‘Places’ has been developed as the central warehouse for all place-related data held by Communities and Local Government. It is available on the department’s intranet and its purpose is to enable staff to easily access a comprehensive range of information across regions, local authorities, wards and more local areas.
The Places database performs a number of functions including:
acting as a key statistical analysis and management information tool in support of the departmental policy and decision making processes;
contributing to more efficient management of departmental data and IT resources; and,
providing a local area database capable of adapting to the changing needs of the department without the need for significant redevelopment.
The Places database cost £675,000 (excl. VAT) to develop and has part-year maintenance costs for 2006-07 of up to £168,000 (excl. VAT). It will achieve efficiency gains through consolidating several existing separately maintained databases and through staff spending less time on collating data from a wide variety of sources.