IA Reach Electoral Register Milestone

29 September 2008, 12:41pm

Intelligent Addressing (IA) has successfully helped over 50 Local Authorities to match the addresses in their Electoral Registers to those in the NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer). To date IA has processed over 4m individual addresses and report a match rate of 96.72%.

All Local Authorities must format their data and assign a UPRN to each address in their Registers in order to meet the Ministry of Justice’s (MOJ) data standards directive, and by December 2009. The IA process helps them to achieve this. It is designed to improve the quality and integrity of electoral registers, facilitate effective checking of political party donations and help in detecting certain types of fraud. The driver for the data standards work is the future implementation of the Co-ordinated Online Record of Electors (CORE). The directive is the result of a recommendation by the Electoral Commission following lengthy consultation with the Ministry of Justice, Political Parties, Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and software suppliers.

IA’s service helps EROs in each Local Authority to bring their electoral data up to the required standard. This involves a five-stage process, which checks data integrity, converts it to BS 7666 format, matches it to the NLPG, and provides a detailed report suggesting options on how Authorities should proceed. Anomalies are resolved between the EROs and the Local Authority Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) Custodians. Since every voter must have an address in order to vote, this may either involve Authorities creating new UPRNs (unique property reference numbers) where they are missing in the local gazetteer, or the EROs adding addresses into their Registers. When the upgrades to the Electoral Register Management Systems have been installed IA can make available the addresses in BS7666 format, which have to be loaded alongside those recorded in the current systems. The whole process has to be completed in order to meet the December 2009 deadline.

David Canning, CORE Project Manager at the Ministry of Justice will be speaking on these issues at the annual NLPG NSG conference ‘Underpinning Transformation Government’ on 16 October in Birmingham.

“This is a great start to a process that will greatly improve the rigour of Electoral Registers and the standard of democracy in the UK,” said Michael Nicholson, Managing Director of Intelligent Addressing. “We are delighted to be providing a service that is really helping Local Authorities meet the requirements of the MOJ directive and with time to spare,” continued Nicholson.

Contact: Gayle Gander, Head of Marketing
+44 (0)207 747 3500
E-mail: ggander@intelligent-addressing.co.uk
www.intelligent-addressing.co.uk

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