Tag: addresses

How to respond to the DSIT survey on increasing access to public sector data

2026-02-21 / peterkwells / 0 Comments

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.

I’ve published a seperate post on why addresses and geospatial data are important. This post describes how to respond to the survey and includes my own responses on this particular topic.

Responding to the survey

The survey is not particularly easy to respond to, for example it asks people to provide information about all of the public sector data they use. That would be a lot of information for many organisations and people!

There is a page listing all of questions and a separate page with an online survey to answer the questions. It does not say that you can email answers to the team so I would recommend filling in the online survey.

If you focus on the key questions 12-14 it might only take about 5-10 minutes. You can save progress as you go, but you can’t change your answers once you have submitted the questions

I recommend that you respond politely and honestly throughout. Do use your own words and thoughts. In case it’s useful to help your thinking then here are some tips on what to expect and how I responded.

Questions 1-7 are about your organisation and job.

I both work with multiple organisations / sectors and use data as a citizen so found this section confusing as it assumes people only use data for a single organisation. Others may find it simpler.

Questions 8-11 are about public sector data you use in your work.

Again, it wasn’t obvious how to answer these. I use, experiment with, imagine, and campaign to improve lots of data. But this wasn’t why I was responding to the survey and it wasn’t clear what this information would be used for.

So I kept it simple and skipped questions 8 and 9, they’re optional questions, and answered don’t know/other to questions 10 and 11 as they are both mandatory questions.

In response to question 11 I gave a couple of suggestions of other issues that affect both businesses and individual citizens, specifically “inability to contact data holder” and “inability to request data corrections”.

Questions 12-14 are about existing public sector data sets that you or your organisation would like to access that you currently do not. This is where I chose to respond about address data

For Question 12 I responded “Administrative address and mapping data created and maintained by public sector organisations as part of their public task“.

Question 13 is about the access issues. I responded with “Cost”, “Data Quality” and “Legal Frameworks”. In the “Other” section I gave a short description of the legal risks and current business models, saying:

“1. The intellectual property status of many public datasets that contain this data is unclear. This is because of unclear licensing and derived database rights. Public sector organisations can interpret this situation differently, for example Ordnance Survey’s recent contact with 34 local authorities https://www.owenboswarva.com/blog/post-addr44.htm. This risks a chilling effect where people are unwilling to invest to innovate.

2. Some of the public sector organisations that create and maintain this data, for example the Ordnance Survey, are run as government companies. This creates an incentive to protect their rights and monetise the data, rather than to maximise the public good. They should instead be funded to publish this data for free.“

Question 14 is about the benefits. I responded:

“Address data, and geospatial data more broadly, are foundational datasets that are used extensively across the public and private sectors.

There are many current use cases that would be improved by making the current datasets freely available under an open licence; use cases that will be improved because effort and money that is currently spent buying datasets and understanding licences will be spent on other more useful activities, and new use cases that will be created by innovators – in the public, private and third sectors – who currently feel hindered by the cost and/or legal uncertainty.

The EU estimates it will receive up to €2 billion per year in economic growth from making this data available for free under an open licence. “

Questions 15-16 are about new datasets that the government could collect.

I chose not to respond on these topics in this survey.

Questions 17 – 19 is about public sector data that would help people develop or use AI.

My response to question 17 pointed out the existing set of complex copyright questions about data and AI and how open data would help:

“Publishing address data, and geospatial data more broadly, as open data for free would help me develop or use AI as it will reduce one element of the current complex set of copyright issues that surround AI products.“

Questions 20-21 are broad free-text questions
Questions 22-25 are about staying in touch for more research.

Obviously I opted to stay in touch.

An opportunity to put address data higher on the UK agenda

2026-02-21 / peterkwells / 0 Comments

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.