Are you able to include a link to this announcement? I could not locate it on the http://www.communities.gov.uk website.

For info, there is another initiative (as a sub working party of the National Police Geographic Information Board) looking at the potential of a National Emergency Services Gazetteer. Whilst very early days, there is a definite need for the Emergency Services to have a gazetteer of addressable and possibly more importantly, non-addressable entries, to assist Emergency Services in rapid deployment of resources and back-office analysis of data. There are obviously a wide range of potential datasets that could be utilised and there are working groups set-up to determine what provides the most useable and accurate information.

I’ll post an update in the future to discuss any major licensing/IPR/accuracy issues that I’m sure we might face!

Statement by Communities and Local Government on 1 June 2007.

The Department has been considering its role in the proposed National Spatial Address Infrastructure. During last year we consulted government departments on the core specification for addressing and continued to discuss this with Ordnance Survey and the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA).

The Department has noted that there have continued to be improvements in the main address products produced by the Ordnance Survey and the IDeA and we expect this to continue. We also note that, although there are still challenges posed by addressing, local authorities are able to deliver efficiencies and government departments are able to deliver their business without the NSAI. On balance, considering the competing demands on departmental resources, we have concluded that we should not carry out any further work on the NSAI at this time.

In the meantime we will continue to encourage Ordnance Survey and IDeA to further their improvements, and would support new initiatives to improve addressing infrastructure that might arise through the Transformational Government agenda.