A professional body for residential property managers has called on the Government to promote the wider adoption of the unique property reference number (UPRN).
The Institute of Residential Property Management (IRPM) has published an open letter to Housing Minister Robert Jenrick and director of the Geospatial Commission Thalia Baldwin outlining a number of steps it believes should be taken.
UPRNs provide unique identifiers for each address in the country. They are allocated by local authorities and managed nationally by GeoPlace – a joint venture of the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey – and can be used as a key feature in matching different datasets for service delivery and planning.
The IRPM letter says the use of UPRNs should be mandatory for all public sector datasets related to properties and buildings, and a clear roadmap should be developed to get to this point.
This should be accompanied by all government tenders and policy on residential properties mandating their use, and they should be presented in a clear and usable format with tools and support materials to make them easy to adopt and share.
Other measures include making a limited number of attributed reference numbers and geospatial identifiers available, and developing a clear agreement about the ethical use of data in the housing market.
The letter also highlights benefits from UPRNs including a more targeted and cost-effective enforcement of legislation, speeding up the home selling process, increasing protection of tenants, reducing the number of rogue landlords, reducing waste and empowering consumers.
Numerous benefits
“We believe that the wide market adoption of the UPRN would be a significant step forward with numerous benefits to the UK residential market, society and the economy,” the letter says. “If all the conditions above were to be met, we would proactively work towards the adoption of the UPRN across the whole market.”
Nick Chapallaz, chief executive officer of GeoPlace, said: “This is an extraordinary open letter. It marks an important shift in awareness among businesses and organisations that are determined to deliver better outcomes by making better use of location data.
“The signatories represent a formative cohort, and their appetite for greater adoption of the UPRN will be excellent news for the property sector, homeowners and tenants alike”.
The Government provided a significant boost for UPRNs in April of last year, when it announced they are to become core addressing identifiers for the public sector as part of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement. This was followed in the summer by the Government Digital Service emphasising their value in guidance on identifying property and street information.
Front image from GeoPlace
Image in text from iStock, Chris Cook
