Found: Millions of missing buildings

silicon.com, working with the Guardian newspaper, has found that forgotten offices and houses are turning up all over the country as part of a new project to put all the nation's address lists on a single group of standardised databases.

Previously, local councils had been keeping track of buildings in their area using technology that hadn't changed since the days of William Caxton. Greater Manchester maintained over 50 different sets of addresses before the project began, according to one source.

Local councils around the country have been finding pieces of land that they own that they didn't know about, office buildings where companies had been trading for years without paying taxes, and properties they were maintaining without realising they belonged to someone else.

Steve Bramwood, Geographic Information Programme Manager at the Innovation and Development Agency, estimated that local governments would find 10 per cent more properties that they didn't know about before they were through the project.

In one demonstration alone, a local authority found 40 houses it didn't know it had, according to Nick Griffiths, technical director at Intelligent Addresses, the company building the database.

Councils are claiming millions in unclaimed taxes, and saving millions in more efficient delivery of services through the database.

The new database will be the key to Tony Blair's entire e-government initiative, linking into the Government's UK Online and Government Gateway projects, as well as the 'rolling register' project to put the electoral roll online. "This is a key platform for modernising local and central government," said Bramwood.

Local governments and a number of national organisations such as the Post
Office maintain separate lists of addresses, for residential property, business premises, and other public buildings, even public toilets and tourist attractions.

The NLPG aims to unify all these databases, giving each address a unique 12-figure code.

The project, known as the National Land and Property Gazetteer, was initiated by the Innovation and Development Agency, IDeA. The information is stored on the local authorities' databases, accessed through a national hub, maintained by Intelligent Addressing, a subsidiary of Property Intelligence.

The database includes information from: The Post Office Address File, The Council Tax list, the Non-Domestic Rates List, Property Intelligence's own Gazetteer, The National Street Gazetteer (maintained by the local Highways Authorities), and information from local authorities' own data sets.

So far, 80 authorities are on the system, and 120 are working with Intelligent Addressing to develop an electronic Gazetteer. Sales of the information should begin in mid summer, said Bramwood.