Transport Direct
National Codes Project: Holiday Dates and Serviced Organisations
Executive Summary for Stakeholders
Created by: Vicky Edge & Mark Fell
Contact:
Version: 2.0
Date: 31st March 2010
Contents
1 Document Version History 4
2 Introduction 1
2.1 Background 1
2.2 Project Overview 1
3 Bank Holidays and Local Holidays 3
3.1 Background 3
3.2 Scottish Holidays 4
3.3 Use of the data 5
4 Serviced Organisations 6
4.1 Background 6
4.2 Local Education Authorities 6
4.3 EduBase – Schools (England and Wales) 7
4.4 Scotland - Schools 8
4.5 UCAS – Colleges and Universities 9
4.6 Ordnance Survey Data 9
4.7 Use of the data 9
5 Term/Holiday Dates 11
5.1 School Holidays 11
5.2 DfT - Roads: Road Traffic & Road Length Statistics Section 12
5.3 INSET Days 14
5.4 Further Education 15
5.5 Use of the Data 15
6 NaPTAN & NPTG 17
7 The Data Recommendation 18
7.1 Data Format 18
7.2 Structure of data 18
7.3 Data Adoption 21
8 Data Limitations 23
8.1 Table 1: Serviced Organisations 23
8.2 Table 2: Term Dates 24
8.3 Table 3: Bank Holidays 24
9 Proposed Maintenance Mechanism 25
9.1 Maintained by Traveline 25
9.2 Areas/Codes Table 25
9.3 Table 1: Serviced Organisations 25
9.4 Table 2 27
9.5 Table 3 28
9.6 Estimate of time required 28
9.7 Other Updates 29
10 Meeting Stakeholder Needs 30
10.1 Consultation 30
10.2 Changes Following Consultation 30
11 Future Recommendations 31
1 Document Version History
Document Version / Author / Date / Comment /V1 / V Edge / M Fell / 04/03/2010 / MF edit of VE main paper (v0.8) for Executive Summary wider consultation
V2 / V Edge / 31/03/2010 / Executive Summary of main paper (v1) following consultation
National Codes Project
2 Introduction
2.1 Background
This document provides a summary of the recommendations for the Serviced Organisations, Term Dates and Public Holiday components of the National Codes Database.
This paper sits alongside a partner report which separately addresses the National Operator Code (NOC) component of the National Codes databases.
The development of new National Codes databases is being carried out alongside the development of the schema for TransXChange (TXC) v2.4. It is essential that both activities inform each other and result in harmonised approaches.
This report makes recommendations as to the data build approach and the ongoing maintenance of the database.
The structure of this note is as follows:
1. Bank Holidays and Local Holidays
2. Serviced Organisations
3. School Holidays/Inset Days
4. NaPTAN & NPTG
5. The data
6. Limitations
7. Ongoing maintenance
8. Future Recommendations
2.2 Project Overview
The objectives of this phase of the project were to:
· Gain an understanding, and report on the amount of Serviced Organisation data available
· Gain an understanding, and report on the quality of Serviced Organisation data available
· Identify the key stakeholders, engage with them, and develop a plan of activities for working with them
· Investigate a framework for the ongoing use and maintenance of available, good quality data
· Provide the available data in an interim form, allowing Serviced Organisations to be identified, as well as dates of operation
· Add value to the information currently available at a national level
· Make recommendations for the future inclusion of data within the National Operator Codes database
The use cases for this data would include:
· To provide an authoritative naming and coding mechanism for Serviced Organisations within England, Wales and Scotland
· To provide a single source of authoritative term dates, at the level of Local Education Authority
· To provide a list of Serviced Organisations and their contact details (including a postcode where available), where this information is available nationally
· To align Serviced Organisations with NaPTAN Admin Areas
· To allow a scheduler to associate the operation of a journey within a timetable with a serviced organisation
· To allow a serviced organisation to be either an individual organisation or to be a default for an identifiable collection of organisations (e.g. a single school, or any school within a particular local education authority)
· To allow a serviced organisation to be associated with a specific calendar of dates of operation or non-operation (e.g. for schools, term dates)
· To allow relevant parties to access the data and use this locally/regionally for any necessary purposes
· To allow relevant parties to manually enter additional Serviced Organisations at a local level
· To allow the reference source of serviced organisation dates to be used to interpret a schedule or timetable ‘on the fly’ in order to establish the dates of operation or non-operation for a specific journey
· To allow serviced organisations to handle national bank holidays
· To provide for a description and contact details for each organisation which could offer useful information in the event of there being no current date information available
3 Bank Holidays and Local Holidays
3.1 Background
It is important to understand the differences between bank holidays[1] and other forms of public holiday as these are likely to impact on service provision in the areas which they affect. All holidays in Scotland are allocated as Bank Holidays, with a mixture of Bank and Public Holidays, and Holidays by Convention (Common Law Holidays) being allocated in England and Wales. This is summarised in the Table below.
