‘We are delighted with the positive response to the portal. The site has received widespread praise, which serves to highlight Connect’s technical expertise and design know- how. We are very impressed with Connect’s professionalism, flexibility and attention to detail. For the first time the public can access one site for information on property from Lerwick to Berwick.’

Ken Scott, Senior Responsible Officer for Scottish Assessors’ Portal.

 

Background

The Scottish Assessors’ Association, responsible for valuation of property for rates across the whole of Scotland, commissioned Connect to establish a dedicated web portal that provides the public with online access to information on council tax banding, rateable values and electoral registration.

The portal, developed as part of the Definitive National Addressing Programme, is funded by the Scottish Executive’s Modernising Government Fund.

The Solution

Connect worked closely with all 14 assessors responsible for the valuation function for the 32 Scottish local councils to develop a national online database, which provides property valuation information on over 2.3 million domestic properties and 300,000 non-domestic properties in Scotland.

The Scottish Assessors portal provides a single point of access to Assessors’ information on electoral registration, council tax banding and non-domestic rates, derived from locally managed and maintained Assessors’ sources, on a nation-wide basis.

The portal is the central source of information for citizens, central government, local authorities and other public bodies. Information is presented in an up-to-date and consistent format through design and implementation of standard identifiers, addressing and coding. This uses existing national address standards (i.e. BS7666) and interim and emerging standards, as appropriate.

Connect’s solution provides a number of services including a secure mechanism for harvesting data from regional databases to populate the portal, a content management system (Connect CMS) to enable web-based creation, maintenance and management of content (e.g. forms, FAQs, news etc) and delivery of content to assessor, government, citizens and other key stakeholders.

The Results

• Information collated from 14 Scottish Assessors effectively collated
• Portal provides a single point of access to Assessors’ information on electoral registration, council tax banding and non-domestic rates
• To date £40,000 has already been saved by the ability to download information from the Assessors' Portal (according to the April 2005 edition of Open Scotland’s newsletter ‘Customer First’)