National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG)

The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) is the first, definitive, national – England and Wales – address list that provides unique identification of properties and conforms to the British Standard, BS 7666:2006 Parts 1 and 2. It allows organisations throughout local government to link their data to the same high-quality source of references that define addresses and the history of changes that occur at those locations. This could potentially be extended to the public and private sector.

The NLPG is collated from Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPGs) that have been created by all councils with a statutory street naming and numbering function. These LLPGs provide regular updates, between daily and monthly, to the NLPG for transmission to users participating in the MSA, making the NLPG the most up-to-date address dataset in England and Wales.

Authorities are contracted to create and maintain local gazetteers through the Mapping Services Agreement (MSA). This ensures that local government is in control of its undertakings and provides a framework to ensure quality and timeliness for use by all in local government.

The NLPG enables local government to:

• meet government targets for electronic service delivery, efficiency and service transformation
• reduce duplication of effort on maintaining land and property-related information across multiple departments
• protect their investment in data collection by using standards across evolving application systems
• offer economies of scale to suppliers of gazetteer management systems and geographical information systems (GIS)
• recognise the benefits and adopt standards that facilitate data-sharing between departmental systems
• use this information to support internal decision-making processes
• disseminate information to citizens
• provide access to a rapidly-growing commercial market for geographical information.

NLPG benefits are equally applicable to any public or private sector organisation that needs to link its data to address-based data.

Resources

NLPG website

Council officers, working with LG Improvement and Development (formerly the IDeA) and its partner Intelligent Addressing, have produced best practice for the maintenance of land and property gazetteers and interaction with the street naming and numbering processes.
Conventions and street naming and numbering best practice document (PDF, 80 pages, 985KB)