The UK Government’s National Data Library team is running a survey to understand the opportunities for responsibly increasing access to data held by the public sector. It closes on Saturday February 28th. 

If you care about increasing access to UK address data, or geospatial data more broadly, then this is an opportunity to let the UK government know.

If you focus on the key questions – numbers 12-14 – about existing public sector data that is hard to access then it should only take 5-10 minutes.

If you’re not sure about why this is important then some reasons follow.

If you already know how you want to respond then simply skip directly to this post some tips on how to respond and see the responses I sent in.

Address data is incredibly valuable but too difficult to access

In the UK addresses – for example, “29 Acacia Road, Beanotown” – are maintained by local authorities. The list of address changes as flats, houses and offices get developed and demolished. These local lists are collected into a national dataset and made accessible to other public and private sector organisations.

While this happens address data gets tangled up in a complex web of other organisations who end up holding some intellectual property rights in the data, particularly the Royal Mail and the Ordnance Survey.

The Royal Mail is a business and the Ordnance Survey is a business owned by the government. Because they are businesses their primary goal has become to generate revenue for themselves by selling the data, rather than maximising the public good that could be created from using the data.

As a result the UK’s address data has become expensive, hard to access, not always accurate, and hard to correct. 

This reduces the value that can be created from address data.

In practical terms that reduced value results in worse services. For example more occasions when people struggle to get home insurance, register with a doctor, or apply for a benefit because their address is not recognised by the computers.

At a more societal level it means it’s just that bit harder for businesses to get started or public services to be built. People spend time and effort buying data licences and then paying lawyers to help interpret those licences, when that time could instead be spent building better services for us to use.

So, as well as the poorer services that some people experience, there are other services that simply do not exist because businesses and public service organisations could not build them.

Put together that means lost services, businesses, and jobs.

As a practical example, recently the Ordnance Survey, a company owned by the government, paid their lawyers to contact at least 34 local authorities to ask them to check if they had released a list of addresses in error. Whoever is in the right on the legality of each data release, it’s clearly more public money not being spent on providing public services.

And this is just address data. Imagine the potential if the UK made all of its geospatial institutions and data fit for the future. 

Overall the issues add up to big financial numbers and the UK is increasingly becoming an outlier as other countries make this kind of foundational data openly available for free. The EU has estimated that by 2028, its own plans for the wider availability of geospatial data – including addresses and maps – will generate up to €2 billion per year in economic growth.

So poorer services and weaker growth. Sounds like the UK is missing out by not making its own geospatial data more accessible.

Is it worth responding?

Over the years many people, such as Tim Berners-Lee, have asked and Prime Ministers, like Gordon Brown or Theresa May’s Conservative manifesto in 2019, have promised that addresses and other geospatial data will be made more available. Before it was elected the current government was very interested too.

Unfortunately despite the public promises successive governments have failed to deliver change.

Recently the current UK Government even appeared to confirm that the civil service had made no assessment of the potential benefits. Which was surprising. It makes you wonder what people have been doing all of these years.

So will responding to this latest survey change anything?

Honestly, it’s impossible to tell. All most people can do is continue to request and provide evidence of the potential benefits.

If the government, or its civil servants who work on data policy, believe the benefits are not significant then at least this might encourage them to provide their own evidence for public debate or run some experiments that could help the UK learn how to make data more accessible.

After all, addresses and geospatial data are relatively easy to make more available. The potential issues are well understood. The real challenge is modernising government institutions, and that’s a challenge that the current government has said it is willing to take on.

So, let’s ask them to try.

Read on to find out how to respond to the survey and ask for better access to address data.