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Smart people use the smart city

Smart people use the smart city



David Leslie of the City of Edinburgh Council explains how seamless service and information delivery is the goal of its Smart City programme



Edinburgh has always been a city of innovation and ideas: philosophers, historians, scientists and inventors have all found their home in our city, and made their mark on the world. Sherlock Holmes, and Peter Pan, anaesthetics, the electric light bulb, and of course the telephone were all born of Edinburgh's finest minds.

It's a pioneering legacy we're extremely proud of, and one we strive to continue. So it seems fitting that our Smart City vision for Edinburgh will establish Scotland's capital as one of the most modern, forward thinking and innovative local authorities in Europe. And, given the position of Alexander Graham Bell in our heritage, we are pleased and proud to be partnering with BT in a unique approach to public/private partnership, which is taking the government's Modernising Agenda into new territory.

Through the inventive use of modern information and communications technology, our Smart City programme will offer totally connected, seamless service and information delivery to the people of Edinburgh. The traditional barriers between council departments are being broken down, wiping out the information silos that plague local authorities and cause inefficient duplication of effort.

Smart City
Smart City is not just an intellectual concept - it's firmly based in the reality of transforming our way of working to create a citizen-focussed city where people can interact with the council whenever, wherever and however they want. It's entirely business focussed - so everything has to be justified in terms of cost and benefits. Nothing happens just for the sake of making change.

That vision is shared by BT. Through its change management and business transformation experts, BT is creating new public-facing improvement projects, as well as delivering all the less visible, but equally essential, behind-the-scenes infrastructure. With our planned developments, the City of Edinburgh Council will be in an even better position to support the city in competing with the world's greatest cities for significant inward investment, creating jobs and prosperity.

Such a transformation does not happen over night. Instead we are working together on a project-by-project basis, and one of these - the transformation of the Council's Planning and Building Control services - perfectly encapsulates the kinds of improvements that the Smart City partnership is all about.

Planning and building control authority
The City of Edinburgh Council is the busiest planning and building control authority in Scotland. Like all similar departments in the country it assesses and administers all types of planning and building warrant applications. It also provides a public facing enquiry service and is the core supplier of Property Enquiry Certificates (PECs).

However, with predominantly paper-based processes, and cumbersome enquiry handling, the department was not nearly as efficient as it could be. What's more public information, which should have been accessible to the people of Edinburgh, was actually hard to get hold of, being stored away in ever increasing paper archives. There were, as a result, limits to the way in which customers could access the service, or even submit and pay for applications.

All of this was the complete antithesis of what we are trying to achieve with the Smart City programme. So with the modernising government benchmarks and targets in mind - along with the need to improve work processes, turn-around times and customer service - the work on the planning and building control system was commissioned from BT, and a dedicated team set up.

Specific objectives
There were several specific objectives of the project, the first of which was to create a local land and property gazetteer that was compliant with the BS7666 British Standard and which would then be used as a property reference throughout the Council. This was fundamental to the whole programme as it would unify data that was previously held in six different systems - PEC, Non-Domestic Rates, Council Tax, Housing, Planning and Building Control. This would enable the coordinated, efficient and joined up service that we needed.

The gazetteer provides a unified source of all land and property information and is managed by the Planning service. There is now only one data source, but it's also accessible by other systems within the Council, such as Common Charges, Housing, Transportation and Roads, Revenue and Benefits, as well as to the Lothian Valuation Joint Board.

The next objective was to expand the number of ways that citizens could access planning and building control services. In addition to the front desk, where staff and kiosks would be provided to deal with enquiries, access channels including the telephone, CD-ROM and the Internet were planned. In particular the Internet can be used for submitting Planning and Building Warrant applications, as well as payment for and delivery of PECs.

New channels of information
To provide these new channels of information to members of the public, BT designed and delivered an Internet portal for Planning and Building Control. Underpinning this was the gazetteer and a technical infrastructure, which linked the public-facing, front-end systems of the planning service with those in the building control service.

Due to the complexity of the portal, it has been introduced in stages. The initial phase provided a public front page to enable users to view planning applications and submit comments. The next stage enabled users to request PECs online - the ePEC - and incorporated user registration and online payment. This was followed by a specifically developed module that enabled users to view building warrant applications online. Finally users were able to submit and pay for planning and building warrant applications online. All documents are available electronically thanks to document management technology, which also forms part of the portal's foundations.

e-PEC service
The e-PEC service was also one of the specific objectives of the project. It makes writing to the Council to request a certificate a thing of the past. Now the city's conveyancing community can log on and register at the web site and order a PEC online - and receive it within 24 hours. We had already undertaken work to improve the PEC service by adding a quick reference checklist, including Environmental Protection Act information, and giving the option of purchasing information from Scottish Water. All this has been included in the online version, which has dramatically improved the service offered to customers, with more enhancements and service options planned for the future.

Efficient, quicker services
Most importantly the people of Edinburgh are benefiting from more efficient, quicker services, and from valuable staff concentrating on the technical job and service delivery rather than resource-absorbing administration. The transformation of our planning and building control services forms sturdy foundations on which we can build our plans for joined up government and exceed the targets of the modernising government agenda.

For further information email d.leslie@edinburgh.gov.uk.