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Project 14: NLIS, ScotLIS, and NLPG ProjectDescription
1.
This project is an integration of three sub-projects (NLIS,
ScotLIS, and NLPG) for which separate but linked ISB expressions of
interest had been submitted but which were combined for the purposes
of the ISB bid. Under the aegis of HM Land Registry (HMLR), the National
Land Information Service (NLIS) was designed to provide integrated
information on land and property in England and Wales. The Scottish
Land Information Service (ScotLIS), under the direction of the Registers
of Scotland (RoS), was to provide a similar service in Scotland.
And the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), under the direction
of the Ordnance Survey (OS), was to provide the “vocabulary” which
both NLIS and ScotLIS required – i.e. an index to land and property
information in Great Britain.
Project initiation, design and specification 4. The strategic purpose and form of the project were established before the ISB bid was made. But, as was evident from the submission of three separate expressions of interest for ISB funding, it had not been thought initially appropriate to integrate them fully at this stage. The case for the combined project was that the ISB funding would enable the three sub-projects to move to integration, scaled up from the pilot stage, at a faster pace. This was an essential part of the rationale for the project. As the bid document put it, “delays will . . . offer opportunities to other potential suppliers which could fragment the market and prevent data standards being adopted”[1]. Although these opportunities would have engaged the private sector earlier they would “not have embraced the protocols and standards developed, would lack an overall strategy, and are likely to occur only in high profit areas.” A significant feature of the initiative was, therefore, considered to be the construction of a technical and legal platform for private sector organisations at a later date to identify, build, implement and operate land and property services using government and other data within a consistent framework.5. The allocation of project costs between the partners and the ISB funding is presented in Table 1. The table also identifies the tasks that the ISB funding was designed to cover under each of the projects.
6. The potential benefits from the initiative were not quantified in the bid – it was the intention that the ISB funded tasks would include consultancy to validate and develop the economic appraisal and business case for building on the results of the pilot exercises funded by the initiative. The cost savings in the form of improved efficiencies in local authority use of the new systems were also be assessed as part of the ISB funded activities. In general terms the kind of potential for savings and benefits from the project is set out below.
8. The direction and management of the project had to be revised at a very early stage in its development (in the spring of 1999) because of the outcome of the strategic review carried out by OS with respect to its new Trading Fund status. The review concluded that the OS should withdraw from specific applications and should focus on its infra-structural role. This meant that its view of the ISB project and its role within it changed substantively. OS thought the project should work through invitations to third parties to bid to develop NLIS/ScotLIS services and wanted the OS role to be focused on providing the underpinning geo-referencing framework (on-line mapping). On this revised model of the project, those organisations closer to the nature of the application (.i.e. electronic search of the Land Registry and the local authority local land charge search) should take the lead in developing the main business and technical developments in support of that application. It would seem to be consistent with this model that the private sector could get involved in the application specific developments. 9. OS intended that whosoever picked up the specific applications, the OS would work towards the development of the NLPG infrastructure allowing others to take forward the client side as data services suppliers. However, IDeA also had an interest in the development of the NLPG given the statutory duties on local government. Even though it was not included in the NLPG project, by June 1999 IDeA had assumed the lead on the NLPG without access to ISB funding and the OS has not drawn down any of its ISB funding allocated to this component of the project. 10. Whilst the respective roles of local government and the OS in the NLPG ISB project took some time to resolve there was no delay in developing the NLPG. In order to take the NLIS project to market there had to be a working NLPG. In the first instance, this meant cleaning up and linking the records of local authorities (as the street naming and building numbering authorities) and changing the process of address creation. The planned development of NLPG is now ahead of schedule through the work of a public private partnership between IDeA and Property Intelligence. A GB wide copy of the dataset has been created and over 70 local authorities are in the process of linking to it. The project has been designated as a National Project and part of local government’s electronic service delivery targets under the Central Local Information Age Concordat. The NLPG is already starting to underpin other developments such linking electoral registers to create a national copy to British Standards. 11. These developments of the NLPG were undertaken without access to the ISB funding allocated to this part of the project. However, it is our understanding that agreement is close between the OS and IDeA for co-ordinated development between the NLPG as designed by IDeA/Property Intelligence and the OS topographical database using its buildings dataset. We understand that these terms of reference will form the basis of a proposal to the Treasury for use of the ISB allocation for this co-ordination purpose. 12. Both NLIS and ScotLIS are working within the overall direction provided by the NEB but started doing so with somewhat different approaches. ScotLIS wanted to develop a shopping mall approach to service provision in which more than electronic conveyancing services would be on offer whereas NLIS remained more focused on the conveyancing applications. As the projects have developed the approaches have converged. The NLIS Channels have become broader in focus based upon citizen centred approaches to requirements for Land and Property Information and each is thus a “shopping mall”. The ScotLIS development has been primarily focussed on a web site of data sources, similar in concept, but with less operational capacity than the NLIS hub. The main application of ScotLIS data has been the development of Glasgow City Council’s on-line services. The next step for ScotLIS is to provide applications with the integrated search capabilities of the ScotLIS. It is quite likely that the development of a channel for Scotland will only be economic if it utilises the NLIS hub since this is where the main costs are incurred. 