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Bristol City Council

Trading standards and intelligence sharing in the South West (SWERCOTS)

Without secure email, the trading standards community in the South West can neither share ‘restricted’ intelligence with enforcement colleagues and law enforcement partners nor access specialist intelligence databases.

However, the advent of GCSX secure email dramatically transforms the teams’ dynamics by enabling secure email and providing secure access to specialist databases. Teams can now target effective enforcement in partnership with other local, regional and national services and law enforcement agencies.

This new collaborative and intelligence led approach should make the lives of rogue traders, loan sharks, fraudsters and other criminals targeting the vulnerable much harder – and the lives of residents much safer.

Conwy County Borough Council

Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD)

The government’s ‘Taking Profit Out of Crime’ initiative helps councils, the Home Office and other partners to recover money from crimes covered by the Proceeds of Crime Act. Data is held centrally in the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD).
Conwy County Borough Council has been leading recovery activity in its area – currently working on behalf of itself, 11 other councils, the DVLA and the Illegal Money Laundering Unit.

GCSX will facilitate secure remote access to JARD for Conwy’s team - enabling roll out of more efficient electronic processes and delivering immediate savings from cutting the need for officers to make frequent trips to London to access information in person and attend court.

Dartford Borough Council

Kent Connects Kudos – tackling crime and antisocial behaviour

Kent Connects’ KUDOS (Kent Universal Data Output System) project is exploring how secure data sharing can be enabled in order to streamline joint working between partners to help tackle crime, antisocial behaviour (ASB) and drug abuse in Kent and Medway.

The police, fire and rescue authority, local councils, primary care trusts and others work together in the area through local crime and disorder partnerships (CDRPs). Each agency has its own IT and data recording systems but has a duty to share its data. Kudos is using GCSX to enable standardised, secure data sharing and underpin operational planning.

Devon County Council, on behalf of the Devon ePartnership

Flexible Working

Devon’s councils are working together to pin down an ‘accredited and affordable model for enabling secure access’ to council systems for Flexible Working initiatives – which enable normally office based staff in partner councils to work from home or from a trusted partner site, such as an NHS site. However, ensuring access to a secure office environment and secure access to GCSX from the many different desktop, laptop and PDA devices used by staff is proving difficult.

During the CoCo approval processes the partnership encountered a variety of protocols across government departments for secure access to GCSX. The current project will analyse, and attempt to synchronise, identified policies in order to develop a standard, affordable and accredited working solution to enable flexible working for all partnership councils.

Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council

Business Crime Partnership

Dudley Borough Business Crime Partnership Limited is a private, not-for-profit company set up by the council in a bid to reduce crime, the fear of crime, and antisocial behaviour in local business centres.

Implementation of a secure GCSX connection will enable the council and partnership to securely share sensitive information with West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

It will become possible to send pictures, crime details and criminal backgrounds in real-time safely via GCSX so that prolific offenders can be swiftly targeted in the business centres covered by the partnership.

Great Manchester Public Protection Partnership (GMPP)

Business Compliance – Regulatory Services

Ten Greater Manchester authorities and the Fire and Rescue Service have formed the Greater Manchester Public Protection Partnership (GMPPP) to transform regulatory services in the region.

The partnership is creating a radical new model to assess business compliance across all disciplines - Trading Standards, Environmental Health, Licensing and Fire Safety - with a simple e-enabled assessment tool utilising a harmonised risk assessment system. The methodology for securely sharing this data across the partnership – and Greater Manchester Police, the Health & Safety Executive and the Food Standards Agency - is underpinned by GCSX.

The project aims to deliver efficiency savings and reduce unnecessary inspections; it will also enable expensive resources to be targeted at high risk and rogue businesses to deliver higher levels of public protection.

Halton Borough Council

‘Place shaping’ through GIS data sharing

Halton Borough Council has little information available beyond its own borough boundary to either help with citizen enquiries or facilitate business planning.
The project aims to rectify that by formulating a means of securely sharing and using standard geographic information between Liverpool City Region Sustainable Community Strategy partners. Data will be in a standard format and be capable of being used directly within each partner’s existing corporate GIS.

