Making savings

Saving money and improving efficiency is a high priority on every local authority’s agenda. With public sector cuts looming, a slow conveyancing market and environmental information regulations (EIR) looking set to reduce local land charges income even further, cutting costs is more important than ever.

In December 1998, the National Land Information Service (NLIS) project, set up with the help of the LGA Group with the aim of savings councils money, was awarded £2.3m from a joint Treasury and Cabinet Office initiative called ‘Invest to save budget’ (ISB) to enable the procurement and roll out of NLIS across England and Wales. Since its roll-out, NLIS continues to deliver savings for councils and is regulated by Land Data, a not-for-profit community interest company.

For more than a decade, NLIS has worked with local authorities to modernise the land and property ‘search’ ordering, payment and information supply process. Today, every local authority in England and Wales connects with NLIS, at no cost to them.

By participating in NLIS, local authorities gain the benefit of using a shared single, standardised and regulated technology infrastructure that supports the government’s best value programme and provides electronic service delivery consistent with local authority needs.

NLIS is a free service for local authorities that saves otherwise required capital and ongoing operating expenses, while at the same time providing a consistent and easy to access service to the public.

Created as the local authority ‘electronic front door’, connection to NLIS negates the need for councils to support other search portals, which could add as much as £4 per search to the local authority search fee.

Many of the internal process savings offered by NLIS are well-documented and local authorities can see savings made through efficiency, security, speed, tracking, anti-fraud, audit and risk management.

Local authorities can connect to NLIS on different levels, utilising electronic or manual methods. However, the councils that have removed the paper element of the process make the optimum process savings. Direct savings, including postage and printing costs, can save up to £10 per search.

Further savings of up to £20 per search can be made if the staff time required to manually process and collate the search (which requires contact with numerous departments across the local authority) is replaced by internal electronic links which will feed seamlessly into NLIS.

Beyond all of this there are the other benefits to consider. NLIS licensed channels invest heavily in marketing and sales teams, and these teams, working across the country, are actively promoting the local authority electronic search product.

This is a key component to increasing the local authority profile, increasing revenue and reducing the resource required to deal with queries arising from other providers such as local authority portals, non-regulated external portals and the private search sector. These take up valuable resource for little and often no remuneration.

For more information on NLIS and Land Data please go to www.land-data.org.uk

Jan Boothroyd is chief executive of Land Data