Interview with IA's Gayle Gander

With the commercialisation of the NLPG now a reality, our very own Carl Hancock spoke with Intelligent Addressing's Head of Marketing Gayle Gander to find out more...


Q: Hi Gayle. So what was the prime mover behind the commercialisation of the NLPG?

Hi Carl, licensing the NLPG wider afield than the local government community has always been the aim of local government and IA. The intention being to improve working practices with the other organisations that interface with local government, such as central government, the utilities, partners, who would also be able to share information using the NLPG’s UPRN.

To give you a bit of history, back in 1999, funds for the development of the NLPG were unavailable from central government and LGIH (Local Government Information House - a wholly owned company of the Improvement and Development Agency, IDeA), was tasked with leading the initiative for local government, and sought a partner from the private sector who would be able to provide both the necessary skills and funding to create the NLPG.

This led to LGIH approaching three firms with existing knowledge of BS7666 and IA was the only one prepared to invest and be reimbursed through future licensing revenue. At that time, government was encouraging the involvement of SMEs in public/private partnerships, supporting government’s efforts to modernise.

The public private partnership that emerged was based on IA bearing the development task and central costs of setting-up and managing the NLPG hub, whilst LGIH provided the coordination of local government contributors and worked to secure onward licensing arrangements with data contributors. This partnership, along with the development of local land and property gazetteers by local authorities, turned the NLPG into a reality. However, it is only in the last couple of months that local government has managed to secure a licensing agreement with Ordnance Survey to allow the NLPG to be used by the private sector and central government.


Q: Which industries do you plan on marketing it to, or do you think will be interested in the product?

We’ve always known that there is very wide sector interest in the NLPG. Over the past eight years we have averaged about 2 new enquiries each week regarding using the NLPG, in really interesting and innovative ways. That’s not a bad enquiry rate for a dataset that has not been marketed beyond the local government community!

Knowing where customers are, how to get to them and where assets are located is crucial to so many commercial organisations, therefore the NLPG has a role in utilities, banking, insurance, pensions, retail, direct marketing, property and housing, environmental reporting, satellite navigation, transport and logistics, demographics, mobile working and field services, healthcare, directory development, just to name a few in the private sector.

There is an equally wider application in central government from the Land Registry, to Revenue and Customs to MoD to Environmental planning. In short, anyone who needs to deliver a service to a location!


Q: How do you envisage the split between end-user/reseller purchasers?

This is a difficult question as its IA’s intention to become the NLPG wholesaler and for the retail activity to be largely undertaken by resellers. That said, particularly in these early days, IA is following up directly with a number of organisations that we have been talking to over the years and who wanted to be alerted when the NLPG became available to them. However, in the longer term, we do see the vast majority of sales to end users being made through resellers.


Q: Have you had serious expressions of interest yet?

Oh yes, from both end-users and resellers.


Q: Tell us about the benefits, what would a business or organisation gain from the NLPG?

The NLPG isn’t just a list of addresses, it’s an intelligent address – a process that provides constant improvement and updates as well as a robust framework for data management procedures.

Any organisation that needs up-to-date, comprehensive data will benefit from using the NLPG. The key benefits can be summed up by the 8 ‘C’s:

Currency – it comes directly from local government, the legal and authoritative source of new addresses

Completeness – local government has a duty to provide services to 100% of its citizens, and therefore has to have confidence in a rigorous process which guarantees that its activities have comprehensive underpinning data

Comprehensive – provides non-postally addressable objects and multiple address references

Connectivity – the use of the UPRN as the key identifier for a property enables systems to share information about the same entities without the need to match multiple datasets and hold multiway cross references

Consistency – the only address dataset compliant with BS 7666 Part 2 and underpinned by data entry conventions mandated for use under Local Government’s Mapping Services Agreement (MSA) with each local authority in England and Wales

Change only updates – the NLPG offers updates at the user’s convenience, from daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly

Custodians – over 750 local authority staff are continually updating their local records and have a sense of ‘ownership’ of the data

Central hub – managed by Intelligent Addressing, providing expertise and robustness in the management and verification of the data.


Q: What about competition in the market place, how will you deal with this?

As the 8 ‘C’s above illustrate, the NLPG offers much more than any other addressing solution. The NLPG is already directly underpinning over £100 million of local government business, and indirectly some £20 billion, and is a proven solution for this sector. I don’t think that any other address offering can offer this sort of service, after all, an address dataset, developed, maintained and used at source by business users of the data has to have the highest level of currency and completeness possible.

So to directly answer your question, we will meet any competition in the market place head on, knowing that the NLPG is the best product and service available.


Q: Is your pricing going to be a factor? How do you plan on overcoming this?

The price is much higher than we want it to be. We envisaged a multitude of organisations from FTSE companies down to local charities being able to access and use the NLPG. We believe that this data is an essential part of the nation’s infrastructure and therefore didn’t want price to be a barrier. In the short term the pricing will not enable local government to achieve its objective of the NLPG supporting every address based application in the country.

However, each license sale of the NLPG has to include royalties to be paid to OS for two addressing and street related products - which aren’t cheap. That said, the potential efficiency savings that organisations can make through using the NLPG dwarf the license fee.

We will continue to lobby government for fairer and less restrictive licensing terms. OS as a Trading Fund has to meet revenue targets but it has a track record of reviewing and reducing its prices. Future price changes will be passed on to NLPG licensees and local government will review the constituent price for the NLPG at the same time in order to maximise use.


Q: How do you envisage the commercialisation to work for existing gazetteer management suppliers such as Aligned Assets?

The wider availability of the NLPG should expand the market for existing gazetteer suppliers and is a superb opportunity for companies like Aligned Assets to provide a complete solution to the market – software that already contains the NLPG and is ready to go.

Companies will want to incorporate the timeliness of the updates from the NLPG into their address lists. They will want to match their address lists to the NLPG to associate the relevant UPRNs. They will want to share information both with their organisations and with others using the power of the UPRN. All of these facilities are enabled by the current GMS suppliers such as Aligned Assets.


Q: Should the Local Authorities, who are the providers of your address data, have any concerns about this commercialisation?

No. As I mentioned earlier, local government’s aim has always been to make a financial return to the local authorities that have worked so hard to provide the data that makes up the NLPG. The authorities are aware that the aim has been to license their data commercially.


Q: Finally, where do you envisage the future direction of the NLPG?

I believe that the NLPG is the definitive address dataset of choice for anyone that needs to manage land and property or deliver services to a location. Definitive addressing is such a hugely important resource that the UPRN will become ubiquitous within the public and private sectors.

Local authorities have a programme of setting objectives for the future development of the NLPG. As users outside of local authorities start to become stakeholders in the NLPG, their requests will be fed into the objective setting process, which means that the NLPG will become responsive to the needs of an ever wider range of users. I’m a firm believer that being responsive to the requirements of the users of a product is key to achieving success and providing a solution that is genuinely valuable.