Table 1: 2010 ‘Bank’ and ‘Public’ Holiday Dates
Subgroup / Holiday / DD/MM / England and Wales / ScotlandHolidays / NewYearsDay / 01/01 / BPH / BH
Jan2ndScotland / 02/01 / BH
GoodFriday / var / HBC / BH
StAndrewsDay / 30/11 / BH
Holiday Mondays / EasterMonday / var / BPH / BH
MayDay / var / BPH / BH
SpringBank / var / BPH / BH
LateSummerHolidayNotScotland / var / BPH / BH
AugustBankHolidayScotland / var / BH
Christmas / ChristmasDay / 25/12 / HBC / BH
BoxingDay / 26/12 / BPH / BH
Displacement Holidays / ChristmasDayHoliday / var / HBC / BH
BoxingDayHoliday / var / BPH / BH
NewYearsDayHoliday / var / BPH / BH
Jan2ndScotlandHoliday / var / BH
StAndrewsDayHoliday / var / BH
Bank holidays in England and Wales are the same but there are slight differences in bank holiday dates in Scotland. In 2007, Royal Assent was given to 'The St Andrew's Day Bank Holiday (Scotland) Act'. This made 30th November (or the following Monday if it falls at a weekend) a bank holiday in Scotland. Thus additional bank holidays in Scotland are 2nd January and St Andrew’s Day (around 30th November). Easter Monday is not an official bank holiday in Scotland but it is often observed by Scottish banks and retailers.
An added complication comes in that, since Easter 1996, banks operating in Scotland have harmonised the days they actually close with banks in England and Wales. In other words, although Scotland still has a separate set of bank holidays, all Scottish banks adhere to English bank holidays (though as an added complication some additionally take extra local holidays, see below). As a result, Scottish banks are open on the Scottish Bank Holiday on 2nd January, but are closed on Easter Monday, which is not a Scottish Bank Holiday. In the same spirit they stay open on the Scottish Bank Holiday on the first Monday in August, but close on the English Bank Holiday on the last Monday in August.
Table 2: 2010 Bank Holiday Dates (Summary - England and Wales, Scotland and ‘both’)
Both / England and Wales / ScotlandChristmas Day* / Late Summer Bank Holiday / St Andrew’s Day
Boxing Day* / Easter Monday / Second of January*
New Years Day* / August Bank Holiday
Good Friday
May Day Bank Holiday
Spring Bank Holiday
*Or displacement holidays if falling on a weekend
The expected dates of bank holidays in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are announced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (formerly Department of Trade and Industry). Following Devolution, dates for Scotland became a matter for the Scottish Executive.
Initial contact has been made through the enquiries desk at the DBIS, and they have advised that bank holiday dates for England, Wales and Scotland (including the dates of any ‘special’ bank holidays such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on 5 June 2012) are published on the Direct.gov website two years in advance. These can be viewed here:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/LivingintheUK/DG_073741
3.2 Scottish Holidays
”Local Holiday” dates also exist in Scotland and can be determined by local Chambers of Commerce which decide when they are going to take the annual quota of four days - and they are on all sorts of dates throughout the year. Indeed, the dates were often decided to ensure that shops in nearby towns were closed on different days. For example, many Glaswegians travel to Edinburgh on a Glasgow Local Holiday - and vice-versa. Of course, the "Local Holidays" in a particular town may by chance coincide with a "Bank Holiday" - Glasgow usually has a local holiday on the last Monday in May which is also a Bank Holiday - but Edinburgh has a Monday holiday roughly in the middle of May instead.
