Credit: PA

The Department for Transport is progressing plans to launch “an interactive mapping tool” to provide civil servants with information that could help inform policy and other decisions.

The DfT plans to either develop such a tool itself, or acquire an off-the-shelf product that could then be populated with the relevant data. 

The intention is to provide “a wide range of information – [such as] rail projects, population size, proportion of population that uses public transport – that will be used within the department to make better decisions, as well as to be able to better tell a story, and make better strategic links when making investment decisions”.

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The department will undertake a discovery exercise dedicated to clarifying what information would be most useful to include on the map, as well as identifying “any data issues that need to be resolved in order to do so”.

The discovery phase – which will last between four to six weeks and has a budget of up to £25,000 – will also aim to explore the relative merits of building and buying the tool, and how best to ensure it is kept up to date in the future.

Suppliers interested in delivering this work have until midnight on 23 December to bid to do so, after which the DfT expects to evaluate up to six potential providers. Work is scheduled to commence on 10 February.