Hampshire County Council

Recreation and Heritage Policy Review Committee Item 11

11 September 2003

East Hampshire Resource Project - Connection to Hampshire Public Services Network (HPSN)

Report of the Director of Recreation and Heritage

Contact: Margaret Plumridge Ext 6173

1 Introduction

1.1 The East Hampshire Community Resource Network was established to develop a range of resources and equipment which is available to support the voluntary and community sector in East Hampshire including an information and communications technology ( ICT ) link to 8 of the 9 participating centres. This link was originally provided via the HPSN broadband connection and provided the following organisations with direct links to Hampshire County Council :-

Alton Community Association

Headley Down Community Association

Horndean Community Association ( Merchistoun Hall)

Liss Community Association ( The Triangle)

Petersfield Community Association

Petersfield Voluntary Centre

Voluntary Action for East Hampshire (Council of Voluntary Service)

Whitehill and Bordon Community Association

1.2 The East Hampshire District Council area is largely rural. Consequently these links were essential where other HPSN connections such as in the local library were not easily accessible on a day to day basis or the availability of commercial broadband was scarce.

2 Background

2.1 The funding for the project originally came from a joint bid to the Home Office Active Community Unit (ACU) and the Lottery's Community Fund. The capital bid to the ACU included only 12 months funding for the connection to HPSN. The revenue bid to the Community Fund failed.

2.2 Following this the Executive Member - Recreation and Heritage agreed to provide funding towards a development worker in order to ensure the project reached its full potential and to assist with the marketing of the Resources Centres to other local community organisations. It was hoped that further funding could be found either via the East Hampshire District Council or the Local Strategic Partnership. This funding has not been forthcoming and the Consortium Steering Group have now agreed that the search for additional funding should be concluded and that the development worker should be appointed on a part-time basis.

3 Hampshire Public Services Network

3.1 HPSN provided these organisations with the following :

· Direct links to Hantsweb and the full range of county information services

· Direct links to local statutory services at district and county level

· Direct links dedicated to voluntary and community sector information

· Resources for training, learning and information

4 The consequences arising from the cost of HPSN

4.1 It has not been possible for the Consortium to obtain further funding towards the cost of the HPSN connection. The annual cost to continue this service to all nine sites would be £36,000 based on figures produced by Hampshire County Council's IT Services. The organisations involved in the consortium recognised that they could not support these costs from their own budgets and when negotiations with IT Services were unable to provide a solution before the end of Year 1 the consortium members agreed to disconnect from HPSN.

4.2 However, two of the centres were unable to disconnect because there was no commercial broadband alternative to HPSN in their area at the time of disconnection. Both these sites now have an alternative means of connection and will disconnect from the HPSN service in the next few weeks.

5 Current costs to the centres in the year 2003/04

6. HPSN and local commercial access

6.1 The differences between HPSN and other services are outlined in Appendix 1.

6.2 For most corporate organisations that run a network service with numerous users at any one time HPSN provides a better service as it allows access to multiple users without affecting the delivery. This is because the ratio of users per line is 4:1. With other packages the ratio of users can range up to 50:1 and services may be slower as usage within the local exchange increases and creates increasing pressure on the line usage.

6.3 However, for small organisations solutions other than HPSN are more cost effective and can provide the service required by users. Alton Community Association reports that the BT Business 500 package is working well and that they have had no difficulty with it.

7. Funding the appropriate service

7.1 It has become clear that one of the difficulties encountered by consortium members has been an understanding of the differences between broadband service providers. It has also been recognised that HPSN is not appropriate in some circumstances as it is too sophisticated and consequently too expensive a package when a relatively simple service will suffice.

7.2 IT Services does provide a consultancy service that could be used to develop solutions for organisations such as the East Hampshire Consortium though many such organisations have limited funds to expend on consultancy time. With professional advice these organisations could provide more locally based public access solutions relatively cheaply.

7.3 It is proposed that the consultancy time suggested in para 5.11 should be used to provide an appraisal of the current solutions devised by the individual members of the consortium and an appraisal of future options for the consortium as a whole. This will require

· A review of the current consortium members requirements and a comparison made of the current providers to ensure they are using the most cost effective packages to meet their needs.

· A review of the requirements of any new consortium members including the Kingsley Centre and Liphook Millennium Hall.

· Advice on how the services at the sites could be developed to provide an appropriate public service in the future

· A report on the feasibility of networking the village halls to their local resource centre and consequently to the common consortium services. This could include common accountancy services which has been suggested already.

· The provision of IT support to the current consortium users

· To update the website and extend its information provision and access.

7.4 All this would need to be done within the framework of providing a cost effective service which could be supported by the consortium members themselves in the future.

7.5 The experience of the East Hampshire Consortium to date and this proposed work would enable future consideration to be given to developing similar activity in the community sector in other districts in Hampshire and help to provide continuing support to the community sector as a whole.

Recommendation

That Members support the following proposals and submit them to the Executive Member for Recreation and Heritage for his consideration:

1) that £9296.63 be provided to cover the costs of the IT connections to the consortium members for the year 2003 -2004

2) that £2750 be provided to support the consultancy costs for the work as outlined in para 7.1 - 7.3

3) that consideration be given to how support can be provided to such projects in the future enabling the most cost effective access solutions to be developed.

Section 100 D - Local Government Act 1972 - background papers

The following documents disclose facts or matters on which this report, or an important part of it, is based and has been relied upon to a material extent in the preparation of this report.

NB the list excludes:

1. Published works

2. Documents which disclose exempt or confidential information as defined in the Act.

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