Half of the local authorities in England and Wales who are not linked to the National Land Information Service (NLIS), need to move quickly and “change their working practices”, a Government minister has said. Tom McNulty, minister for housing planning and regeneration, said that while there has been much "hard work" to set up NLIS, which aims to speed up the property market, councils now need to put effort into necessary internal restructuring so that they can link to the service.
“It will greatly help the many people involved in buying and selling properties, the conveyancing community and councils themselves if councils and conveyancers switch to NLIS,” he said in a foreword to a booklet written by Kable on the service, published on 29 April 2003. “Government has made a central investment on behalf of all of us. The many parties have worked hard to overcome organisational boundaries that so often make such projects difficult…We now only need those remaining councils to change their working practices as quickly as possible.”
McNulty’s comments come amid increasing concern that councils are making slow progress towards joining the service, which aims to fully automate the existing paper based property search process.
The Government’s Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) had a target for all councils to be connected to NLIS by the end of this year but it now is likely that, due to the number of councils still to be connected, it will be missed.
The service, which is run as a public private partnership between supplier Macdonald Dettwiler and the IDeA, is often cited as a potential leading e-government project, but it has so far foundered on local authority inertia, with councils placing it low on their list of priorities.
As part of the drive to encourage local authority participation, the NLIS partnership launched the booklet which was written and researched by Kable in order to illustrate the benefits that the service can bring.
Despite the sluggish take up, those councils that have joined are said to be happy with the service. Steve Gosling senior administration officer at Birmingham City Council, one of the first NLIS members, enthused about the benefits.
“We could see right away how much post and paperwork it could eliminate. We’re already talking to our software providers finding a way to link directly to NLIS through XML schema. That way there would be no logging on. The service would be seamless.”
Quelle: KableNet
