Campaign: Address data
We’re calling on the Government to provide an accurate and freely accessible database of all UK postal addresses. This would be a low-cost way to unlock innovation and provide a much-needed boost to the economy and public services.
You can read our recommendations in full in this briefing.
What’s the problem?
Postal address data is essentially a big list of all UK addresses, void of personal information. Navigation software, delivery drivers, and even local councils are guided by postal address data in their daily tasks.
The Government lost control of the UK’s address data when Royal Mail was privatised in 2013. As a result, address data is now:
Expensive. Anyone wanting to use this database - including new businesses and the central government - must pay significant amounts of money in licensing fees. This is detrimental to innovation and adds unnecessary cost to the provision of basic services.
Unreliable. The private ownership of the data complicates the process for creating and managing addresses. This means that new addresses often do not appear on systems for months, and the UK does not have a single authoritative address database. The maturity of the Government’s broader data infrastructure depends upon reliable address data, which can be used to join different datasets together without using personal information. For example, inconsistent addresses slowed the delivery of aid to vulnerable people during the Covid pandemic. The current system is hampering the delivery of vital public services.
The opportunity
This is not an expensive problem to fix, and it should cover its own costs. Moreover, the UK increasingly looks like an outlier among high-income countries in not having open address data. Addresses have been identified as a fundamental geospatial dataset by the UN and by mid-2024 we will be the only country in Europe without open address data. The US, Australia, and New Zealand (among others) are similarly developing the necessary infrastructure.
By taking back control of address data, the Government would be supporting economic growth and innovation, making the public sector more efficient, and improving the value of other public data by making it easier to join together disparate datasets.
Publications
Report: The state of the UK’s high-value datasets
December 2023
This report calls for the UK government to make their high-value datasets freely available to support government processes and unlock economic growth. We audit the current state of UK high-value datasets and find they have patchy accessibility. With no plans to improve on this, the UK is falling behind the EU and other comparators.
Briefing: Address data
November 2023
This briefing examines the poor state of UK address data and explains why opening it up would be a low-cost, high-impact solution.
UK address data is expensive, hard-to-access and unreliable. This limits growth and innovation, slows public service delivery, and means the UK is falling behind other high-income countries.
Written evidence: Ofcom and address data
January 2021
We responded to Ofcom’s proposed work plan, recommending it reviews Royal Mail’s delivery of the Postal Address File (PAF).
Currently, anyone who wants to access PAF must pay high licensing fees and is subject to complex intellectual property restrictions. This limits innovation and growth.
What needs to happen now?
The Government must publish and maintain an open national address database. In our briefing, we detail three inexpensive routes the Government could take to make this happen.
We recently met with Jonathan Reynolds, Shadow Business Secretary, to make the case for open address data. We will continue to advocate for the data’s release.
If you want to support our work on this campaign, please get in touch at contact@centreforpublicdata.org.