Aligned Assets Business Data Helping to Locate Unbilled NNDR Properties

Due to the change in legislation surrounding the retention of business rates, Aligned Assets are set to make their business database available to business rates teams across local government.

The new legislation will see local authorities retaining up to 50% of all business rates collected and the Aligned Assets database can assist in locating unbilled businesses and thereby generating new revenue.

Containing over two million records and updated daily by a call centre of 65 people making in excess of six million validation calls each year, the business database is currently used by emergency services to assist in locating 999 calls made in commercial areas, and is also the source of directory information for organisations such as 118 118 and Bing.

Announced on 21st November 2012, the new policy will come into effect on 1st April 2013. According to Brandon Lewis MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government:

“The business rates retention scheme will enable local authorities to retain a large proportion of locally collected business rates to help fund the services they provide, thereby creating a direct link between business rates collected and local authority income, and reducing local authorities’ dependency on central government grants. The scheme will give all councils a strong incentive to go for growth and could add approximately £10 billion to the wider economy by 2020.”

“In 2011/12 there was over £21 billion in business rates after billing reliefs collected from approximately 1.8 million businesses,” explained Managing Director of Aligned Assets Andy Hird. “This equates to an average of £11,500 per business, which means that even if a council was to use our data and locate only one unbilled business, the return on investment would be almost 100%.”

To find out more, visit www.aligned-assets.co.uk/businessdata

ABOUT ALIGNED ASSETS
Aligned Assets are an industry leader in AddressBase, gazetteer and address management solutions. They supply software across the public and private sectors including over 100 Local Authorities, Fire & Rescue Services and Police Forces. In addition to software and data solutions, they offer a complete range of consultancy, training, bespoke development and project management.

Aligned Assets Present a Practical Strategy for Adopting AddressBase Premium

Gazetteer specialists Aligned Assets have released guidance to assist both public sector and private sector organisations in implementing AddressBase Premium from the Ordnance Survey.

With the majority of existing datasets such as AddressPoint, AddressLayer 2 and the NLPG being withdrawn in 2014, the document draws on the necessity for organisations to act sooner rather than later in their migration to AddressBase Premium.

Titled ‘A Practical Strategy for Implementing AddressBase Premium’, the document demonstrates how any organisation can start using AddressBase Premium without the immediate need to change their existing systems over to AddressBase-compatible versions.

It is these existing systems that present the main obstacle to change as they are often large, complex and critical to the organisation, yet will be based on older address datasets or sometimes no structured dataset at all. It is this issue that the document looks to address.

Andy Hird, Managing Director of Aligned Assets, explained more, “The process described involves initially bringing AddressBase Premium into an organisation and access being given to it via a browser based search engine. With this, technical staff can begin to familiarise themselves with the format and structure of the data, whilst non-technical staff can begin to adapt to elements such as UPRNs and property classifications.”

“Once in place, the process would move to using Aligned Assets’ data conversion software, Symphony iExchange, which can take AddressBase Premium and convert it into standard and non-standard formats. In doing so, changes to the AddressBase Premium data can be exported to the non-AddressBase systems, thereby keeping them updated.”

“This gives an organisation the benefits of AddressBase Premium but in a staged and controlled manner that does not result in major upheaval, and buys time for other suppliers to modify their systems to take native AddressBase data.”

‘A Practical Strategy for Implementing AddressBase Premium’ is available as a free download via the Aligned Assets website and is relevant to the emergency services, local and central government, the NHS and organisations across the private sector such as insurance, utilities and banking.

To find out more, visit www.aligned-assets.co.uk or email solutions@aligned-assets.co.uk.