Local Government Association/IDeA

LG Inform Plus Standards

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/ service

A comprehensive framework of standards built up through collaboration with English Local Authorities since 2002. The standards include controlled vocabularies, most notably the Local Government Services List, which is published as Open Data linked to local government functions, legal powers & duties and types of metric that measure service delivery.
The standards are used by local authority web sites, GDS and linked data tools. They are at the heart of the LGA’s own LG Inform Data Services which cross-references services with metric types and open geographies to power reporting on places and organisations.

Why do you think it should win this award?

The standards put information from 400 different local authorities and many government departments in a consistent format so that councils can easily share and compare data. By managing this work itself, the LGA relieves each authority of duplicating the effort locally. As government administrations have come and gone over the years, the LGA has stuck with this consistent approach to referencing local data and made all standards freely available in a variety of formats.

What are the key achievements?

A comprehensive list of the services English councils are required or empowered to deliver
Resources used to link local government data from many local authorities built into Local Directgov, council CMSs and data harvesting tools
Framework for gathering and aggregating open data with 200+ council datasets using URIs from the Standards
LG Inform and LG Inform Plus reporting tools used by English councils for comparing outcomes