Plans for UK national address register shelved
The government’s intention to establish a single, comprehensive national address register, announced in May, has been shelved because the parties involved could not agree a way forward, undermining the country’s e-government strategy and raising a barrier to delivering efficient public and private sector services.
Inaccurate addresses disrupt deliveries, emergency response times and the collection of council tax. In the past, problems such as duplicate, missing or erroneous addresses have been seen as modest or isolated and often resolved with local knowledge. But with computer technology, even tiny discrepancies in an address can lead to problems.
The aspirations for e-government, the introduction of electronic conveyancing, ID cards, offender tracking and a fraud free electoral system would founder without a unique and recognisable address for each property.
Until now, no single body has had responsibility for all such spatial information.
Government departments and agencies such as the Royal Mail (which looks after post codes), Ordnance Survey (mapping data), the Land Registry (the register of property title) and the Improvement and Development Agency (the local authorities’ quango that brings together the information in their land gazetteers) have their own lists and often seek to maximise their revenue streams from their own data sets.
The negotiations between the OS and the IDEA began in May, but have now been suspended, with both sides saying that they cannot reach agreement on the transfer of IDEA’s National Land and Property Gazetteer to OS as an input to the proposed new database, the National Spatial Address Infrastructure.
The heart of the issue is thought to be the fees that bodies such as the local authorities, which have contributed the data, would have to pay the OS to get access to it.
Dr Robert Barr of Manchester University described the news as “the most serious breakdown of the last five years, during which there has been a scandalous waste of public money”.
The government, which would be the greatest beneficiary, seems to have given up on the initiative. Jim Fitzpatrick, the local e-government Minister in the ODPM, said he was disappointed, but hoped the parties would continue to consider options set out in the prospectus”.
Keith Dugmore, of theconsultancy Demographic Decisions, said the government was “spectating not delivering”.
Independent experts now want ministers to pass the project to the government’s chief information officer. Such a transfer should, they say, include removing any claimed intellectual property rights in addresses or their locations from the OS, local government and the Royal Mail, so that a single, pooled data set can be created.
Dr Barr said: “A reliable modernised address list is a key ingredient to modernised e-government. No more delay can be tolerated.”
