Zatpark Flexible Enforcement for Local Authorities
Zatpark Flexible Enforcement is our innovative feature that enables you to create any type of ticket for any enforcement purpose.
At Unity5, we know that Local Authorities are under pressure to deliver more with less whilst ensuring service delivery stays aligned with Government digital strategies. Our clear understanding of the needs of Local Authorities led to the creation of our innovative, flexible enforcement solution. The Zatpark Flexible Enforcement platform is a one-stop solution for permit management and issuing and enforcing penalties for parking, moving traffic, environmental, community behaviour, education and more.
Unity5 has long partnered with Local Authorities to create enforcement solutions that improve their services, create efficiencies and ensure compliance. In this article, we explain how our Flexible Enforcement solution came to life from our close collaboration with North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC).
Creating flexible enforcement to solve multiple problems with a single system
It was our work with North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC) that highlighted the need for a flexible enforcement solution that enables authorities to create custom ticket types for any enforcement type.
North East Lincolnshire Council is a local authority serving 160,000 people. Early in 2022, North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC) published “The Council Plan”, outlining details of services to be delivered and developments planned over the next five years. The plan seeks to deliver transformation and innovation through the optimal use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and the ambition of NELC to work with its partners to create ‘Stronger Economies’ and ‘Stronger Communities’.
In 2019, NELC and their regeneration partner EQUANS Services undertook a full review of their parking operations. They concluded that a new parking management system was required to transform the service and deliver a much improved and enhanced customer experience. The service would move away from a paper-based system to a state-of-the-art digital system, significantly reducing workloads and delays and giving residents and businesses the service they expect.
Delivering integrated parking enforcement
Unity5 made a strong bid, resulting in NELC and EQUANS awarding us their parking management software contract. Unity5 has a strong track record of delivering market-leading parking management and permit solutions in the UK with its Zatpark enforcement management solutions.
“Most of the procurement team and I had no prior knowledge of Zatpark until we started to evaluate the bids. The decision to select Zatpark was based on how well it met our requirements, along with it being competitively priced. The quality of the technical submission and thorough software demonstration showed a great deal of effort was made. It was the best solution to allow us to transform our service and improve value for money.”
Lynne Bromley, Parking Manager
Parking Services, Places & Communities North – North East Lincolnshire Council
Delivery of the project began immediately after the award of the contract. Head of Onboarding & Implementation Oli Pelliccio was to oversee the project’s delivery.
Following initial discovery sessions, the Zatpark software development team made bespoke changes to ensure NELC evidence was captured accurately, facilitating the automatic generation of the legal and prosecution packs.
“The big difference between Parking and Environmental is the legal case pack that is completed in the back office that we have been working on with the ZatPark team. When an FPN isn’t paid or if we opt to go straight to prosecution rather than issuing an FPN we have to compile an expedited legal pack for our legal team to consider and a full prosecution pack when we agree it is sensible to go to court. Much of this information is pulled through from the case information entered for producing each ticket and saves officers typing 12 pages sometimes of repeat offender details.“
Will Abe Environmental Enforcement Manager, NELC
The onboarding plan ensured the new system’s maximum value, allowing them to take advantage of process and efficiency improvements quickly.
Unity5’s Zatpark is known as an integration-agnostic market-leading solution for parking enforcement. However, not just these features benefited NELC; it was its flexibility to adapt to manage any enforcement type.
Delivering digital transformation for environmental enforcement
Immediately following the success of the Zatpark and Zatpermit implementation for NELC’s parking enforcement, the Unity5 and NELC teams began focussing on solving NELC’s environmental enforcement problems.
Environmental issues such as fly-tipping had become a significant problem for NELC. Gathering evidence and identifying the offender of these types of environmental contraventions was extremely challenging for them.
The Unity5 team worked to understand the environmental issues NELC were experiencing and proposed a multi-faceted enforcement solution. The Zatpark solution would use the Zatpark back-office platform with Zatenviro, giving NELC CEOs the tools to gather evidence and issue FPNs to offenders.
