Unique Property Identifiers

1. This paper looks at the reasons for the development of two completely separate systems of Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRN) and the possibilities of future alignment. Geoplace 2. GeoPlace, a joint venture partnership between Ordnance Survey (OS) and the Local Government Group, was launched in December 2010. The National Address Gazetteer (NAG) Database is produced by GeoPlace and provides a definitive source of accurate spatial address data. Landmark 3. Energy Performance Certificates are an assessment of the energy efficiency of a property. They were required by the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, and were introduced in August 2007. Part of the requirement was that a Register should be kept of all the certificates issued and that each certificate should be associated with a unique property reference number. 4. Landmark were commissioned by DCLG to provide UPRNs because, at the time the Energy Performance Certificate registration scheme needed to be set up in 2006, the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) option (the predecessor to NAG) was not suitable as, amongst other things, there was no commercial licence. Likewise other options from OS could not be applied because of licensing and derived IPR issues. Even if the licence issues could have been resolved, the licence costs would have been substantially higher which would have resulted in higher Lodgement fees. (At the time OS were looking at a yearly licence fee of 250K for Domestic alone). The Landmark solution was significantly cheaper. 5. Where possible, the current Register automatically generates UPRNs using the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) as the base file for generation. Where an address is not found or identified in the PAF, the Register generates a new UPRN with an address as part of the service. This UPRN is used by the Energy Assessor and Accreditation schemes via their software tools to generate and allocate a Report Reference Number for the relevant Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), Display Energy Certificate (DEC), Air Conditioning Inspection Report or related documents, and covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It currently contains around 8 Million UPRNs allocated to Domestic, Commercial and public properties . Can the two UPRN databases be aligned? 6. Setting aside the historic reasons for the two separate databases, the key question is whether the Register could now change to use the OS AddressBase product and, if so, what would be the impact of this change? 7. The Register could use AddressBase under the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) licence, however there are restrictions on the commercial aspects (see below) and derived Intellectual Property Right (IPR) restrictions. 8. Even with PSMA, Royal mail Royalties would still need to be paid so some of the existing licence costs would continue. The main implications would be licence consequences to stakeholders who interface with the Registers. e.g. whilst there

are no sub-licence issues or costs in the existing solution, changing to AddressBase would necessitate a number of current stakeholders, such as accreditation schemes, taking on additional costs for their own use of the AddressBase UPRNs and addresses where additional commercial products are also used. In addition there are plans to remove restrictions on EPC data to make it publicly available, in order to directly support the Green Deal by enabling Green Deal providers to access EPCs and target commercial offers and support to EPC holders. Such use would be excluded under the PSMA licence and would require a commercial licence, which currently costs 190k per annum. 9. Any change from the current Landmark solution would also result in significant disruption and implementation costs to replace current systems and change all the existing 8 million UPRNs to AddressBase equivalents. It is not just the data source that would change but also the numerous systems components used for the addressing applications deployed in the Register. Consequential costs would also be incurred throughout the entire industry for all companies who currently use the existing UPRNs. These additional costs would have to be funded by an increase in the lodgement fees. 10. In approximately 12% of Domestic and 20% of Non Domestic properties, EPC property addresses are not identified within the base PAF files, resulting in a UPRN that is manually generated by Landmark personnel. It is very likely that these addresses do not exist in other address products including AddressBase. This is due to the very specific definitions of properties within the regulations for EPCs, the need for UPRNs to be generated within 24 hours for EPCs, and different address recognition or preference e.g. Property owner. AddressBase will not be able to respond to these changes within 24hours. 11. The above particularly applies when dealing with multiple occupancy of commercial properties, and the flexible definition of what constitutes a Property which is unique to the EPCs and the EPBD. Hence sub-UPRNs are frequently manually generated by the Register operator as part of its service to Energy Assessors. Landmark potentially adding sub-UPRNs specifically for the purposes of EPCs to the AddressBase product isnt contractually appropriate and offers no benefit to the EPBD programme. 12. Finally, the Information Commissioners Office has decided that EPC property addresses are classified as Personal data. This places further restrictions under the Data Protection Act on both DCLG as the Authority and Landmark as the Register Operator. Therefore even ignoring costs, licences and practicalities, the type of address product and method of addressing EPCs may not be the key issue to sharing address data, as the DPA could be the controlling factor. Conclusion 13. There are a number of reasons why the use of Addressbase to generate UPRNs for the register is neither feasible nor desirable. Ordnance Survey and Landmark have however agreed to look into the feasibility of an EPC UPRN being included within AddressBase so that cross-references can be made.