National Land and Property Gazetteer

The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) is an initiative in the United Kingdom to provide a definitive and consistent address — see address (geography) — infrastructure for the whole of the UK.

Until recently, the UK has not held a single list of all addresses in the country, meaning that many government and private services have not been sure whether addresses from differing sources refer to the same or different properties.

The NLPG is made up of the input of Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPGs) maintained by local authorities that are the creators of all address information excepting postcodes. The NLPG then acts as a central repository or "hub" for LLPGs maintained by local authorities. The NLPG also enforces compliance by local authorities with the national standard for the representation of address information, British Standard 7666 (BS7666), and coordinates and enforces the maintenance of LLPGs by local authorities.

The NLPG is managed by the company Intelligent Addressing on behalf of the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) -- an umbrella government organisation coordinating and promoting local authority good practice.

The NLPG does not just hold addresses where people work or live, or addresses that have a postal address. The NLPG also includes 'non-addressable properties that are of no use for postal deliveries but can be vital information for emergency response, asset insurance, planning issues, repair and maintenance, and many other activities.'.

In many ways the information held by the NLPG may be considered to hold a national model of land and property in the UK.

Although the NLPG is in an intermediate stage of development, its usage has been taken up by a number of public and private organisations, as it provides the most complete register of land and property in the UK.

National Spatial Address Infrastructure
On 26 May 2005, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister proposed that ownership of the NLPG transfer from the IDeA to Ordnance Survey to allow for the creation of the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI). But proposals for the NSAI have been suspended, although Ordnance Survey have signaled their intention to independently develop a commercial product in competition with the NLPG.