Technophobe councils jeopardise e-government

The creation of a nationwide property database which would simplify the buying and selling of houses and help councils reclaim millions of pounds of lost revenue is being threatened by the 'luddite' attitudes of many local authorities.

The National Land Information Service (NLIS), a project to automate large parts of the house-buying process, is due to be launched later this month.

But only 100 of over 400 local authorities in England and Wales have so far put the measures in place needed to get it up and running.

The NLIS is the first of a range of e-government services to be based on a giant nationwide data project, the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG).

The NLPG is meant to create a single, consistent and up-to-date list of all the properties in the country.

Some of the local authorities which have managed to implement the NLPG found that they didn't know about as many as one in ten properties in their area. The discovery has enabled them to reclaim millions of pounds of lost rent.

However, three out of four local authorities have not yet put this process in place. Even the so-called e-city of Hastings hasn't bothered to get involved.

The half-finished NLPG project threatens to make e-government a two-tier service. Some parts of the country will have an efficient conveyancing system, along with other services, based on well-maintained NLPG records, while others will have second-rate services, hobbled by inefficient data.

The organisations in charge of implementing NLPG, the Home Office's Innovation and Development Agency (IdeA), and private company Intelligent Addressing, have created stand-in local databases in a bid to bridge the gap. But they may end up making the situation worse rather than better.

To work properly, the local databases have to be built from a number of different address lists which local councils keep, and which often conflict with each other. Some local authorities have more than 30 separate address sets. A proper NLPG database should reconcile them all.

However, the substitute sets that IdeA and database integrator Intelligent Addressing have built are only put together from three sources - the Valuation Office's non-domestic ratings list, the Council Tax list, and a list supplied by the Ordnance Survey, called AddressPoint.

Tony Black, operations director at Intelligent Addressing, conceded that the lists wouldn't be accurate, at least to start with. "I wouldn't want to overstate the quality," he said. "Sitting here in London we are not able to resolve problems out there in the country."

However, one well-placed source told silicon.com: "The difficulty is that the local authorities will be maintaining their own data sets too. This project just adds one more inconsistent data set for them to deal with."

Will you be living in a second-class area? Has your local authority bothered to get involved in the NLPG? Click http://www.silicon.com/a48861 to see the list of lost authorities which have signed up to date