UK Address data in disarray!
The Chair of the UK Parliament House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee Tony Wright MP has a letter written to the Minister of State at the Department of Communities and Local Government on the 14 July 2009 calling for a regularly updated single source of Addresses within the UK. The letter refers to the lack of a definitive source of Addresses in the UK and that the Office of National Statistics was spending in the region of £12 million on creating an Address register for the 2011 census. The letter also refers to the from the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar dated 8th July 2009 regarding establishing a national address register.
The UK Parliament House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee has published a report containing the written evidence submitted to the Committee’s inquiry into the 2011 census. The titled: Official Statistics: 2011 Census, Written Evidence contains evidence submitted by 17 organisations and individuals.
One of the issues that the Committee is considering is the lack of a definitive Address database upon which the UK 2011 census can be based and the proposition of the Office of National Statistics to generate a definitive address list just for the census and then to discard the address list after investing in the region of 12 million pounds.
The submission from the Local Government Data Unit Wales (OSC 05) states:
“11 Local authorities do well with limited staff to develop and maintain number and address lists locally, which feed the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG). The NLPG is a compilation of the local lists of legal addresses created by local government (under the Town Improvement Clauses Act 1847 and subsequent legislation). The volume of addresses from the census address list that will typically need to be checked, to validate that list, is not yet clear to local authorities. To help plan their support, the earliest publication of the report on the testing that was done and some indication of resource requirement, is needed.”
“• It is essential that the investment in the census address list is not wasted and that the register remains available to the nation after the census.”
The submission from the Royal Statistical Society (OSC 07) states:
“We are appalled that the address list being developed for England and Wales by the ONS in conjunction with Royal Mail, Ordnance Survey and local authorities’ National Land and Property Gazetteer will, as a result of copyright restrictions, only be available for the Census and will not be maintained thereafter. This is a colossal waste of public money. We hope Parliament will put further pressure on the three organisations and the ONS to develop a solution to ensure that the list will become a permanent maintained address register. Scotland and Northern Ireland have achieved much more than England and Wales in this area.”
The submission from the Statistics User Forum (OSC 13) states:
“6. The development costs of the address register for England and Wales, compiled from Post Office, Ordnance Survey and Local Government data, are understood to be £12million. Its use is tightly restricted to the Census and copyright restrictions mean that it will not be maintained thereafter, a substantial waste of public money. The Forum would emphasise that such a register would be of significant benefit to a great many users in all sectors including the ONS itself. This failure of public bodies to operate for the public good in England and Wales is in sharp contrast to Scotland, where a permanent national address register is being created.”
The submission from the Local Government Association (OSC 14) states:
“8. A specific area where local authorities are being asked to do more work than in previous censuses concerns address registers. The ONS has decided to create a single address list. Whatever the merits of that decision, it is too late to plan for an alternative approach. So the task is to make this work. A robust address list should certainly be a cornerstone of an effective census, and should help avoid the errors that occurred in 2001.
9. The plans involve local authority officers (in practice, the local address ‘custodians’) in attempting to resolve discrepancies between the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File and Ordnance Survey’s Address Layer 2. A series of pilots were carried out in 2008, but the full report of these pilots has not yet been published. It is not yet clear how many addresses will need to be checked, when the checking will be required and how quickly the work has to be done. It is possible that some authorities could be asked to check several thousand addresses.
10. We appreciate that creating a single address list is ground-breaking work. It is evident that the ONS are seeking ways to minimise the amount of checking that has to be done by authorities (not least by introducing a pre-check stage involving the NLPG hub managers, Intelligent Addressing, who are the contractors employed by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) to manage the NLPG on behalf of local government). But the fact remains that without some clarity a out the size and timing of the task, it is difficult for local authorities to plan for its completion.
11. The resources to undertake this work are limited. Smaller district councils may have less than one full-time equivalent employee responsible for addressing. What they are required to do for the census has to fit in with regular maintenance of the NLPG and other projects (such as the matching of gazetteer data to electoral registers, which has to be completed before the end of October this year).”
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