EHJ December 2003, pages 356-359
The Parsol project - planning and regulatory service online - is delivering a range of regulatory and licensing products to help local authorities meet their 2005 online targets. Tracey Khanna reports

At the heart of the "e-government" initiative is the concept of modernising UK government in the interests of citizens and business. The overarching strategy is to deliver all suitable services electronically, through the internet, mobile phones, digital television, call centres and personal computers, in relation to personal demand and tailored to individual need. According to the Office of the e-Envoy, set up in September 1999, the e-government strategy has four guiding principles: building services around citizens' choices; making government and its services more accessible; improving social inclusion; and using information better.

As part of the work being done to meet the e-government strategy aims, a consortium of key national organisations and local authorities, led by Wandsworth London Borough Council, submitted a strategic business case to the Government in August last year for a national e-planning project that, among other things, would bring together environmental health with trading standards and planning and building control. The national project - planning and regulatory services online (Parsol) - aims to deliver a range of regulatory and licensing products to help local authorities achieve the goal of e-enabling all services by 2005.

Organised into a number of "streams", stream 4 of the Parsol project specifically deals with regulation and licensing and is being led by Wandsworth LBC. Dave Smith, area environmental health officer at Wandsworth explains how the project was conceived: "The national planning project, as it was originally, was the result of a pathfinder project on online planning services previously carried out by Wandsworth. Similar work had been done by the Welland Partnership, a consortium of five local authorities, on delivering planning information to local town centres, and by Salisbury district Council to look at how spending money now on IT infrastructure would save money in the future. This work needed to be expanded to provide not just online planning but standards and toolkits that could be used by any local authority; ie how they should be doing it, what procedures they should be following and what they needed to have in place."

When the initial business case was submitted to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, it was decided that there should be something in the national project which related to the interaction between planning and other regulatory services of the local authority community - specifically building control, environmental health and trading standards. "The business case was re-written to include those three other regulatory service areas and specifically to add on stream 4 - which was to essentially act as a pathfinder itself for looking at how the other regulatory services could provide services to the public and to the business community online," says Mr Smith.

"Originally, the idea of stream 4 was to look at the interactions of other regulatory services with planning. But I recognised at a very early stage that if we were going to have active involvement from the other professional bodies and professions, they had to get something out of it themselves. The interfaces between planning and say environmental health, though important, forms a very small amount of the work that environmental health departments do. Bigger issues such as liquor licensing needed to be addressed as well. So our focus changed slightly from just looking at the inter-relationships with planning to looking at useful tools for the other professions to assist in their day-to-day work and to help ease some of the burden of taking on additional areas of responsibility," he goes on.

Before the consortium started looking at online applications and associated work flow, it was felt important to understand how current procedures work. "I talked to colleagues from a number of different local authorities," says Mr Smith, "and it seemed to me that although basic principles seemed to be the same because of working to the same legislation, practices such as, for example, how licence applications were processed, differed vastly from one authority to another."

As Mr Smith points out, one of the important issues for the business community is consistency in procedures between local authorities, "for example, if Sainsbury's is applying for a liquor licence in any of the boroughs where it has got stores," he says, "you would expect the procedures to be the same and they are not. This is something that business has said is increasingly frustrating - that there isn't an even playing field."

In response, the working group decided that it would look first at how existing systems are being operated and try to come up with a standard - or protocol - for how licensing applications and registrations are done, and how they can be done electronically. "We produced a number of process flow charts, mapping out what a proposed best practice model would be and put those out to consultation," he explains. "I was favourably surprised to find a lot of people coming back and saying, 'no we don't do it like that but we recognise that we probably should be doing it like that'".

The delivery date for the project is March 2004, when a report will be produced with examples of how to streamline processes. "More importantly," Mr Smith asserts, "we will actually be producing the software in some cases to enable this to happen." The project is currently working to provide regulation and licensing online and is looking at around 16 sample licence application types which are typical of many of those handled by environmental health and building control departments, as well as trading standards. Additionally, web services and an online application page are under construction which will be provided free to any local authority at the end of the project.

"We are also working with the major back office suppliers to make sure that online application data that is received can interface with back office systems, work flow and document image processing" says Mr Smith. "So, what we are producing essentially is a freely available bolt on to the systems that local authorities already have to enable them very quickly and very cheaply to start processing online applications."

It is widely felt that there is much panic among the local authority community over taking up the liquor licensing functions, and the project recognises the importance of having software available as soon as possible that will particularly deal with this process. Software for data interchange has now been virtually completed for premises and personal licences - and will be submitted to the office of the e-envoy very shortly - and as soon as the regulations are published, ie the necessary applications forms, the work that has been done will be refined and the user interface built."

All of this is being funded by the ODPM. The project itself has secured a budget of £4.4m, of which the regulation and licensing stream has £450,000. A recent survey - carried out on behalf of the group by MORI - to see how confident local authorities are in meeting their 2005 e-government targets and what is standing in their way - asked about funding issues. "Out of the environmental health departments that responded, 67 per cent said that they had insufficient staff resources for implementing new systems and 51 per cent said inadequate financial resources," exclaims Mr Smith. The survey also showed that although 61 per cent are "fairly confident" in meeting their targets, only 20 per cent are "very confident".

