Planning & Environment!Planning & Environment

LOCAL LAND CHARGES - SERVICE UPDATE    24th July 2008

As part of the Council’s program of improvement, we were due to upgrade our computerised systems within an agreed timescale of 6 days which commenced on 9th July through to midday on the 15th July, this upgrade affected a number of departments including Planning, Local Land Charge searches and registrations.

Because of the significant amounts of data being transferred over to the new system, the software company Northgate required the Council to set in place a period of “Downtime” which meant that we would have no access to either our systems or the information held within them.

We duly notified you of this “downtime period” in advance ensuring that all of our customers were kept informed of our impending closure. It is with much regret that the Council has seen this closure far exceed the original timeframe agreed with Northgate. This has had a major impact on the Council’s ability to provide the Local Land Charges service to its customers and it was felt appropriate to publish the statement issued by Northgate to ensure our customers are kept informed of the current situation. 

Statement from Northgate:

“Northgate wishes to apologise for any inconvenience caused to the public by the unavailability of the local land charges system. We have put in place an action plan to rectify the problems which have arisen as a result of a one-off migration to a new system. We are working closely with the council to ensure that the system is fully operational and are confident that the service will be available over the next few days”.

To ease the current build up of search requests the Local Land Charges department is currently attempting to produce a temporary work-around, which should enable us to produce some (but not all) of the searches that have been submitted.  

Further updates including information about register viewings will be issued in due course, as the various operational issues are resolved with Northgate.

 

 

 

Lorraine Rossiter

Customer Services and Administration Manager

 

Click on the following links to view the recently published "Notice of Service disrusption letter" and "Downtime notification letter".

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