The House of Lords debates postal address data

This post is the latest in a series from our project to open up UK address data. Read the full briefing note.

If you care about innovation, better public services, or growth in the UK economy - listen up! Yesterday, the House of Lords debated opening up the UK’s address data, a move that would bring us one step closer to all of those things.

Those sentences might seem worlds apart, so let’s unpack them a little. 

What’s the deal with address data?

We’ve been calling for the Government to make core datasets freely available for a while. Why? Well it would support government processes, unlock economic growth, and there are no privacy concerns because none of this data is personal. You can read more about that in our briefing on high-value datasets.

One dataset we’re particularly interested in is postal address data. In the UK, it is expensive, hard-to-access and unreliable. So we’ve been campaigning to make it freely accessible alongside experts Hadley Beeman, Peter Wells and James O’Malley. We all believe that this would give the economy a boost, improve public services (e.g. there’s evidence from other countries that it shortens emergency service response times), and even help delivery drivers be more efficient. Our briefing goes into more detail.

How did the House of Lords get involved?

Because of this, it was very exciting when Lord Clement-Jones tabled amendment 252 to the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. You guessed it - this proposes that the Government regularly publish a list of UK addresses as open data. And it gained support from peers across the political spectrum - Lib Dem, Labour, Conservative and Green.

Yesterday was the big day when it was debated in the House of Lords. You can watch the key speeches here, courtesy of James O’Malley.

What happened in the debate?

Both Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett, some of the amendment’s brilliant supporters, spoke in favour of opening up address data. And Baroness Bennett even mentioned our campaign!

One big - and very welcome - surprise was Baroness Harding’s support for the amendment. She headed the Test and Trace programme during the pandemic, which relied significantly on address data. Noting that errors in address data can cause huge problems for service builders, she said:

“If the data quality is not good enough, it leaves us substantially poorer as a country. This is a fundamental asset for the country and a fundamental building block of our geolocation data”.

Lord Bassam, Labour’s spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), said that Labour had an “open mind” on the topic.

However, the Government’s DSIT spokesperson, Viscount Camrose, opposed the amendment. As James O’Malley writes, this was largely expected - it was the arguments he made that were most disappointing. He said that:

1. The fact that the address file is used by over 50,000 businesses “demonstrates that current licensing arrangements are not prohibitive”.

That many businesses use the data despite its cost merely demonstrates its value. The point is that these businesses could use that money for other productive things. And we don’t know how many start-ups have failed to get off the ground because of the high licensing fees. The UN and the EU have flagged address data as a fundamental geospatial dataset and a high-value dataset respectively, precisely because free access is good for innovation.

2. The Government explored opening address data in 2016, but their prototype dataset had “critical quality issues”.

Read Peter Wells’s thread on why this is not quite the case…

3. The cost of opening up address data is too high.

Our briefing details solutions that we think will cost significantly less than the £31 million the Government currently pays for 5 years of public-sector access to the data. And it’s worth noting that there’s evidence from elsewhere that the the benefits outweigh the cost - the Danish Government estimated that making its address data freely available generated annual economic benefits 70 times greater than the cost. 

You can also read blogs from Owen Boswarva and James O’Malley for some excellent play-by-play of the debate.

What happens now?

Given that the amendment did not have the support of the Government, it was unfortunately withdrawn from consideration. 

But this is not the end! We will continue to campaign for open address data alongside policy and data experts. So please get in touch at contact@centreforpublicdata.org if you’re interested in helping to make this happen.