The UK open data community has been calling for open address data for many years. We've made some progress around the edges on postcodes and statistical lookups, with occasional indications of support from government – but delivery of a fully open national address dataset has remained out of reach.

The Geospatial Commission's plan to develop a national Geospatial Strategy offers another opportunity to put the case for open address data to government. The Commission's recently launched public consultation includes the following question:

Q5: Do you anticipate that any changes will be needed to the both address data and the wider address ecosystem, to support emerging technologies? Please provide evidence of value to support any proposed changes.

Maximising re-use of address data is also arguably relevant to some of the wider themes in the consultation document.

This post contains notes on the current availability of address data for the UK and provides a bibliography of reports and other resources that may be useful in understanding the potential benefits of unlocking address data as digital infrastructure.

Who owns UK address data?

The UK's address data infrastructure is managed centrally by GeoPlace, a Limited Liability Partnership jointly owned by the Local Government Association (LGA) and Ordnance Survey.

GeoPlace maintains the National Address Gazetteer (NAG) which combines address data from the hundreds of Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPGs) held by planning authorities in England and Wales with additional data from Ordnance Survey, Valuation Office Agency and Royal Mail. The NAG also contains Scottish address data from the One Scotland Gazetteer maintained by the Improvement Service.

GeoPlace also maintains a data hub that contains address and street data from these and other sources including Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Island governments.

Ownership of UK address data is complex and any national address dataset is likely to contain intellectual property from multiple sources. Individual addresses are created by developers and planning authorities and compiled into datasets at local and national levels.

The postcode system is managed by Royal Mail. Local authorities assign an identifier called the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) to each new address, from blocks of UPRNs allocated by GeoPlace. Address-level geocodes are appended by Ordnance Survey and in Northern Ireland by Land & Property Services (LPS).

Most IP rights in the UK's address data infrastructure are owned by public bodies. However Royal Mail was privatised in 2013.

Address data products

Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF) is the most widely used UK address dataset. PAF contains full addresses and postcodes for postal delivery addresses, but does not include UPRNs or geocodes. PAF is licensed for re-use on a commercial basis through Royal Mail's Address Management Unit (AMU).

The AMU also offers some associated products, including data on properties that have not yet been built.

The PAF Advisory Board provides independent advice to the AMU on behalf of PAF users. The Board's papers are a useful source of information about the business development of PAF.

AddressBase is an Ordnance Survey product that combines PAF with UPRNs and geocodes. There are enhanced versions of AddressBase that include properties without postal addresses, land areas, and cross-referencing to other datasets, as well as a separate product with data for Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

Pointer is the address database for Northern Ireland, maintained by LPS with input from local councils and Royal Mail. Pointer includes UPRNs and geocodes.

All of the above address data products are available on commercial terms through value-added resellers (VARs) as well as directly from the product owners. Some VARs provide specialised address management software.

PAF data is publicly available for re-use for specific purposes (i.e. not as open data) in a small number of third-party data products such as Land Registry's Price Paid Data and MHCLG's Energy Performance of Buildings data.

There are also many public data products that contain large amounts of address data not derived from PAF; for example Companies House's Free Company Data Product and the Food Standards Agency's food hygiene rating data.

AddressBase is the successor to other Ordnance Survey geocoded address data products: ADDRESS-POINT, Address Layer and Address Layer 2. Those products were withdrawn in 2014.

Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open product contains postcode centroids for Britain derived from address-level geocodes. The non-open Code-Point with polygons product contains notional postcode boundaries also derived from address-level geocodes.

The Central Postcode Directory (CPD) maintained by NISRA contains postcodes with centroid geocodes for Northern Ireland, but is not available as open data.

National datasets of postcodes with centroid geocodes are also available as open data (except for Northern Ireland) in ONS's National Statistics Postcode Lookup (NSPL), ONS Postcode Directory (ONSPD), and NHS Postcode Directory (NHSPD).

UPRNs are not open data at source, but under some limited conditions Ordnance Survey licensees can sub-license UPRNs as open data.

National datasets of UPRNs matched to statistical geographies are available as open data in ONS's National Statistics Address Lookup (NSUL) and ONS UPRN Directory (ONSUD).

The National Census Enumeration Address Register (NAR) created for ONS's 2011 Census by Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail and the Local Government Information House has apparently not been re-used for further purposes. ONS plans to use AddressBase as the basis of its enumeration for the 2021 Census.

Open Addresses UK, an ODI-affilliated project to crowdsource an open national address dataset, went into "hibernation" in 2015.

In the 2016 Budget the Government announced "£5 million to develop options for an authoritative address register that is open and freely available". It's unclear how or if that money was spent. However a vestigial GDS attempt to build an address register was abandoned in 2017.

Most public authorities have free access to PAF, AddressBase and Pointer for internal use under centrally agreed licensing arrangements: the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA), the One Scotland Mapping Agreement (OSMA), the Northern Ireland Mapping Agreement (NIMA), and the PAF Public Sector Licence.

Responsibility for future negotiation of those arrangements was transferred from BEIS to Cabinet Office when the Geospatial Commission was formed earlier this year.

Cabinet Office made the following statement in June:

Furthermore, over the next 12 months the Geospatial Commission will work with GeoPlace, the LGA, the Improvement Service (on behalf of Scottish Local Government), and OS to investigate opening up the key identifiers UPRN and USRN, together with their respective geometries, for the whole of Great Britain under OGL terms. This work must protect the integrity and authority of these identifiers, so as to provide both businesses and public sector organisations with the confidence to continue to rely on these within their own products and services, without restricting their ability to use and benefit from them.

This seems to indicate that Cabinet Office is working on a plan to unlock elements of AddressBase that can be turned into open data without the cooperation of Royal Mail: address-level identifiers and geocodes, but not the addresses themselves.

Bibiliography

The National Address Gazetteer: being run in the interests of Ordnance Survey, to the detriment of citizens and the private sector
Demographics User Group (DUG) letter to Francis Maude, January 2012

Addressing the world – An address for everyone
Universal Postal Union white paper, 2012

Address wars – an armistice?
Cllr Bob Barr, October 2010

It's good to talk – opening up the address debate
Slides from a talk by Prof Robert Barr, July 2012

Is authoritative data worth the price? The case of addressing data in the UK
Slides from a talk by Prof Robert Barr, October 2013

The case for an Open National Address Dataset + Annexes
Open Data User Group (ODUG), November 2012

The Postcode Address File (PAF) and International Examples
Open Data User Group (ODUG), January 2013

Further Benefits of an Open National Address Dataset
Open Data User Group (ODUG), February 2013

Submission to Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) Licensing Consultation
Open Data User Group (ODUG), September 2013

Responses to consultation on the Postcode Address File
ODI, ODUG et al via Ofcom, 2013

The Case for an Open National Address Dataset: Update for MRS CGG
Open Data User Group (ODUG), November 2014 (via MRS)
[added to this post on 6 November 2018]

National Addressing Database – Feasibility Review Scope
BIS, February 2013

An open national address gazetteer (the "Neffendorf Report")
Katalysis Ltd report for BIS, January 2014

Open Addresses UK Transparency Board Proposal
Discovery Phase discussion document, 2014

Open Addresses: the story so far
Open Data Institute, May 2015

Address Day: what next after the address wars?
Slides from a talk by Jeni Tennison, March 2015

Open addresses: will the address wars ever end?
Notes for a talk by Peter Wells, August 2016