Valuebill after Acacia: Addressing Addressing!

The Government project that puts geography into property taxation could rejuvenate and help finance the work that local authorities need to do to complete their local land and property gazetteers. But there needs to be a new business model for the national compilation, the NLPG.

Valuebill after Acacia is my paper for the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) which their Council meeting on 15 December will be asked to endorse. It asks AGI to work with the Local Government Association to raise the profile of UK Addressing among elected politicians and users of land and property gazetteers in all sectors.

At present, councils are expected to invest considerable resources in street naming and numbering, then in the back-office processing of data that many public agencies need - all without financial reward. Whilst they are required to pay Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey for the use of postcodes and geo-codes associates with local gazetteers, these (and other) central government agencies can use the results without charge - yet councils have to buy back the data they themselves produce, once it is merged into the NLPG!