Summary

Ash Parish Council have used Parish Online to effectively manage their local street assets as powers were devolved to them. Using Parish Online gives them an interactive tool to save time and money and deal with issues in real-time.

Challenge

Ash Parish Council has grown into an expansive residential area with a population that could soon reach above 18,000. This created a number of challenges;

• The increasing population and subsequent urban development has put a strain on its limited resources to manage accumulating assets.
• Historically, Ash Parish Council has had to rely on Guildford Borough Council to update its records and provide maps with information regarding its assets – resulting in significant costs in terms of time and money to both councils.
• The council controls over 600 street lights and identified mutual benefits from controlling its own stock of lighting within the parish.
• The council needed to identify the location of individual street lights to maintain and repair them as necessary. The next step was to source geographic data, which would be simple to use, accessible and affordable.

Solution

Working with Guildford Borough Council, Ash Parish Council signed up for the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) and used Parish Online to access high-quality Ordnance Survey data.

Once they started to use this tool, it quickly identified a significant advantage – in addition to managing street lights, it could also oversee its entire assets, producing a comprehensive online log across property, green spaces, sports grounds, cemeteries, parish notice boards, bins and bus stops – this exceeded all expectations.

This tool has provided Ash Parish Council with detailed mapping, meaning it no longer depends on Guildford Borough Council for assistance. Through Parish Online, highly-detailed and accurate Ordnance Survey data is immediately accessible. Processes are now less complex and time consuming, meaning that assets such as street lights can be well maintained.

Benefits

Parish Online has given Ash Parish Council the following benefit;

• Independence to manage their own local assets
• Ability to print detailed maps on-demand and share them with councillors and contractors
• With better asset management, streets and public spaces are safer
• Considerable cost-savings by having tools and data at their fingertips.

"Inputting all of our assets into one place has saved us a considerable amount of time, energy and money. By using Parish Online we can plot our own assets in real time, deal with problems instantaneously whilst providing detailed maps of the local area to councillors.

We will also be using these maps in our neighbour planning. When we want to know where something is we print off a map, it’s as simple as that. We now have the tools to take ownership of our local assets."

Graham Bidwell, Administrator, Ash Parish Council

Title picture credit to © DEHN (https://www.dehn.co.uk/en-gb) All other pictures sent to us by Ash Parish Council.