Zatenviro is Unity5’s solution that enables local authorities to deliver clean and safe public spaces for their communities. Zatenviro is one of Zatpark’s Flexible Enforcement add-ons. Zatenviro was designed in conjunction with local authority users to provide compliance with the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, the Environmental Protection Act 1990, the Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014, and the Littering from Vehicles Outside London (Keepers: Civil Penalties) Regulations 2018.
After collaborating with the NELC team to work through the implementation steps, Zatenviro was deployed successfully.
Once up and running, it meant that NELC CEOs could now efficiently and accurately gather information related to the ticket circumstances.
On-street officers could now quickly and easily issue FPNs for any environmental offence. The Zatpark solution automated the processing of notices for ‘duty of care’ and ‘failure to produce waste documents’. This maximised the efficiency and effectiveness of NELC back office staff and enforcement officers.
Zatenviro supports your cleaner neighbourhoods initiatives.
Learn more
Delivering school absence enforcement with Zatpark ticket-type flexibility
Following the success of implementing parking and environmental enforcement at NELC, other council departments could see the huge efficiencies that Unity5 was delivering.
Shortly afterwards, our partnership team in NELC was contacted by Nicky Best, IAG Officer from the NELC Education Welfare Service (EWS). Nicky was very interested in seeing how Zatpark’s flexible enforcement process worked.
Having seen how Zatpark simplified NELC’s complex parking and environmental enforcement processes, she asked if the Zatpark system could help enforce school absenteeism, commonly known as truancy. Then began conversations between the Unity5 and EWS teams to discuss a possible solution.
Working together to understand school absenteeism
School absenteeism, often called truancy, refers to pupils absent from school without a valid reason or permission. It can be argued that education underpins a civil society, enables prosperity, and supports a healthy economy. Nicky’s team certainly believe that delivering a comprehensive education to every child in their locality is crucial in allowing all of their children to reach their full potential, and absenteeism is one of the biggest barriers to this.
The Unity5 team discovered that managing absenteeism is a huge challenge for NELC welfare teams when enforcing school attendance. Following a school attendance enforcement procedure is a big headache for the authority’s staff. Monitoring attendance and issuing warning letters to parents took a huge amount of administrative time and resources from teaching staff that could otherwise be spent on educating children. Equally, NELC was using their limited staff resources to issue absenteeism penalties to parents manually. The follow-up processes of issuing reminders, final warning letters, and gathering evidence packs for prosecution were also time-intensive.
The Unity5 team relish a challenge, so they jumped at the chance to fully understand NELC’s challenges in managing school absence enforcement.
They held discovery sessions with NELC and the onboarding teams to understand Nicky’s requirements.
The team learned that Education Welfare Services (EWS) oversees school absenteeism referrals. The EWS monitors school pupil attendance to ensure school attendance is in line with Department for Education (DfE) targets. NEL EWS works with schools and other agencies to improve school attendance in their locality.
The Education Welfare Service aims to ensure that every child can access education in a safe environment, which we wholeheartedly support.
Understanding unauthorised absence and school non-attendance fines
The Unity5 team learned that unauthorised absence in NE Lincolnshire could happen for many reasons. School staff responsible for child welfare would identify children regularly absent from school and work with the family to improve their attendance.
NELC Education Rules
All NE Lincolnshire parents and guardians must aim to ensure their child attends school for at least 95% of the school year. If the child’s attendance consistently drops below an expected level during each school term, the school will send the parents warning letters requiring them to ensure the child attends school. If parents don’t ensure their child regularly attends school, NELC EWS may decide to issue a Penalty Notice (PN) fine. Ultimately, NELC parents can be prosecuted for not educating their children.
If a NE Lincolnshire child’s absence was purely down to their parents not ensuring they attend school, the headteacher could ask Nicky’s team to issue the parents with an FPN. Similarly, if parents decided to take their child on holiday without authorisation from the head teacher, they could also be issued a penalty notice.
