Harrow Cuts Waste by £3.5million: Gazetteer Underpins Award Winning Waste and Recycling Service

London, 07 March 2011 - Harrow Council’s new Waste and Recycling service is used as a benchmark by other local authorities.  It has won a number of awards and is set to deliver £3.2m in savings over the next ten years. However none of this would have been possible without its high quality source of addressing, Harrow’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG).

Harrow’s Waste Management system handles three bin types for each property, recycled waste, general waste and organic waste, each linked to a unique property reference number (UPRN) held in the LLPG. This system is wirelessly linked to vehicle cabs and integrated internally with the call centre CRM. Both systems independently receive address updates on a daily basis from the LLPG. Forms on the MyHarrow web portal are also linked to the CRM and the Waste Management system and are facilitated by the LLPG.  In addition, the LLPG is also used for the Waste Management system’s integrated route optimisation module, which is already delivering a 15 per cent fuel reduction.

Use of the web is growing with transactions via this channel making up nearly 60 per cent of the total as Harrow residents choose to self-serve when it comes to Waste and Recycling queries. In the Access Harrow call centre there has already been a noticeable change with overall call volumes down by 3 per cent, those associated with the environment down by 7 per cent and those specifically to do with missed bins down by 25 per cent. These amount to over 200 fewer calls per week. 95 per cent of the remaining calls are being resolved at first contact. Furthermore the number of outbound follow-up calls has been slashed by 95 per cent. Call duration has also been cut by 45 seconds on the average call, which lasts 248 seconds. Costs too have been reduced significantly from £2.23 per enquiry in 2006/7 to £0.82 in 2009/10.

“The Council’s Waste and Recycling service is used as a benchmark by other local authorities and we are particularly proud of the savings that are already being made. Of course all the systems put in place to deliver these changes are underpinned by our LLPG, which provides the links between the Waste Management System, the CRM and the My Harrow web portal. As well as projected savings of over £3.2m over 10 years we are seeing improvements in recycling rates and a reduction in the number of waste related calls received by our call centre, in other words improvements all round,” said Jonathan Milbourn, Head of Customer Services, at Harrow Council.

CONTACTS:

Contact: Gayle Gander, Head of Marketing, +44(0)207 747 3500, E-mail: ggander@intelligent-addressing.co.uk, www.intelligent-addressing.co.uk

Notes to editors:

The NLPG is a joint venture between all local authorities in England and Wales, the Local Government Information House, part of the Local Government Group and Intelligent Addressing Limited.  It is the authoritative, national address list that provides unique identification of land and property and conforms to BS 7666 (2006). Local authorities in England and Wales have a statutory responsibility for street naming and numbering. They update the NLPG on a continual basis, enabling daily updates to be available to users. 

Intelligent Addressing is an information management specialist and data provider, focusing on land and property data, particularly addresses. As well as being the joint venture partner with local government in the development of the NLPG, IA also manages the national datasets for local government; the NLPG and the National Street Gazetteer (NSG).  Data is an essential yet high-cost resource to maintain. IA helps organisations find, utilise and manage the information that they need and provides services to any organisation that depends on the accuracy, manageability and versatility of its information.

Local Government Information House is part of the Local Government Group.  LGIH concentrates on core projects that have maximum benefit for the whole of local government. To this end, LGIH focuses on geographical information-related projects, as the standardisation of this type of data affects more than 80 per cent of what local government does. LGIH acts as an intermediary between the public and the private sector enabling it to negotiate with private companies on behalf of local authorities in order to provide key parts of a technical infrastructure for improved service delivery.

Changes coming in 2011

Addressing information from local authorities and Ordnance Survey will be brought together in a new joint venture partnership, GeoPlace LLP, to create a national address gazetteer database that will provide one single definitive source of accurate spatial address data for England and Wales.  Subject to agreement with Scottish Local Government it is planned to incorporate the spatial address data from the One Scotland gazetteer. More information will be available in the near future.