Efficient management of addresses saves time and money, says Tony Vickers

The Guardian

Address-referencing can link data, helping to avoid a repetition of such tragedies as Soham and Victoria Climbié. A recent Office for National Statistics report estimated that 8-10% of addresses may have been missing from the last census in some areas.

In the mid-90s, when I first became a councillor, a new "open" addressing standard (BS 7666) was developed, which was later endorsed under the government interoperability standard (e-GIF). At the same time, a de facto national address infrastructure management process, called the National Land and Property Gazetteer, was agreed.

In fact, local government is a key player in national addressing. First, we districts and boroughs are responsible for street naming and numbering and are thus one of two definitive sources of UK address information. The other is Royal Mail, which allocates postcodes to addresses if they have letterboxes. Secondly, councils are the UK's largest users of address data. And thirdly, we manage a greater and more diverse number of address-related databases than any other part of the public sector, including properties without letterboxes.

So in 1999 local government took the lead under the Central/Local Information Age Concordat. As central government did not wish to fund the national gazetteer, the Local Government Information House sought a private sector partner. Intelligent Addressing Ltd (IA) was selected.

The job given to IA was to help local authorities clean and match key address datasets together to create master local address gazetteers and to provide a central "hub" for England and Wales to receive local gazetteer updates and hold the national collation.

With no statutory compulsion or direct funding, persuading 375 local authorities to create local gazetteers hasn't been easy. Yet every single council in England and Wales has committed to the process and all but 24 have created BS7666-compliant local gazetteers or are well advanced in doing so.

But the project faces severe problems. Key partners Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail contribute geo-codes (enabling every property to be mapped) and postcodes, but trading funds are required under Treasury rules to make users pay for these. Councils have to supply street naming and numbering free, even though they own the copyright. So the national gazetteer's anticipated success has sparked a turf war over the intellectual property rights of these publicly owned agencies.

Addresses and maps are to the knowledge economy what railways and roads are to the industrial economy: fundamental infrastructure. It's time the national gazetteer received the recognition and support from elected representatives it deserves. Everyone needs the nation to be properly addressed but nobody needs it more than local government. All it needs now is for local authorities to get a fair share of the royalties to enable them to complete their local gazetteers.