London borough frees up access to its info

The Royal Borough of Kingston has increased the amount of information it is making available to the public as part of its work to comply with Freedom of Information Act legislation.

The borough has a population of only 150,000, making it London's smallest district.

At the start of 2004 Kingston - and every other public sector organisation - had to make records available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

All councils have to have a list of documents that are available to the public. Most just have a paper version but we went one step further and let people download it straight away.

But with the way most public sector IT systems have evolved over time, the challenge for many organisations has been how to do this.

Kington's IT manager Robin Noble told silicon.com: "We weren't sure how many requests we would get. As a local authority we didn't know. It was a big challenge. The technical challenge was to share our publication scheme."

The borough's publication scheme is a one-stop shop for general information, such as laws and details of elections. The council decided it would save time and money by putting this online.

He said: "All councils have to have a list of documents that are available to the public. Most just have a paper version but we went one step further and let people download it straight away. With this it saves having to write answers to people."

The council decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for the publication scheme and Ciber UK to make it run on the website.

Noble said: "We already had an investment in Microsoft SharePoint and we had put all of our documents into that. So we turned it into an online version of our publication scheme. It's been popular with the public."

He added: "There are 400 other councils in the UK and I'm sure a few of them could benefit from doing something similar."

The council has moved other services onto the website, giving the public the facility to pay council tax bills and fines online.

The payments system has also enabled local children involved in youth enterprise schemes to sell goods online, Noble said.