London Borough of Redbridge and Hertfordshire County Council declared winners of 2010 Local Government IT Excellence Awards with Metropolitan Police winning a special prize for innovation

• Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council highly commented
• Awards are organised by Socitm, Solace, and Intellect, sponsored this year by Best Practice Group

London Borough of Redbridge with the Ilford Blueprint Online project, and Hertfordshire County Council with Connect Digitally, the Online Free School Meals project, have been declared winners in the 2010 Local Government IT Excellence Awards announced at the Socitm 2010 conference dinner in Brighton on 11 October.

The Metropolitan Police received a special prize for innovation for their Focus Court Presentation System, while Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council was highly commended for its e-buy procurement system.

The awards, organised by Intellect, Socitm and SOLACE, are now in their 15th year. The competition highlights public sector IT projects that improve the efficiency and delivery of services within local communities. This year's awards are supported by Best Practice Group, the UK experts in making service provider partnerships work.

More about the winners:

Ilford Blueprint Online is an innovative web-based marketing tool developed by the London Borough of Redbridge and Virtual Viewing Ltd to help turn planning policy into reality. It provides 3D visualisation of development potential in Ilford, one of London's 11 metropolitan town centres. The project team has successfully combined web-based commerce and gaming technology with planning policy and regeneration, creating an online resource for promoting development opportunity sites identified in Ilford's adopted Area Action Plan.

Connect Digitally, Online Free School Meals is transforming a service with a complex delivery chain that sat in the 'too difficult to solve' box for years. Led by Hertfordshire County Council and funded by the Department for Education, the project is working with 174 local authorities in England and Wales and 4 central government departments to change a difficult, paper based process to an electronic one with potential to improve outcomes for over a million children annually while driving down service costs. Innovative technical delivery, shaping the service around the citizen, and persuading providers and users of the benefits of this change are critical to success.

The Focus Court Presentation System is a bespoke software-based digital evidence viewer and organiser, designed by the Metropolitan Police Service's own engineers for use in the courtroom by non-specialist operators including police officers. It is a highly effective and simple-to-use tool, allowing the officer one-click access to all of the digital exhibits pertaining to a case, helping to speed up and streamline the presentation of evidence in court.

Highly commended:

The E-Buy procurement system developed by Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council and EGS is on course to save £3.5million over five years by transforming the way the councils procures goods and services from suppliers. E-Buy - delivered on time and under budget - has replaced disparate and inefficient systems with a highly-automated, web-based solution for purchasing-to-payment (P2P), including electronic invoicing, saving hours of admin time for employees. Suppliers of all sizes and the wider local economy are benefiting too.

Photos of the winners will be available from 2pm

Further information: vicky.sargent@socitm.net tel: 07726 601139