An opportunity to improve the UK's most problematic public dataset: street addresses

The UK's street address data is one of our most important - and problematic - public datasets.

Address data is as fundamental to public and private sector services as the Periodic Table is central to science.

For these reasons, countries from France to Australia to Denmark offer official, freely available address and location data.

But the UK doesn’t.

This causes people building services innumerable problems.

Whether you’re a business owner spending endless time wrangling with basic data issues, or a civil servant delivering emergency support services at the height of a pandemic, or a charity making it easier for people to vote, you waste time obtaining and cleaning basic data.

Ultimately, this is pure drag on the economy, and a brake on public service improvements. It causes real harms.

Addresses are a key part of our national data infrastructure, and they aren’t working.

But now, there’s an opportunity to start to do something about it.

Address data is managed by Royal Mail, and Royal Mail is regulated by Ofcom. Because of this, Ofcom has powers to review the governance of UK address data.

Ofcom last reviewed addresses in 2013. But right now, it is consulting on what it should do for the next 2 years.

So we should all ask Ofcom to review address data again in 2021.

Here's how to ask them to do this, in 5 mins:

1. Download the consultation response form (.odt)

2. Suggest Ofcom review the cost and governance of PAF in 2021/22, as part of its broader review of postal regulation

3. Mail it to planofwork@ofcom.org.uk by 5 February

Please share our full briefing and tweet thread with anyone who might be interested, and let’s make 2021 the year we start to improve the UK’s address data!