The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) successfully generates Council Tax bands for 26m+ residences and Business Rates for 2m+ non-domestic properties, yielding over £60bn for Local Authorities in England and Wales.
For several decades, the VOA has used a combination of specialist human knowledge and a relatively simple geospatial ecosystem. In 2019, the Business Systems Transformation (BST) program was set up to address VOA’s longstanding technical debt and meet an aspiration to develop resilience to changes in government policy.
This provided an opportunity to completely redesign the geospatial ecosystem, which is a core component of location intelligence used in property valuation.
The tasks included the transformation of a) ageing technology; b) legacy geo-analytical processes; c) fragmented geospatial data governance; and d) limited geospatial data and science literacy. In 2023, BST successfully delivered VOA’s first enterprise-level Geographical Information System (GIS), VMS, with the following activities:
- Incorporating business and users’ needs closely during the design of application, change management, and learning; and incorporating best practices from other organizations.
- Reducing development time, cutting expenses, and enabling reconfiguration for any type of mapping by using a single source code to create various VMS versions.
- Enabling the historical mapping, multi-criteria decision-making, and interactive exploration through linked views.
- Using rigorous novel geo-analytics to redefine how VOA models and visualizes the geographical homogeneity of valuation and link the properties to other geospatial intelligence.
VMS is used daily by over 1000 users within the VOA. Users have reported improved productivity, quality, and an uplift in their working experience.
Provision of variety of authoritative data layers (latest maps, aerial images, street views) in a single interface has made it easier to remain in a single workflow, rather than switching between windows. Use of government address data standards such as UPRN has reduced ambiguities in address search.
Aside from operational users, VMS has also been a catalyst in the use of geospatial data, science and technology for automated valuation modelling and machine learning by data scientists.
Sanjay Rana, Geospatial Lead, Valuation Office Agency (VOA), Bristol, United Kingdom