This aim is to share socio-economic, crime, demographic and land use planning information between partner authorities - Halton, Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, St Helens and Knowsley - plus other more general information sets such as environmental monitoring and property.

Hampshire County Council on behalf of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Partnership

Exploring a regional approach to employee authentication

On behalf of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight IT Managers’ Group, Hampshire County Council is investigating whether the national Employee Authentication Service (EAS) can be used as a common ‘strong’ authentication service for national, partnership and local working. GCSX and its ability to provide secure network links between local authorities and to EAS is an essential component of the design.
Hampshire believes that it is feasible to develop a standard authentication service offering capable of being either used directly or replicated as appropriate by any local authority to strongly authenticate their employees to any EAS service or local partner network.

Ultimately this should provide a key enabler for service transformation through breaking down the barriers between partner systems and support flexible working without compromising security. This will promote the take-up of shared services by making them available more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Lancashire Council (Lancashire Constabulary & Police)

Antisocial behaviour data sharing in Lancashire

A consortium of partners– including Lancashire County Council and Lancashire Police (project sponsor and lead respectively), London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Newcastle City Council, North Lincolnshire Safer Neighbourhoods Partnership, and Somerset County Council - has started a project to help deal more effectively with antisocial behaviour (ASB)

The consortium aims to build and test a secure ‘pipe’ (data connection) for data sharing; gain government approval for switching it on; and then write and test XML schemas (templates for recording data).

This will join the two main secure environments that police and local authorities use – the GCSX network and the Police National Network (PNN) – to enable ‘almost life-time’ swapping of information about ASB. Thus enabling ASB to be identified, tracked and dealt with far more swiftly than at present.

Lichfield District Council

Business data sharing in the West Midlands

Business Matters aims to demonstrate that by applying data standards to core data about businesses, data can be shared in ways that will improve efficiency both for business and the public sector.

Project partners Lichfield (lead authority), Solihull, Dudley and Business Link West Midlands, believe that sharing accurate, up-to-date data will bring major benefits to many service areas. The GCSX secure network enables the project to move from this theoretical model of data sharing to actual deployment.

Partners will be able to share a single ‘version of the truth’ about businesses in the West Midlands, thus facilitating better delivery of business support and regulatory services. Businesses should get more focused and targeted support, and public sector partners will be able to work in a joined up and more efficient way.

London Borough of Islington

No Recourse to Public Funds

Islington aims to develop a database and information sharing process for social services to inform care provision for people with ‘No Resource to Public Funds’ (NRPF) – for example, asylum seekers and failed asylum seekers, people who have entered the UK on visas and, in some cases, European Economic Area nationals who are destitute in the UK.

This ambitious project aims to address the information gap and revolutionise the way the NRPF client group is managed by local authorities. It will also develop a national NRPF database in partnership with the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to record who is being supported, why, and by which local authority. This will be accessible via GCSX.

A steering group of six authorities (Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton and Hove, Glasgow, Islington and Manchester) is working with representatives from the UKBA and the NRPF Network.

London Trading Standards Authority (LOTSA)

Trading Standards and Regional Intelligence in London

London Trading Standards (LoTSA) has its own regional intelligence unit providing services to all London boroughs, requiring the sharing and exchange of information.

Information is shared through the filing of ‘5x5x5’ intelligence reports by trading standards officers within London Boroughs. Access to secure email and a connector from existing case management systems to a national database will greatly enhance the service. GCSX now forms a base on which to develop a working connector between local case management systems and LoTSA, enabling electronic receipt and processing of 5x5x5 reports.

North Kesteven District Council, on behalf of the Lincolnshire Public Sector Working Group

Customer Data Hub

Lincolnshire County Council is creating a single, trusted and complete view of the county’s customers in a new Customer Data Hub (CDH). This central repository of accurate, up-to-date data will be shared with the district councils.

