates the data in order to provide a single and definitive source of national addressing for wider use.

The process of building and maintaining Local Land and Property Gazetteers is one that has little visibility outside a local authority but it is one that is going on within every council within Britain today. Every house and property now has a unique property reference number (UPRN), a sort of super postcode held in a central database (LLPG) which provides all Council departments and computer systems with a definitive reference for all property.

The Best Performing Authority is awarded to the authority, which has the highest points score based upon a number of different parameters. The award is a reflection of the efforts made by Huntingdonshire in maintaining and improving its gazetteer. Huntingdonshire scored maximum points, matching its gazetteer 100% with centrally held Council Tax and Non-Domestic Rates registers, by returning change-only updates, new houses, demolitions etc, to the central NLPG hub on a daily basis and for updating its gazetteer to the new 2006 British Standard.

www.nlpg.org.uk

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