13. The changes in the overall direction and shape of the ISB project clearly placed considerable pressure on its overall management. It was challenged by a lack of clear agreement between partners as to the objectives of the joint project and the respective roles and responsibilities of the partners. The pressure was compounded because there was no pooling of funds and, consequently, funding was based on separate budgets and cross-invoicing arrangements. This led to complex paper trails as the different accounting regimes between partners and sub-partners had to be negotiated. Whilst the associated administrative problems were not insurmountable, they did not provide much of an incentive to engage in partnership activities that required a good deal of cross-invoicing. 14. More significantly, the allocation of funds to separate accounting officers and the lack of any official status within ISB rules of local government constrained flexible specification and re-specification of roles and responsibilities between partners or potential partners. This clearly mattered with respect to the re-negotiation of the OS role. Having accounting officer responsibility for the NLPG sub-project, OS could not just hand over its ISB funds to IDeA, nor could it justify spending the funds in ways that were inconsistent with its strategic objectives, nor could it return the funds to Treasury without jeopardising the integrated nature of the project. Likewise local government had statutory responsibility which could not simply be handed to Ordnance Survey nor could it stop carrying out those responsibilities and using them to support the NLIS and ScotLIS projects. The constraints imposed by the financial accountability arrangements had, in this case, led to protracted negotiations culminating in a request for the funding to be rolled over into 2000/01. 15. Even where there was a single point of financial accountability, there could still be delays and administrative issues to resolve where a third party was invited to join the project that had not been included as a partner in the original bid. Thus, the British Geological Survey (BGS) was invited to put in a proposal for involvement in the ScotLIS project to develop on-line services with respect to its mining reports. This would contribute to the “shopping mall” approach being adopted by ScotLIS and its Management Board considered that the proposal met with the criteria under which the original bid for ISB had been agreed. After approval had been secured from the Treasury, the Accounting Officer gave authority to BGS to proceed. These processes took up some time and caused some delay. There are still some financial administration details being worked out in respect of how the funds are to be disbursed. At one point these matters threatened to curtail the development work but the obstacles have now been removed. 16. Finally, on project management issues, it should be noted that a formal management system (such as PRINCE 2) was not deployed even though the Implementation Plan made reference to the use of some of its techniques (e.g. post implementation review for all products that reach the market place). In the course of our consultations the project management processes were described as pragmatic and lacking in transparency. From our own inspection of the project implementation plan and progress report, we would be inclined to agree with the latter observation. The different sub-projects and accounting regimes were always going to make project management difficult and, in this case, the problems were compounded by the re-specification of the relationships between the sub-projects that was required in spring of 1999. Nevertheless, the format used for management reporting purposes rendered it even more difficult to establish what progress had been made against (revised) targets.
18.
Given the complexity of the project and its inter-relationships,
we would have expected more systematic management and monitoring systems
to have been in place. We found it difficult to integrate the financial
information in the progress report with the information on activities
and the responsible organisations. In fact, the progress report did
not give the impression of an integrated project at all, separate
accounts being provided of the three sub-projects. One of the comments
from our consultations was that, with hindsight, it would probably
have been better explicitly to acknowledge that there were three separate
projects and run them independently with the existing NEB taking an
overview to ensure that cross-fertilisation and synergic actions were
taken as and when appropriate. Additionality, longer term effects and value for money 20. The project was not assessed in the bid document nor by those we consulted as being fully additional. Rather, the ISB funding brought about a project of a different form and accelerated its introduction – on one assessment by 12 months. We would agree with the assessment of partial additionality.21. Despite the problems that the project had to overcome, there was a general view amongst those we consulted that it was achieving, or would achieve, as much if not more than was expected of it. Electronic conveyancing will be on users' desks as a consequence of the project much earlier than otherwise would have been the case. Moreover, the project’s cost-effectiveness was rated as strong and better than expected. 22. It is too early to say whether the project as a whole will continue after ISB funding in the same form. What does seem clear is that some components of it (e.g. ScotLIS) will be likely to continue at a higher level of activity. Collaboration between partners has been fostered by the project even where there have been difficult negotiations between them. In particular, a step change was reported in the relationships between central government departments/agencies and local authorities – the latter had now found an effective single voice that had made collaborative working much practical and positive. 23. It was reported by consultees that the ISB project had both wider positive and negative effects within their organisations. The negative effects came through a lack of clarity about respective roles and responsibilities that led to unnecessary commitment of resources and effort. The positive effects came from the raised profile given to the potential benefits of partnership and collaborative action especially in the context of an innovative project (like Project 14) where the exchange of information and know-how was particularly valuable. 25. The project was financed through separate pots of money with separate accounting officer responsibilities and this clearly created some problems – both of an administrative and a more substantive kind (see paragraph 13). Arguably, it might have been better had the pots of money been merged but in this particular case, where there were three distinct sub-projects, the case for merger was less clear-cut and it might have made matters even more complicated. 26. It should be noted that, even with separate accountability lines, there were reported difficulties (or potential difficulties) with a lead department/agency meeting its accountability requirements when outputs on which it depended were being generated by another department/agency. This suggests to us the importance that must be attached to clear allocation of responsibilities and roles between departments/agencies and to the use of formal management information system.
[1] Harnessing the Power of the Information Age: ISB Bid for Funding (page 41); NLIS, ScotLIS, and NLPG; October 1998 |
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