Connected to the national ‘Tell Us Once’ initiative, the project aims to use a common infrastructure - based on GCSX - across the county to improve information transfer. A common messaging format will be agreed to notify public sector authorities of residents’ changes of circumstances, along with data sharing protocols and governance processes around data management and data quality.

In a future phase of development, CDH will provide Lincolnshire’s ‘change of circumstance’ service to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) via GCSX.

Plymouth City Council on behalf of Devon ePartnership and Isles of Scilly

Civil Contingencies / Emergency Planning

Recent events in the Devon ePartnership area – including the grounding of the MV Napoli off the East Devon coast and the flooding in Boscastle and Ottery St Mary – exposed communication frailties among Devon’s public services and highlighted the need for a standard, secure approach to both planning and operational contingencies between organisations.

Building on work by Plymouth and Isles of Scilly civil contingencies teams, the project encompasses sensitive emergency planning data which can be shared among agencies via a secure infrastructure - GC Mail over GCSX. It involves all 11 Devon councils, plus Cornwall Council and the Isles of Scilly, police, ambulance and fire services, as well as primary care trusts (PCTs) and regional agencies.

Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council

Blue Badge Scheme

The Blue Badge Scheme for disabled parking provides a vital lifeline to disabled people. A marked increase in Rochdale’s elderly population is reflected in the rise in its Badge holders from 673,000 in 1987 to over 2.3 million in 2007. Two-thirds of badge holders are over the age of 65 and 55% of them do not use public transport.
Rochdale is seizing the opportunity presented in the Department for Transport’s Reform Strategy to establish a secure data-sharing system.

With the ultimate vision of creating a national database with local access, Rochdale will use GCSX to give all Greater Manchester and North West authorities access to vehicle driver data.

This will not only facilitate the issue of badges but also significantly enhance fraud enforcement. It will also enable secure data exchange with local authority partners such as the NHS, police authorities and DWP.

South Lakeland District Council

Information sharing to facilitate a needs led approach to older people

Starting with service provision for older people, South Lakeland District Council is piloting a new approach to delivering efficient and effective services – ‘Need-Led Service Design’. By understanding customers’ needs, and then designing and wrapping services around these needs, the council felt its services, and those of its partners, could be better targeted and more effective.

The pilot will be underpinned by secure data sharing via GCSX across all relevant parts of the public sector working with the elderly.

Partners, including NHS Cumbria, Cumbria County Council, Cumbria Fire and Rescue, Cumbria Constabulary and Age Concern, are keen to share information operationally. This will help them to provide services seamlessly and proactively to older people on a preventative basis, spotting issues before they become problems and keeping older people healthier and independent for longer.

Sunderland City Council

Births - Tell Us Once

Sunderland City Council is exploring how parents’ experience of the public sector on the birth of a new child can be improved. From supporting new parents by improving access to child benefit and other child related benefits to developing secure and appropriate information sharing across the Local Strategic Partnership, Sunderland believes that more can be done to deliver joined up services for new babies and their families.

The city is working with HMRC’s Child Benefit Service, South of Tyne and Wear Primary Care Trust, City Hospitals Sunderland Foundation NHS Trust, Northumbria Police and Gentoo Housing to explore how a secure infrastructure like GCSX can underpin improved data capture and data sharing.

The project is linked to both the DWP ‘Tell Us Once’ and DCSF ‘ContactPoint’ projects.

Torbay Council on behalf of Devon ePartnership

Safeguarding Children - GC Mail

The Devon ePartnership surveyed all Devon councils to identify user communities for secure email, the volume of such mail, and current methods of transfer. The results clearly demonstrated that secure email was unacceptably being transmitted via insecure mechanisms, such as the internet. Significant volumes of secure data were also being shared between Devon councils, government agencies, police, health and voluntary sector organisations.

Three Devon councils – Torbay, Plymouth and Devon itself – subsequently identified a requirement for secure email for their Safeguarding Children teams. Torbay Council has already piloted Government Connect’s GC Mail for its team.

The project aims to document achievements/benefits to date, expand the solution further into the secure email community for Torbay team, and then roll out the solution for Plymouth City Council and Devon County Council.