A much-hyped land and property database for England and Wales is
less accurate than the long-established address file it aims to
supplant, it emerged this week.
Electronic property searches using the National Land and Property
Gazetteer (NLPG) generated successful matches in about 92% of
cases, compared to 93% using the Postcode Address File (PAF), first
introduced in the 1970s, for 600 randomly selected address
searches.
The embarrassing findings emerged in a statistical report on the
NLPG, a public-private partnership between Local Government
Information House and supplier Intelligent Addressing. The NLPG is
supposedly a trail-blazing e-government project.
The NLPG, which has been under development for three years, will
underpin the National Land Information Service (NLIS) - an online
search facility for land and property information essential for
buying houses.
Address data experts seized on the report, undertaken by
Intelligent Addressing and Local Government Information House, as
proof that the NLPG has failed to deliver on its promises after
three years and millions of pounds of investment.
"[The NLPG] has still to prove that it is any better than the
existing address systems," said Robert Barr, senior lecturer in
geographic information systems at Manchester University. "There is
a danger that it may be considerably worse."
Earlier this year local authority IT professionals and suppliers
claimed that up to 20% of the data in the NLPG may be inaccurate.
The claim was strongly denied by Intelligent Addressing and Local
Government Information House.
The NLPG's project leaders said a number of factors could explain
why the address match rate for property searches using the NLPG
database was lower than when using the PAF. It could be because the
original enquiry format from the NLIS channels, which the report's
searches were done through, was in the PAF format, they said.