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At the GeoPlace annual conference on 28th April in London, the Rt Hon Matthew Hancock MP, Cabinet Office Minister and Paymaster General spoke to over 350 local government addressing experts about the importance of their role within a national address register.
The Minister said: "I want to pay tribute to the work local authorities do in creating accurate addresses across Britain through the role of the Local Land and Property Gazetteer Custodian, which is invaluable to the process of querying and matching addresses - driving up accuracy and improving the frequency of updates".
Addresses are a vitally important part of the national data infrastructure. Addresses aren't just used to deliver post, just about everything that happens has a link to a physical location; from emergency response, to supporting social services, from waste management to flood relief, from providing services to vulnerable people to managing school admissions; from connecting utilities in properties to underwriting insurance and from planning street works to mobilising a fire crew to a block of flats. There is no room for error â completeness, accuracy and timeliness of information is of the essence.
The work undertaken by local councils is the foundation on which the address system of the country operates as only councils have the power to create and approve new addresses or changes to addresses. With two million changes recorded every month by GeoPlace and Ordnance Survey, data maintenance is time consuming and challenging. Using a national address register reduces duplication of effort and ensures uniformity of the address reference base by all users.
In recognising the importance of addressing, the Minister acknowledged that: "It is the people in this room that ensure we have high quality address data" and pledged to work with GeoPlace and Council address Custodians to ensure that businesses and public services have access to high quality, precise and open data.
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