Tag: UK

Britain is to have its first national address register to improve service delivery across the public and private sectors, the government announced on Friday.

Inaccurate addresses can disrupt business deliveries, emergency response times and the collection of council tax. In the past, such problems have been viewed as modest or isolated and often resolved by the local knowledge of a postman or council worker.

But as computers and technology are increasingly used, small discrepancies in an address, irrelevant to a person, can lead to problems. A national call centre dependent on a database cannot know each locality, for example.

The aspirations for e-government, the introduction of electronic conveyancing, ID cards, offender tracking and a fraud free electoral system would all founder, if there was no recognisable address for each home.

The Conservatives have signalled their opposition to the partial privatisation of the Royal Mail, increasing the political difficulty for the government of accepting the plan favoured by the group’s management. Speaking to the Financial Times, David Willetts, the new shadow trade and industry secretary, said he was “sceptical” about the proposal to transfer a majority stake in the state-owned postal operator to its staff. He warned that the Royal Mail could end up being neither politically nor commercially accountable, in a “sort of limbo, where there’s nobody putting them under pressure to perform”. Ministers are still considering whether to cede to pressure for the scheme from the postal operator. Any such change would require approval by MPs – Tory opposition, allied to a likely Labour rebellion, could make such a vote hard for the government to win.