Performance

Strategic objective 6: To provide enhanced and transparent national, regional and district data services for the property market from 2003

We are working with the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to supply them with the data they need to calculate the new council tax valuations due in 2007 and to link from the published information on the VOA website to Land Register Online. This will provide a more open and transparent means of showing how the tax is calculated.

We have continued to supply other government departments with data for use in the various house price statistics they produce, and local authorities with individual house price data (but not actual addresses) to inform their business cases for grants, market analysis etc.

We have taken part in preliminary discussions with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), consultants and pathfinder local authorities on the way forward for developing GIS systems to support local authority decision-making.

We are currently seeking guidance from the Information Commissioner about the data protection implications of supplying individual address data as part of a house price dataset and hope to have a ruling soon.

In January we received Information Fair Trader accreditation from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. We are the first ‘small trader’ to receive this and we hope to have the recommendations suggested in the final report in place later this summer.