Publication - FOI/EIR release

Correspondence relating to Scottish Police Gazetteer system: FOI release

Published: 8 November 2017
Directorate: Safer Communities Directorate
Part of: Public safety and emergencies, Public sector

Information request and response under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

FOI reference: FOI/17/01981
Date received: 29 August 2017
Date responded: 2 November 2017

Information requested

You asked for all correspondence/emails and minutes from any meetings since April 2012 between the Scottish Government and HMICS or Police Scotland relating to the Police Scotland gazetteer system.

Response

I enclose a copy of most of the information you requested. However, some information (names and contact details of individual external stakeholders) has been withheld under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA – personal data relating to a third party. In some instances the information provided is contained within wider documents which also contained other information not within the scope of your request. We have only released information which is within the scope of your request, and have redacted other information not within scope.

By way of context, the Scottish Police Gazetteer is an electronic location based system which allows Police Scotland service advisers to visually locate incident locations. The Gazetteer uses information supplied through the One Scotland Gazetteer which is a dataset developed by Scotland's 32 local authorities. The Improvement Service also plays a central role, collating and quality assuring the data included in the One Scotland Gazetteer before sharing it with Police Scotland, usually on a weekly basis. Further information on the One Scotland Gazetteer can be found at: One Scotland Gazetteer

In January of this year HMICS published an update report describing the progress made by Police Scotland to implement the recommendations contained in the Inspectorate's initial assurance review on call handling. The report recognised the continued work of Police Scotland to deliver improvements to the Scottish Police Gazetteer and highlighted the training and support which had been made available to support service advisers in the development of local knowledge, supplementing the systems and processes at their disposal.

HMICS continue to support both Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority in their efforts to strengthen this aspect of policing, independently assuring the service's preparedness to proceed with key phases of the ongoing project to remodel call handling. Beyond that remodelling work, Police Scotland recognises the significant opportunities which exist for closer collaboration in the provisioning of key systems such as the Gazetteer. To that end, the service is committed to ongoing dialogue with key partners including the other emergency services.

Title	Format	Size
Annex A - Cross Blue Light Services Working Group, Jan/Feb 2016	PDF	282.83KB
Annex B - Email Correspondence Gordon Peterson, Feb 2016	PDF	731.64KB
Annex C - Extract HMICS Note, 7 March 2017	PDF	47.55KB
Annex D - Email Correspondence Scott Wood, April 2017 (part one)	PDF	1.31MB
Annex E - Email Correspondence Scott Wood, April 2017 (part two)	PDF	1.29MB

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The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses