Visit the siteTellMeScotland

The Challenge

Public Notices are placed by Councils, almost exclusively in newspapers, to inform people of changes to services, Councillors’ surgeries, etc as well as planning, roads and licensing. The latter three are called Statutory Notices and legally must currently be advertised in local press. There is a considerable debate about the value and effectiveness of these notices in the press. Around £4.5million is spent each year on advertising these public notices in Scotland and c. £40million in England and Wales.


Given the success of myjobscotland (*see below), the Councils’ recruitment portal (with which Spider has also been involved), and the rapidly increasing numbers using broadband, COSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities) decided to develop a new portal to publish all statutory public notices for Scotland’s 32 councils.

The Solution

After successfully tendering for this work, Spider Online designed and built the new Public Information Notices (PIN’s) Portal, www.tellmescotland.gov.uk. The tellme portal revolutionises the entire business of public and statutory notices. Instead of the public having to seek out paper adverts, the system ‘tells’ registered users what it happening in their area. It offers Scotland’s Councils a more effective way of communicating with the public whilst delivering increased value for money. This combined with expert advice on reducing the copy content of notices by at least 20% (in some cases up to 50%) make this a fantastic project for the public sector to save money and improve efficiencies.


More specifically, www.tellmescotland.gov.uk provides a single online location for public notices that Scotland’s 32 local authorities are legally required to publish. Visitors click on a virtual map to listings of public notices in their area, satellite imagery of their location and information and maps identifying the issues and places involved. The aim is to provide the public with improved accessibility to statutory information and to help Councils save money on advertising. It’s a very exciting project, probably the only one of its kind in the UK and as a result it should attract much interest in the future.

The Results

The portal had a soft launch in December 2010. All 32 Scottish councils are engaged with the project and over half are now uploading notices, to the benefit of their citizens. Councils are likely make annual savings of £3 million a year a year thanks to this ground-breaking project and the potential for the rest of the UK is, literally, tens of millions of pounds.


* The new PINs portal follows on from the successful roll-out of myjobscotland.com, designed by Spider Online. The recruitment portal for Scotland’s 32 local authorities which processes around 300,000 applications every year is a UK and international first in terms of scope and scale and won the Shared Services category at the prestigious UK Public Sector Digital Awards for 2011.