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Suffolk Coastal District Council’s (SCDC) corporate GIS delivers efficiency

Local government: Planning and delivery

Suffolk Coastal District Council’s (SCDC) corporate GIS delivers efficiency
 The new GGP overlay identifying former land uses has enabled Suffolk Coastal District Council to offer an enhanced service as well as savings of £1 260 per year
Tim Davidson, Environmental Protection team

At a glance

Suffolk Coastal District CouncilSupport from members and senior officers at SCDC helps to implement a corporate geographical information system (GIS) that allows staff and citizen access to geographic information; allows the sharing of data and avoids costs in excess of £1 500.

Printable version: download PDFVisit the Suffolk Coastal District Council website

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After an initial project focused upon digitising all development controls records in 2005, it became apparent that GIS was an increasingly valuable tool to manage data and make information more widely available. A corporate GIS solution was required that would lead to a culture of ‘capture data once and share with all'.

Working with their GIS supplier, GGP Systems, and Ordnance Survey data, the Property Information team at SCDC has built a corporate solution with 347 layers of information that allows staff to have simple and quick access to a range of geographic information. The eGGP online application has, in addition, provided a platform for the authority to be able to publish data across the Internet, allowing citizens to study data that they would previously have had to visit the Council Offices to gain access to (between August 2009 and January 2010 SCDC recorded 1 372 hits to this website).

A more recent project, working with their Contaminated Land Officer, has successfully avoided costs of £1 500 and introduced savings of £1 260 per anum. The officer had been using a software package to manage contaminated land/former land uses information, but it could not accommodate the way he needed to work and additional licences were very expensive. He was also receiving more and more enquiries from customers relating to former land uses and wanted to publish information to enable them to find their own answers. The Property Information team built a layer in GIS that would allow the sharing of data with colleagues without the requirement to buy further licences. The former land use data is now viewed by at least four separate service areas and the public.

View of online GIS eGGPView of shared former land use information from within Suffolk Coastal’s corporate GIS

  • £1 500 cost avoidance (additional licence fees and consultancy/development costs).
  • 194 users of GIS across the authority.
  • 347 corporate layers available (varying in content from tree preservation orders, enforcement and stop notices, and listed buildings to dog restriction zones and dog bin locations).
  • Culture of ‘capture data once and share with all’.
  • Data sharing with customers via GGP’s online GIS, eGGP.

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