[Talk-GB] Using UPRNs to find flats?

Mark Goodge mark at good-stuff.co.uk
Thu Apr 1 12:27:22 UTC 2021



On 01/04/2021 12:44, Steven Hirschorn wrote:
> Incidentally, do local authorities not have any responsibility for 
> keeping a list of addresses in their area for the purposes of issuing 
> Council Tax demands, which they could open? Do they delegate this task 
> to Royal Mail?

Local authorities are responsible for updating the National Land and 
Property Gazetteer (NLPG), which is the canonical source of physical 
(geographic) addressing. Royal Mail are responsible for maintaining the 
Postal Address File (PAF), which is the canonical source of postal 
addresses. While the two obviously have a very large overlap, they are 
not identical. There are things in the NLPG that don't exist in the PAF, 
because they never receive mail (eg, fields, barns, telephone boxes), 
and there are things in the PAF that aren't in the NLPG, because they 
have no defined physical location (eg, non-geographic PO Box addresses).

Neither the NLPG nor the PAF are open data, although some subsets of 
data from them are published as open data.

Things like council tax and business rates are somewhat complex in 
licence terms, because, although the physical locations are supplied by 
the council, the letters sent to them containing a tax bill use the PAF.

What makes it more complicated is that, although the data is not open, 
there is a legal requirement to publish council tax and business rate 
data for all properties subject to either, because people have a right 
to look up their liability online. So you can, relatively easily, 
acquire a database of taxable properties simply by screen-scraping the 
lookup sites. While not, strictly, permissible, the various suppliers of 
that data don't seem to be too concerned about it being scraped, partly, 
I suspect, because it would be impossible to prevent and partly because 
it still isn't anywhere near being a functional replacement for either 
the PAF or the NLPG. And the way the data is presented is deliberately 
intended to make it hard to cross-reference with the NLPG, as it doesn't 
include a UPRN.

Mark



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