Agenda item

The Licensing and Support Services Manager, Worcestershire Regulatory Services, briefly reminded Members that an update had recently been provided at the meeting of the Board on 5^th October 2023.

Due to the short time since the last report to the Board, the amount of change that could be reported was limited. Officers continued to quality check additional forms whilst testing on the financial system took place; and planning for the second phase continued.

Now officers had the merchant ID, the team had been liaising with Adelante (the financial payment platform) who were now assessing how to attach the ID to the appropriate items in the online store. This would allow the appropriate monies to be transferred to Bromsgrove District Council (BDC) and then redistributed to the relevant partner authority.

Sample files had already been exchanged to ensure monies received into Tech-One, the BDC finance system, related to the item details that were on the interface file. The final version could then be loaded onto the Tech One system.

Progress

Meetings had been set up with the Communications Team to discuss the soft launch strategy of the plan, so that this could be discussed with stakeholder groups in testing phase two. It was important that all of the information that customers required to complete the forms was available at this stage. This would include: -

·         Website Update

·         FAQ’s – Frequently asked questions

·         Guidance Documents

Some of these may require changing or editing throughout the testing stages.

Sadly, several obstacles had arisen that the team continued to address by working with our external providers. Firstly, the address base gazetteer had required a software update to ensure the most current correct addresses were being used in the system. This would be normal for most address-based systems that, from time to time the associated gazetteer needed to be updated. This should ensure that newer addresses were easy for applicants to put into the system.

Secondly, there had been a delay in implementing the licensing connector from IDOX, our long-standing database supplier, which was required to ensure the correct district was paid once an applicant had selected the district from a drop-down list. Officers had been informed that this would be available as part of a IDOX upgrade in January 2024. Clearly, officers wanted to ensure that the process was seamless and would not consider moving to live until they knew that the right monies would be identifiable and portable to the correct partner authority. 

In parallel to the wider automation project, officers continued to assess the roll out of electronic ID Cards in the taxi trade for both safeguarding and enforcement measures and this had progressed. IT colleagues at Wyre Forest continued to work on the dashboard implementation and were now starting to trial this. Once officers understand the timeframes of this in more detail, a plan would be executed for implementation across the County.

The Technical Services Manager. WRS, responded to questions from the Board and in doing so explained that, with regard to the issues around addresses and new addresses, WRS did not own the data, the data was owned by each partner authority, who updated their data set from time to time with the associated gazetteer. Therefore, the associated gazetteer needed to be updated as WRS did not have an up-to-date version. There had also been an issue with the system caused by what WRS officers thought was an IT ‘bug’. This meant that officers had been unable to add any current gazetteer updates until this was resolved. Eventually, the IT software provider agreed with WRS diagnosis of the issue and sought to resolve the situation in their system. Once the patch is applied to the system to fix the ‘bug’, WRS would be able to update the gazetteer to the most up to date version. Members were reassured that any costs associated with the “bug” resolution would be met by IDOX.

In response to a query on the ‘go live’ date, the Licensing and Support Services Manager, WRS, stated that she had hoped that the ‘go live’ date of April 2024 would still be met.

RESOLVED that the Progress Report on the Automation Project be noted.