The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has reached an agreement to set up a joint venture between Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Group to create a new single source of address data.

Access to addresses in the Gazetteer will be free at the point of use for the entire public sector including organisations delivering services on behalf of the public sector, as part of the Public Sector Mapping Agreement.

Local Government in Scotland and the Scottish Government are supportive of creating a national address gazetteer and are working with Local Government and Ordnance Survey to achieve this.

• Read more in the press notice: DCLG website
• Read more in the written ministerial statement about NAG (external)

GeoPlace

GeoPlace, the new joint venture, have announced that work is underway to define detailed requirements and specifications and to put in place the necessary technical infrastructure to create and maintain the national address gazetteer database.

The national address gazetteer database will have product quality content by April 2011, allowing customer engagement prior to product release between July and September 2011. Existing address products will continue to be available for some time after April 2011.

• Read more about GeoPlace: Ordnance Survey website

Impact of NAG on the NHS Digital Mapping Agreement

Address information is a key dataset for the ambulance services who form the core membership of the NHS Digital Mapping Agreement. It is also fundamental to all areas of health to know where patients live. To accurately locate an incident or patient is a fundamental requirement of any emergency service.

In the short term, NHS DMA members will receive address information (currently based upon Address Layer 2 from Ordnance Survey) in the same format via our partners, Dotted Eyes, if they so wish, until the end of the NHS DMA in April 2012. There will be a transition period where all customers will be offered the option of a competitively priced package of services to assist in migrating from legacy products to the National Address Gazetteer.

A major benefit of the new database is the use of Local Government's Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN), which provides the linking mechanism between multiple application datasets. At a local level it facilitates every single customer interaction, as service delivery is ultimately linked to where we live.