"Funding and the availability of affordable software and IT skills is a key issue when looking at this," he says "and this is one of the areas where Parsol fills the gap. Those skills are being provided to the local authority community at large out of central government funding and we have been very fortunate in recruiting some very skilled developers to actually build this software for us."

Information about the Parsol project is being disseminated to local authorities in a number of ways: online information, key exhibitions and conferences - including the CIEH annual conference in Belfast - and regional road shows. "We are not saying that everybody is going to take up the products," admits Mr Smith, "there will be some who already have their own system and some who will prefer to go to other providers - that is entirely up to them."

But is there scope for the Government to be prescriptive about this? "I certainly see some of the deregulation processes going that way," says Mr Smith. "Next year's IEG step - IEG 3 - specifically asks local authorities how they are using the products from the national project to deliver their 2005 targets. I can see that if local authorities are not using these products, then it may have some financial implications for them when it comes to receiving further central government support."

Involvement with the various partner agencies stems from where there was likely to be both a planning and other regulatory services consultation process. "It would be wonderful to include everybody right from the beginning, but it makes the logistics a bit difficult," says Mr Smith, "so we specifically tried to look at interfaces with the fire service, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Environment Agency. Alan Plom, head of the HSE's enforcement management branch is positively involved with a watching brief. He believes that the key to the project is the online consultation element. "The benefits to the HSE," he says, "are that we need to be able to exchange information with local authorities, and this could solve a lot of the problems."

According to a spokesperson at Lacors, which supports the development of the Parsol project: "Parsol has as one of its major objectives to support the provision of quality, consistent and readily accessible advice, guidance and information to the public and businesses of local authority planning and regulatory services. If this ambitious programme is to succeed it has to demonstrate and then achieve continuous improvement in the delivery of these key frontline services to the communities they serve."

Key issues for Mr Smith is how links can be strengthened with these external agencies and how the licensing process can be speeded up by e-enabling consultations with local authorities and statutory bodies. He points out that once that work has been completed, and even though it only involves three main agencies at this stage, it will have devised standards under which data can be exchanged and the methodology for doing it. This will then be available to any other agency which may decide to come online at a later date. "A lot of this is looking at standards and deciding what is the best method for external agencies to receive information from local authorities," he concludes.

And what of getting the public aware of the benefits to them of the end product? "People are starting to use online services and they are certainly looking to the internet and to other online information services to find out information on what they perceive as being key essentials in their lives," he says. "Another output of stream 4 is a deliverable that we call 'informing users'. This aims to provide businesses with a one-stop-shop for all the information regarding what they need to do to sustain their business. Essentially, the idea is that if a person wants to set up a butcher's shop, for example, they could go to the site and it would tell them all the licences they may need, how to go about getting them and how to go about carrying out risk assessments - so a one-stop-shop for the business community."

For the general public, transparency in the local authority decision making processes is becoming an important issue. As Mr Smith explains: "Again, the whole issue of liquor licensing being handed over to local authorities brings into play the power of local authority members. Premises that are noisy, have lots of rubbish associated with them, or have anti-social behaviour issues, now move from being essentially a police and magistrates' matter, to being a matter of local interest."

For this reason local authority members are keen for the public to be given access to information regarding pending applications, the detail of those applications, where they have got to and how to appeal etc. "One of the things we are going to enable, as well as online applications for businesses, is application tracking by residents and the ability to view public registers online."

This means that local residents could decide that they wish to see who has applied for a licence in their area and access the details of the application. If there are concerns about applications, the public will be encouraged to object online. "There are huge benefits for local authorities themselves," says Mr Smith, "in that it will e-enable a lot of their processes. It will streamline processes by delivering more information to businesses online and it frees up the frontline staff to do other things."

Another of the things the project is doing is enabling businesses to carry out self assessments online, which again frees up officer time by explaining how to go about it. At the end, the user will either have the risk assessment printed for them to send in, or have the opportunity to have it sent straight to the local authority. "Again, instead of saying 'you must provide me with a risk assessment' and they say 'how?' - we will be providing them with the tools to do it themselves."

In the end, as Mr Smith points out, the project is just opening the door to e-enabling local authorities. "When you start talking about what is possible you can get incredibly enthusiastic about it. It's true that there will initially be some reluctance on the part of the public and businesses moving to online transactions, but the momentum is already there."

Dave Smith is area environmental health officer at Wandsworth LBC and currently seconded to the Parsol project as regulatory services stream co-ordinator. For further information tel: 020 8871 7667.

As part of the publicity programme a series of regional seminars will be held in February 2004 where EHJ's readers will be able to meet representatives and get further in-depth information on how stream 4 can help local authorities meet the 2005 BVPI requirements.