High Peak Borough Council have become one of the first local authorities to successfully match their electoral register to their Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) and achieve the requirements of the Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE).

A recently issued directive from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) required local authorities to convert their electoral registers to the BS7666 standard – the standard set for the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) by 1st December 2009.  To help achieve this, High Peak used data matching software from gazetteer specialists Aligned Assets.

Using Symphony iMatch, High Peak was able to avoid the expense of external data matching services by achieving a 90% match rate using the automatic matching process within iMatch.  Automatic matching however is the simple part of the process and it is the manual matching that inevitably proves to be most time-consuming.

Of the 41,000 properties in their electoral register, 4000 were returned as mismatches that required manual matching.  It is with the manual matching process that the real strength of iMatch can be seen with its intuitive and user-friendly interactive matching process.  The 4000 records were successfully matched manually in only ten days using iMatch through the cooperation of the LLPG custodian and a member of the Electoral Services team.

From the 41,000 properties only 100 were left on the electoral register after automatic and manual matching that bore no resemblance to the LLPG record.  Because of this, additional information was needed e.g. from Council tax records, before the addresses could be linked to the relevant Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN).  By using iMatch therefore, 99.75% of the data was successfully matched with only 0.25% requiring further investigation.

“iMatch was designed to facilitate the data matching process and make it a process that is both quick and easy,” said Phil Gee, Commercial Director at Aligned Assets, “With the introduction of CORE, and the requirement to perform this matching process, we are seeing an ever increasing interest in what iMatch is capable of.”

To find out more about how iMatch can help your authority fulfil the MoJ requirements of electoral register BS7666 compliancy, contact Aligned Assets on 01483 717951.