Almost exactly a year following its unveiling in last year’s
budget by Chancellor George Osborne, Britain’s National Planning Policy
Framework (NPPF) become law on Wednesday March 27th, 2014.
Amongst other requirements, the new rules mandate that councils must set
housing targets on a 5-year rolling basis that will identify potential
developable land within their respective jurisdictions.
While on the face of it, “planning” for such an important
aspect of our economy and our environment might be considered a good thing, the
Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) believes the country is not in a
position to execute on those plans. According to CPRE estimates, only 11 of the
34 Midlands unitary, county and metropolitan districts are in a position to
have their plans in place by the deadline. A vast majority (23 of them) aren’t
yet in a position to submit their plans to the government.
Good planning implies a well orchestrated and perfectly
timed and executed set of consultations. It involved a deliberate outreach
effort by the planners with all major stakeholders involved or impacted,
however slightly or considerably, by an issue. Unfortunately, the government’s
NPPF impacts a large segment of British society, and as a result requires an
extra ordinary outreach effort. And to enable that to happen, government
organizations, private agencies and a host of other bodies must have accurate and
usable data that can further their outreach campaigns.
The truth however is not many such mass contact campaigns
can happen successfully without up to date contact lists, email addresses and
other contact databases. Many of these data resources, compiled and maintained
by various stakeholders are:
filled with duplicate records
- rife with unreadable data included in them
- peppered with incomplete data fields embedded into them
What this means is that, when consultation outreach is
attempted using that data, to discuss the impact that the governments planning
and housing development policies will have on individuals or groups:
- letters sent by regular mail will likely not reach many addressees
- many addressees will probably receive multiple copies of the same information
- emails sent will bounce back, undelivered
- some email recipients will get multiple messages, prompting them to flag the sender as a possible spammer
To avoid all of these negative outcomes, WinPure has
created a host of software tools that can sanitize, de-dupe and cleanse contactlists and address databases. By using a series of highly complex
fuzzy-logic based matching algorithms, these tools are able to quickly cross
check huge amounts of data and produce clean, usable contact lists.
In effect, by taking error riddled lists and matching them
against other such lists, and by purging them of duplicate records and
un-readable characters and fields, WinPure not only helps list owners
save time, effort and money, but it turns that data into a highly effective
communications asset. And since these tools are supported on some of today’s
most affordable platforms, including Windows XP-SP2 / 2003 / Vista / Windows 7
and Windows 8, it means users don’t even have to invest significantly in
high-end IT infrastructure to take full advantage of them.
