Staffordshire County Council provides a wide range of services to all aspects of Staffordshire’s community including; the local education service with over 400 schools, libraries, social services, managing the rights of way and country parks, trading standards, highways, planning, waste disposal and many more.
Those services are fulfilled by three directorates in which staff use maps and GIS to a greater or lesser degree. They are: Children and Lifelong Learning, Social Care and Health and Development Services.
Children and Lifelong Learning brings together services provided to every single young person in Staffordshire. The Pupil Support Unit deals with school admissions and school transport with GIS playing an integral role in helping the unit carry out its functions.
In Staffordshire, a student of secondary school age is entitled to free school transport if they live more than three miles away from the school and this is worked out using the shortest walking route on a GIS system called DataMap Smart.
Fig.1 DataMap Smart GIS software
The Children and Lifelong Learning Directorate also looks after the County Council’s property estate which includes recording the County Council land holdings, leases, licenses, easements and agricultural holding information. They use Ordnance Survey maps as a base for storing information for each County Council establishment down to individual buildings or blocks. They also use old series maps to track historical boundaries of properties and for use in positional accuracy changes and title plans.
Fig. 2 First edition OS map with modern MasterMap overlay
Social Care and Health has used GIS to plot its care homes and day care facilities to see which might be affected by flooding using the Environment Agencies flood mapping data but it is within the Development Services Directorate where GIS has come into its own.
The multitude of functions within DSD include Development Control where GIS is used to plot all incoming applications for quarries or recycling sites against set criteria of planning constraints to aid consultation. It is embedded into the asset management system within Highways and forms the backbone for the work of Environment and Countryside. Data is collated from many sources and provided in the form of GIS projects which all the specialists can use for consultation on development proposals as well as the management of land, monitoring of change and specific research projects in such subjects as the effects of climate change.
Fig. 3 Bracken spraying on Cannock Chase
As can be seen in the very brief descriptions above, GIS is at the core of the work of many units across the County Council. This is truer now as never before as we seek to inform our stakeholders more about what we do and how and why we do it.