Building stronger communities with flexible solutions
The project plan contained three major project milestones:
Phase 1 – Discovery, Specification, and Implementation
Phase 2 – Onboarding and Virtual Staff Training
Phase 3 – Configuring Flexible Enforcement for school absenteeism
Diving into the details, our team worked to understand the legal scenarios required under Section 444(1) of the Education Act 1996 and the letter and notice issue processes needed for educational enforcement.
Unity5 and NELC worked in discovery sessions with the Zatpark software development team and designed the Zatpark school absence enforcement solution jointly.
The product team evaluated and refined the details into software development tasks. They used our Agile-based framework to progress tasks from development to release. The product team operated their two-week development timeframes, referred to as sprints, to refine, develop, test and retrospectively review the work with key NELC stakeholders.
The team made bespoke changes to ensure NELC school absence evidence was captured in compliance with their legal responsibilities and processes.
The resulting Zatpark school absence enforcement solution can automatically progress school absences in a way that suits any Local Authority.
NELC were able to configure Zatpark’s flexible enforcement to match their education enforcement process, automatically issuing letters and notices at the correct time and facilitating the automatic generation of the legal and prosecution packs.
NELC school leadership teams and Nicky’s EWS team now have reduced workloads and have full visibility of every school absence issue. With a clear focus on ensuring every child in NE Lincolnshire reaches their full potential through education, Unity5 and NELC’s partnership has moved school absentee enforcement from a labour-intensive process to a smooth and efficient automation.
Seeing the benefits of single-system Flexible Enforcement with Zatpark
The greater automation of the new Zatpark solutions is providing clear benefits to multiple NELC teams. NELC now deliver better service using fewer resources.
NELC extended its digital transformation programme beyond parking and environmental enforcement to include education enforcement. With Zatpark, NELC has procured a single SaaS system that has consolidated parking, environmental and education enforcement management. The partnership has given them flexibility, created huge savings in procurement and staffing, and reduced the number of enforcement systems needed within the Local Authority.
The results reinforce the success of the system and our partnership with NELC:
- Reduced management systems – The NELC parking, environmental and education enforcement teams now use a single system to manage all ticket types and permits.
- Accurate enforcement – ANPR cameras are integrated with the Zatpark platform for accurate vehicle identification.
- Faster status visibility – Each team can now quickly check the status of their tickets using the Zatpark ticket progression status visualisation.
- Faster evidence collection – The enforcement teams can now automatically generate evidence packs for legal cases.
- Faster letter issuance – Letters and notices are now automatically generated for each team’s enforcement type.
- Reduced workload – each solution delivered has generated significant time savings, removing the need for manual tasks.
In Summary
Unity5’s team worked closely with NELC to further develop our innovative Zatpark SaaS parking enforcement platform, creating greater flexibility for permit management and issuing and enforcing penalties for parking, moving traffic, environmental, community behaviour, education and more.
The teams worked together to create the option for flexible enforcement types outside of parking, including school attendance/truancy. In doing this, NELC could use one system for multiple enforcement types, not only creating cost savings but also generating greater operational efficiencies within the on-street and back-office teams. This collaboration has enabled NELC to implement the Zatpark SaaS Flexible Enforcement solution, allowing them to solve multiple problems Council-wide within a single system born out of parking enforcement.
Unity5 and NELC’s strong partnership successfully delivered effective enforcement across council functions, bringing a broad set of efficiencies for NELC using Zatpark’s Flexible Enforcement solutions.
The significant challenges faced by local authorities in digital transformation emphasise the importance of perseverance and collaboration between local authorities and technology partners to make data-driven decisions, combine and integrate systems, and deliver more with less.
How Zatpark Helps
Zatpark is a cloud-based parking and permit management service capable of issuing and enforcing any penalty type. It provides end-to-end management of parking and permit management processes. Zatpark’s advanced back office suite integrates seamlessly with a host of third-party ANPR, appeals, and debt resolution suppliers.
Zatpark enforcement platform enables management of any enforcement type enabling:
- Simplification
- Efficiency
- Control
- Integration
Contact us for a no-obligation chat and discover how Zatpark can help you.
