Facewatch appoints Richard Thompson OBE as chief executive
Facewatch, a company that has developed an integrated online incident reporting system used by police forces and businesses across the UK, has appointed Richard Thompson as chief executive officer. Richard was most recently chief constable of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary and has extensive experience gained internationally during his time at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. "This is an important step change for Facewatch, which was started in 2010 as a way to protect my customers from bag theft in Gordon's wine bar", said the company's chairman Simon Gordon. "Richard will be instrumental in taking Facewatch to the next level and establishing the brand as a trusted crime prevention and detection platform. Online and mobile tools such as Facewatch Crime Reporter and Facewatch ID are still in their infancy but as the proliferation of camera technology moves online towards central monitoring we can all look forward to a significant reduction in low level crime by working together". Facewatch Crime Reporting has signed protocols with nine UK police forces and has a further eight in the pipeline, covering more than 50% of the population. The mobile crime identification app Facewatch ID has just been relaunched and has been providing police forces with an unprecedented 20% rate of feedback from the public on identifying subjects of interest. Internationally Facewatch is shortly beginning pilots with police forces in the US and Australia, with further negotiations ongoing in Brazil, Africa, India and many other countries.
Pictured: Facewatch website home page.
Facewatch: www.facewatch.co.uk
Capita empty homes review helps Plymouth secure £300,000 over six years
Capita Local Government Services has completed a review of 865 homes that were recorded as empty for Plymouth City Council and, following a verification process using customer credit data, have confirmed that 6% of the properties are occupied. The review has enabled the council to identify more than £300,000 of new revenue through the new homes bonus scheme over the next six years, the company says. The review was completed in around six weeks to meet the September 2013 deadline for the new homes bonus scheme. Capita provided a managed service, comprising the review, verification and inspection process. The review was carried out on a payment by results basis to ensure that the council did not have to source upfront investment. Giles Reid, sales director at Capita Local Government Services, said: "Working closely with Plymouth City Council we were able to quickly locate a significant number of homes declared empty that were occupied. We used a variety of non-intrusive methods, which included investigators from our revenues and benefits team visiting properties."
Capita Local Government Services: www.capita.co.uk/what-we-do/sectors/local-government.aspx
GeoPlace Provides INSPIRE-harmonised transport network web service
GeoPlace, the partnership between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey to run the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) for England and Wales, has launched a web service to make NSG compliant for the Transport Network theme of INSPIRE, the EU directive on spatial data. The Transport Network theme includes road, rail, air and water transport networks together with related infrastructure and links between different networks. The NSG is a national compilation of individual English and Welsh local authority street datasets representing a range of street network and related information such as street name and location details, street geometry and a range of Additional Street Data and falls squarely under the view and download requirements of INSPIRE. GeoPlace has provided a Web Map Service (WMS) for viewing and a Web Feature Service (WFS) for downloading data. A user makes a request to view or download data via a web mapping service or GIS application. An image of the street network is served up allowing an overlay within the user's own data.
Access for registered NSG users is at: https://services.geoplace.co.uk/#Transport-Networks
