Technology saves Councils Quarter of a billion by using Location based technology

Mobile devices, web-mapping, iphone ‘apps’ and other new technologies have helped to save UK local government around £230 million during 2009, according to a new report from the Local Government Association (LGA).

‘Location-based technology’, is allowing councils to link service delivery more closely to residents’ own locations, and is the basis for much of the financial savings and increased efficiency, the report says.

Among examples cited by the report are a series of ‘apps’ for the iphone, including an app launched by Telford and Wrekin Council, Huntingdonshire District Council and Merton Council. The app allows residents to point their phone at a restaurant or pub and instantly receive its food hygiene rating, as decided by council environmental health officers. Gloucester County Council launched another app allowing residents to buy parking tickets for the area of their choice before leaving home.

The LGA research estimates that South Tyneside Council saved just under £147,000 through avoiding having to field telephone or face-to-face enquiries by allowing residents to use the ‘My South Tyneside’ web facility, allowing them to search for local schools, libraries, doctors’ surgeries and other facilities and receive a local news email alert service. 

Daventry District Council was another of the many local authorities to utilise location-based technology, using satellite location equipment to plan refuse collection routes more efficiently, resulting in an estimated saving of £223,000.

Councillor David Parsons, chairperson of the LGA’s Improvement Board, said in a statement that the continued use of these and similar technologies could result in further financial savings for councils in the future, and estimated at more than £370 million a year by 2014-15.

Councils and Mobile Technology

Only a “tiny handful” of UK councils are making significant use of mobile technologies to transform services and generate efficiencies, a leading industry figure has told E-Government Bulletin.
Mark Armstrong, head of public sector at mobile network provider O2, told EGB in an exclusive interview that a range of factors are holding councils back from widespread mobile working in areas like social services and home-working.

The potential is there for social care workers to have remote access to care records; schedule jobs on the move; and for lone worker security systems to be implemented, Armstrong said. Greater efficiencies could also be generated from home working; mobile workflow systems; mobile access to management systems; mobile services and information, mobile email and a range of other areas, he said. But only “a very small percentage – a tiny handful of councils” were integrating mobile access across social care, he said, and mobile penetration was lagging behind the private sector across the board.

No single factor is responsible for this lag, he said. “Social care involves many bodies, such as the primary care trust, and no two council systems are the same, they all start from different positions.
Implementation cost is another barrier, Armstrong said, and there are cultural barriers – though these are not confined to the public sector. There are also particular security considerations for public sector bodies in implementing mobile systems, he said.

However, there are a few pioneers, and others will follow, Armstrong said. “No-one wants to be the first, so the lead time for acceptance is long, but once it is deployed, public sector bodies are very good at learning from each other.

“Use of mobile devices is going to be infinitely more pervasive in the future – the number and type of application that is designed for mobile devices will be much greater and joined up together. At the moment, most areas are looking at one specific application but in the future, there is no reason why they should not be running 20 mobile applications at once.”