MacDonald Dettwiler Ltd (MDL), a subsidiary of Canadian firm MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd (MDA), is entering the final stages of the implementation phase of the Local Authority Modernisation Programme (LAMP) in South Norfolk District Council and Slough Borough Council and is working on a study with Waveney District Council. The Slough contract is worth £1.1 million and the South Norfolk one stands at £1.2 million. Discrepancies are partly down to the number of departments the councils wish to automate and both work on standard contracts that do not require payment until the service has been installed and made live.
A contract for the Waveney project, which is for a much more comprehensive service than South Norfolk, could be ready to sign by the end of March.
LAMP is a part of the National Land Information Service (NLIS) programme. It is ultimately a managed services facility, with investment funding provided by MDA under the auspices of the Local Government Information House, enabling local authorities to reach level three of NLIS and meet the Government’s 2005 e-government targets in that sector.
The underlying intention of NLIS is to automate land and property searches from solicitor’s offices right through to local authorities, enabling property searches to take less than a quarter of an hour rather than 10 working days.
Solicitors and licensed conveyancers will ultimately be able to retrieve land and property title information from the Land Registry and conduct local authority searches, as well as searching for other information like environmental or geological data relating to the property.
MDA’s areas of expertise are impresively diverse. It principally operates under two groups, Information Products and Information Systems. Products provides legal and asset information in the US as well as UK and Canada, accessing current and accurate information on millions of properties.
The Systems group monitors the planet, including orbiting optical and radar satellites, sensors mounted in aircraft, and ground-based systems that acquire, process and distribute image information.
The depth of MDA’s expertise is apparent in one of its subsidiaries, MDA Robotics, a world leader in space robotics which developed the Canadarm for use on the Space Shuttle.
Andy Moreton, LAMP programme manager, said: “The idea behind LAMP is to help the local authorities automate the entire land and property search process within the local authority. We identify and supply the hardware and software that will do the process for them and join-up the departments holding the data required to complete the search.
“All the data held by the departments needs to be digitised and entered on the system so that the whole process can be fully automated.
“There is normally a big paper trail exercise within a local authority to complete a property search, involving planning and building control, highways, environmental health, etc, basically any information that a house buyer may need to know about their potential property.
“When we first go into a Local Authority we spend three to four months on a LAMP study looking at all their systems and data and advise on what would be needed to automate their processes and advise them what it would cost to implement the necessary system.
“When we enter full implementation, it covers all the hardware, software and data required and on the standard contract, seven years management of the system once it is operational.
“MacDonald Dettwiler provides the investment funding for the implementation of the system. When the systems are in place, MDA then manages the system and the councils pay a monthly service charge over the seven years of the contract – seven years is the standard contract length.”
When MDA won the NLIS contract from Whitehall, it was one of the Government’s first PFI e-government initiatives and over 90 companies expressed an interest.
As part of the contract, MDA won the right to offer local authorities the LAMP service.
Moreton said: “The ultimate objective is for all services to go through NLIS. There are now literally thousands of searches being made every week via NLIS.
“The LAMP team are based in Cambridge, which is a great location at the moment. We see a lot of potential for LAMP in the Midlands and the East of England and have another four possible projects in the pipeline.”
Quelle: Business Weekly, 05.03.2004
