LG Inform Plus

Natural neighbourhoods 

Instead of standard geographies, create new custom areas defined to your needs, such as community zones, for more meaningful reporting and greater insight. Use these new geographies in your own reports to show data for your area, or view any of our prebuilt reports through your new area. Natural neighbourhoods also works well alongside data added under the ‘My Local Metrics’ service.

Records retention guidance 

Save money on your council or fire and rescue service’s records retention by using LG Inform Plus’ 1,700 retention schedules for every service in the Local Government service list. In partnership with Invicta Law legal service team, the records retention information guides English councils on the types of records that could be kept for each service to ensure compliance with the Code of Practice on the management of records issued under section 46 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (issued by DCMS in July 2021) on the management of records and to meet likely business needs.

Power and duties tool 

The power and duties tool looks at the legal duties and powers councils must understand to deliver services for each type of English council. Over 6,000 links to current legislation will help guide your authority when making decisions about which services to provide. Produced in partnership with Invicta Law Legal Services team, the information ensures compliance with statute in England and Wales for many different bodies of local government.

Standards 

The local government sector has been working for more than 15 years to develop these information sharing standards. These Standards, developed by the sector, underpin service delivery, allowing councils to take a 360-degree view of local government: from services and functions to changes in circumstances and reshaping service provision.

LG Inform Plus standards are used widely in corporate data systems and support many initiatives that require individual local data sets to be brought together and used in combination for regional and national purposes. They are used to drive public facing national data services like gov.uk and local themes in data.gov.uk and provide a fundamental building block to linking data in an open published way. The standards are seen as the "home of local government semantics" and provide a reputable source of uniform resource identifiers (URIs – essential to linked data) for local data publishing.

Classifying data within these controlled lists (in their human or machine readable forms) allows data consumers and app developers to view business information from any angle or starting point. The contribution that these standards are making to open linked data publishing and the demands of the transparency agenda is significant.

Supporting tools and materials for open data publishing 

The open data pages within LG Inform Plus provide the local government sector with guidance, helpful tools, searching aids and access to core inventories, schemas and data harvesters/aggregators in support of the local open data publishing processes for the transparency agenda.

Each local authority and fire service creates huge volumes of data for the effective running of their business. With the increasing move to open government and widespread publishing of last data stocks, there is a need for central coordination to facilitate basic standards against which such data should be published. Without this central coordination, most local data will be in many disparate forms and it will be impossible to locate, aggregate, analyse in combination and reuse in the vision set out by open transparency.

LG Inform Plus provides a central platform (managed and enhanced in close collaboration with sector-wide information managers and standards bodies) for data publishing strategies to be deployed along with search and analysis tools to provide means harvesting local data and combining it in combination for regional and national re-use by data consumers.