Local Scottish Holidays are not collected nationally, but are instead published by each individual local authority, for example Glasgow:
http://www.glasgowchamberonline.org/page.asp?id=31
It would be a time consuming job to visit each local authority website in turn and collect this information, therefore it is not recommended that information on local holidays in Scotland is collected as part of this activity at this time as this information is already collected and used by Traveline Scotland. Traveline Scotland (John Elliot and Stuart McNeill) have indicated that they are able to manage the input of Scottish Local Holidays into the data source.
The Scottish Executive has confirmed their position on the allocation and communication of bank holidays and local holidays:
Scottish Government Ministers are responsible for setting bank holidays in Scotland and the 32 local authorities set the local or public holidays.
An up-to-date list of bank holidays in Scotland from 2010 to 2013 should be available on the Scottish Government website by February 2010.This publication of the up-to-date list has been delayed because of the proposed extra bank holiday in 2010 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen.Scottishlocal authorities try and publish their holidays as far in advance as possible.
The Scottish Executive has confirmed that it does not send out any information to particular organisations regarding bank holidays however,any additional changes to bank holidays are normally communicated through the media. Local authorities also publish their holidays in their own websites and it is their responsibility to communicate with local organisations.
3.3 Use of the data
A small table outlining bank holiday dates in England, Wales and Scotland has been readily provided. This should be kept up to date annually using information from the Government’s ‘Direct Gov’ website, which will be used as an official source of data.
http://direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/LivingintheUK/DG_073741
It is recognised that information on the following has not been found, and therefore will not be included within the project at this stage:
· The dates of local holidays in Scotland (Stuart McNeill, Traveline Scotland has indicated the possible contribution of this information)
4 Serviced Organisations
4.1 Background
Within this paper, serviced organisations are taken to be education establishments, including schools, colleges and universities. Discussions with some bus operators and Traveline regions have confirmed that there are a small number of other organisations which affect their services, but that these are limited. These other potential serviced organisations include:
· Markets (though typically these have a standard rule, such as every Thursday or second Tuesday in the month)
· Sports stadiums (services which go to or avoid the stadium on match days), the same might also be true of concert venues e.g. Millennium Stadium, Cardiff (where the entire bus station is relocated when major events take place).
· Special Events – e.g. festivals, major sporting events etc.
· Factories which have shut down periods in either summer or winter.
· Late night shopping
There is scope for these serviced organisations to be added to the tables manually, where known (locally), and this will be detailed later in the report. However no national data source has been identified to initially seed these entries.
Understanding how specific establishments (school, colleges and universities) are identified can assist in the correct allocation of holiday dates to specific public transport services. If holiday dates can be correctly allocated within the National Codes database, this could be used by operators to alter their services as appropriate when establishments are closed.
4.2 Local Education Authorities
Local Education Authorities differ slightly between England and Wales, and Scotland.
Local Education Authorities (LEAs) are the bodies responsible for the local administration of state sector education services in England and Wales. In those parts of England that still have counties but no unitary authorities; there is one LEA for each county - e.g. Cumbria LEA, Devon LEA etc. Otherwise there is one LEA in each unitary authority, metropolitan district or London borough. The Isles of Scilly also has its own LEA (though it should be noted that for other services including passenger transport and NaPTAN, the Isles of Scilly are included with Cornwall). In the event that any of these local authorities are subjected to boundary change, the LEA boundaries will change accordingly.
There are currently 174 LEAs in England and Wales (Unitary Authorities, County Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs and London Boroughs) and a further 32 in Scotland.
Local Education Authorities have been included as Serviced Organisations, to align with TransXChange.
4.3 EduBase – Schools (England and Wales)
EduBase is a register of all educational establishments in England and Wales, maintained by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The database contains data on around 65,000 establishments, from compulsory-aged maintained schools to Further and Higher Education colleges. EduBase currently contains over 250 data fields for each establishment, and this number is expected to grow.