Council trio tighten grip on public data

Brent, Manchester and Surry embark on data clean-up initiatives

Three councils have inked a new deal to clean their data and improve public services.

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London Borough of Brent, Manchester City Council and Surrey County Council have all opted for Experian QAS Gateway for citizen address verification, which harnesses the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG).

The NLPG is a dedicated address list set up for local government which contains over 30 million residential and business addresses. Data held within it is cross checked using in-house matching software so that a multiplicity of departmental databases can be updated with changes to inviduals' details at the same time.

Brent data integrity services manager Chris Waterman told silicon.com the service underpins the Tell Us Once initiative being promoted within the government. The scheme focuses on reducing the amount of contact a citizen has to make with their council to make changes to their personal details.

"We will know if someone is new to the council and we can then go out to them proactively for additional services," he said.

According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, local governments could save £54.4m a year collectively by using NLPG data in this sort of way.

Waterman also said the service will also be used to verify benefits claims - for example, it could be used to check if more than one person lives at an address where an individual is claiming a single person's council tax discount.

The data matching project, including the address verification service, will cost Brent more than £500,000 for up to five years.