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Brent Council Case Study

Brent Council is one of the UK’s most innovative and advanced users of technology in the local government sector. The Council is rated 2nd in the National Audit Office Survey of council web sites, and is consistently ranked in the top 20 by SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management). Brent Council’s web site is an excellent example of e-government in action, and of the ways in which mapping services can enhance the provision of local information.

“If it’s geographically related and it’s in our web site, it will link into our mapping system, provided by Multimap,” says Dane Wright, Strategy and Service Delivery Manager of brent.gov.uk. Brent’s A-Z of local council services contains more than 400 categories of information, covering education, libraries, leisure, entertainment and social services, planning, highways, public transport, environmental health and more. All categories use Brent’s mapping system.

“Not only is mapping a powerful tool to aid people in finding out about a location, it soon becomes an alternative navigation tool in place of lists of text. Visual mapping presents information in an easily digestible way,” says Wright.

As well as using maps to enhance its A-Z of council services, Brent Council uses mapping to help users find their local polling stations through its Polling Station Finder and to plan journeys using public transport through its Journey Planner. Brent has also pioneered a local information email alert system that lets subscribers know about events and issues in their area, such as the filing of applications for planning permission and entertainment licenses, roadworks, and crime reporting. Each email offers a link to a map, to help subscribers find the related locations.

Because Brent Council has linked its entire property database to its mapping system, the system also supports the Council’s own internal work. When Brent’s citizens call to report broken streetlamps, abandoned cars, and other issues that affect them in their local areas, the council workers who take the calls can easily pinpoint the reported locations.

Dane Wright concludes, “When we first started with Multimap it was because we wanted a ‘where’s my nearest?’ facility. Since then, our use of mapping has become even more sophisticated. Multimap was able to accept all of our data categories. From schools, to planning to waste – or anything else we might want to add – the flexibility in the Multimap system enabled us to extend the same principle of geographic searching to all council property information.”