Worthing Borough Council

National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG)

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01903 221390

gis@adur-worthing.gov.uk

Worthing Borough Council's Local Land and Property Gazetteer.

All local Authorities in England and Wales were asked by the Improvement and Development Agency for Local Government (I&DeA) to sign an agreement with them, to commit the authority to preparing a Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG), which would eventually become part of the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG).

Since Worthing Borough Council signed the I&DeA Licence Agreement in October 2002 a great deal of effort and resources have been dedicated to the creation of a first class LLPG for inclusion in the NLPG as well as to benefit other departments throughout the Council.

The idea of this statement is to provide an update on progress that has been made with Worthing's LLPG and give an idea of what the future holds for the whole of the council regarding address database management.

In October 2002 four of Worthing's address databases (Non-Domestic Rates, Council Tax, Electoral Records and Ordnance Survey's Address Point data) were sent to an external consultant to undergo an initial cross matching process along with Worthing's section of the National Street Gazetteer (NSG). As the nationally agreed format (BS7666) is so rigid this straight away meant a number of reports were sent back to us anomalies where the software used in the matching process could not understand the address in its old format or find a matching entry in one of the other address datasets provided. The first step was to resolve these anomalies, well over 4,000 in total. After this process had been completed we were ready to accept delivery of our draft LLPG.

In March 2003 the LLPG database was loaded into our Gazetteer software provided by MVM. Although the matching software used to create our LLPG is very intuitive it was never going to produce a database with no errors. In fact when we consider how complex an address database can be it is not unexpected that we have been left with another large task of checking the gazetteer for more anomalies created during the matching procedure.

Every property in Worthing can have more than one address and every database we own may have a slightly different way of storing that address so it is not surprising that we still have many errors to rectify. For example:

These are all exactly the same property but just held differently. The key is to be able to look on one master database and see what the definitive address for that property is along with any other derivatives there may be on different systems, exactly which systems hold information about this address and all in a format that adheres to the BS7666 standard. Simple!

Currently we are working on eradicating the several thousand duplicate records as well as the several thousand candidate records that have been identified as 'not quite right' by the Gazetteer. This is anticipated to lead hundreds of properties throughout the borough being visited to identify without question what the address should be, this in turn will be followed by the mammoth task of checking every single entry in the gazetteer to ensure the highest level of accuracy is maintained.

The LLPG contains more information than purely an address. Along with the preferred and alternative address, it contains the grid co-ordinates for the property and cross references which link the address to other databases in the council. Every property is also allocated an Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN). The end result is a massive database containing several hundred thousand entries which all relate in some respect to one of the 46,000 properties in Worthing.

Since work started we have made over 25,000 changes to the LLPG which has removed thousands of duplicates. All this effort has resulted in Worthing being accredited an NLPG status of 1 meaning we are linked to the NLPG hub and sending regular updates. This is a major milestone in the LLPG project especially as we are the first authority in the West Sussex region to achieve this status.

When we have finished correcting errors on the LLPG and completed the final checks we will have to bring the whole database up to date. Since the original four data sets were sent to Intelligent Addressing the LLPG has not had any new data added to it. This means we will have a 'snapshot' of all the properties in the Borough as they stood at the beginning of the project. So before we can utilise all the hard work that will have been put into the LLPG we will have to spend time bringing the whole database up to date with all the street naming and numbering changes that have taken place along with all new developments etc.

The next stage will be to link the LLPG to other systems throughout the council. Through use of the UPRN field it will be possible for the LLPG to become the 'Master' address database for all systems linked to it. This means any new properties, changes to addresses, etc. will only need to be updated once on the LLPG and this in turn will inform all the other systems of the change. This has the potential to streamline many systems throughout the council along with promoting a more joined up approach. This in turn will allow us to access property information more quickly and easily and will enable the public to view property information over the web via Discover Worthing.

Once this is all finally complete, the Council will have a very accurate and valuable gazetteer that will be usable throughout the Council and which will help to improve service delivery of customer services.

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