Surrey Heath Borough Council needed to find a solution to get multiple departments responsible for property lifecycles working together effectively. Bespoke XMAP software provided by Simon Miles from Geoxphere helped to provide this solution, enabling two key departments to unlock revenue with location data by allowing them visualise council data and foster collaboration. The success of this partnership lead to Surrey Heath winning the Street Naming & Numbering Collaboration and Innovation Award at the 2026 Geoplace Conference.
The Issue
Surrey Heath Borough Council, like all Local Authorities, have various responsibilities with regards to property lifecycles, from development planning all the way to demolition, conversions and use changes. Property lifecycles encompass various departments; Planning at the development inception and conversion phase, Street Naming & Numbering for addressing and street registration, Building Control for overseeing the construction, Revenues for tax collection, Enforcement for ensuring compliance, to name a few. Unfortunately, communicating between departments can be difficult with various software not linked, processes unclear and the hurdles of data protection compliance. This can lead to silo working, duplicating communications and workload.
A project was initiated between Street Naming & Numbering (SNN) and Revenues to see if parallel working could be eliminated, data shared and processes made defined and robust. SNN is concerned with registering new properties and new streets, ensuring official addresses are created and distributed to all public and private databases. Revenue Inspectors are concerned with identifying and monitoring new properties to ensure accurate tax collection and inspect existing policies to verify discounts and exemptions. These departments access planning data, require applicant contacts, carry out site visits, inform external stakeholders, request and collate build updates and review land/property ownership.
Connecting these departments and developing a combined process stream went through various low tech iterations using spreadsheets and cloud tools, but was sadly error prone due to manual entry while avoiding data protection issues.
The Solution
Surrey Heath turned to XMAP, who offered a bespoke solution to this collaboration. This included;
- Enabling the filtering of planning data and merging of SNN application data to provide a dashboard of current planning statuses on future properties. This was further enhanced by visualising these records on digital maps, which can be accessed and actioned by Revenue Inspections.
- Allowing site visit details from both departments to be added to the dashboard which updates all departments.
- The production of various map layers to show properties at different stages, clearly representing key lifecycle checkpoints to trigger processes.
- The integration of GIS and database tools being facilitated within the collaboration to visualise development plots to enable accurate address and street plotting and to create bespoke map views.
Feedback from Surrey Heath
“In addition to producing a bespoke database and GIS solution to this collaboration, XMAP took the time to mentor and instruct on how the system is edited, features are added and how the underlying system works. This extra effort from XMAP has been greatly utilised, empowering the teams to experiment with additional data and features and growing XMAP more into our processes. XMAP is now the primary tool for SNN and property lifecycle management, leveraging it’s speed, clarity and customisability, with plans to extend into data and document management tools.”
“Simon Miles at Geoxphere was integral to this collaboration by leveraging XMAP and all it’s features to achieve linked and visualised data across our departments. He understood the brief quickly and shared prototypes while always taking the time to collect feedback. He was very understanding when we threw new ideas and features his way and always endeavoured to accommodate our requests. Simon was always in touch during the build and, crucially, offered us the opportunity to watch him build the system, so that we can better understand our data and how it can be transformed. After the collaboration, Simon has proved he is always available for future builds, explore ideas and to investigate problems.”
The Result
This collaboration is now permanent, increasing revenue income, speeding up SNN and benefiting the whole council by giving access to accurate, current address, street, revenue and planning data visualised if various formats. It also lead to Surrey Heath Borough Council winning the Street Naming & Numbering Collaboration and Innovation Award 2026 at the Geoplace Conference.