Surrey County Council

Ordnance Survey distribute NLPG data via the AddressBase Premium product. To be useful in web sites and apps, this data must be loaded into databases by each council on a six-week cycle.

GDS developed software for loading this (and related Codepoint) data into a database and exposing it as an API. This code was contributed publicly on Github under an MIT license, and is now hosted by Surrey Digital Services for other councils to use.

Whilst the basic functionality provided by the API (enumerating addresses by full postcode) is useful, the service cannot support the user experience provided by e.g. Google Places API, such as search by partial address and type-ahead completion. This is particularly problematic for service users who do not know their postcode, such as vulnerable people in temporary accommodation.

We propose to extend the API with additional functionality to support these use cases, and make the results available to all UK councils (and their authorised IT service providers) who are licensed to use this data via their PSMA memberships, for integration with a range of digital services. The code will be contributed back to Github under the same license terms, in the spirit of the preceding efforts.