Commercial launch of NLPG attracts vast interest

08 May 2008, 1:26pm

The commercial launch of the NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer) held at the Royal Geographical Society, London, on the 30th April 2008 was a resounding success, attended by over 130 interested parties, including mapping specialists, the emergency services, utilities companies, credit reference agencies, identify management businesses, engineering concerns, central government and information services specialists.

The NLPG is compiled from data supplied by local authorities and is the most comprehensive source of property information available today, providing a location for every property in England and Wales. Today and throughout its gestation, the NLPG project has been directed by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and its private sector partner, Intelligent Addressing.

The NLPG, which comprises over 32 million entries in England and Wales, goes far beyond traditional sources of property and address information primarily because it is created and updated at source by the 376 local authorities in England and Wales. These are the very organisations tasked with creating street names and numbers and who supply this information to the Post Office for the allocation of postcodes. The NLPG goes much further than postcodes by providing precise locations for every property, even those such as churches, individual buildings in a hospital complex and electricity sub-stations that do not have a postal address.

Being able to identify buildings of this sort along with their precise geographical location is of critical interest to the emergency services who need exact incident location wherever it is and for insurance companies who analyse risk at an individual property level rather than at a postcode level. Moreover the incentive in terms of efficient revenue collection from Council Tax and Non-domestic Rates is sufficient to ensure that local authorities are diligent when it comes to maintaining the gazetteer at a local level so users can be confident both of its completeness and currency.

A master list of addresses means that when it comes to property identification all users are communicating in the same language. In the NLPG this is facilitated by the use of a UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number), which provides the linking mechanism between multiple application datasets. At a local level it facilitates every single customer interaction, as service delivery is ultimately linked to where we live. The NLPG is already responsible for quantifiable business benefits and efficiencies within local authorities and is at the heart of transformational government. To the wider public sector, central government and the private sector the NLPG offers unrivalled opportunities for research and analysis, policy making and planning, data cleansing, fraud protection, environmental protection, demographics, licensing and much more. This is more than reflected in the wide variety of attendees at the NLPG launch.

“We are delighted to have launched the NLPG for commercial use said Michael Nicholson, Managing Director of Intelligent Addressing. “Commercialisation secures the future of this groundbreaking project and opens up the way for third party users to benefit from and contribute to its continual improvement. We have had a massive response from potential users who can see the business benefits of this national dataset which pinpoints every property in England and Wales.

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

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