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Housing safety and quality in England is overseen by a vast and complicated system. As the recent MHCLG Digital blog Mapping the housing safety and quality system outlined, more than 75 organisations and 70 pieces of legislation play a role in keeping homes safe. That complexity can lead to confusion, gaps in information, and difficulty holding the right people accountable when things go wrong.
But there is a practical way to bring more clarity, consistency and transparency into the system: using the Unique Property Reference Number, or UPRN.
UPRNs are simple: every residential or commercial property is assigned a single, unique number by local authorities — and it never changes. Yet the impact of using this identifier consistently across the housing system can be transformative. By integrating UPRNs into everyday processes and datasets, it is possible to strengthen safety, improve quality, and enhance the experience of residents across the country. Here’s how:
- the system is heavily fragmented, with many organisations holding pieces of information about a property
- people working in the system often report confusion about roles and responsibilities, especially where ownership or management changes over time
- residents can be worried about and experience more barriers when accessing support
- data about a single property’s history is often scattered across different systems, even within the same organisation, making it hard to develop a complete picture.
When we can’t easily piece together information about a home, it becomes much harder to spot risks, prevent harm, or take swift action. We’ve published articles on this before, see:
- Why every housing provider should be using UPRNs - guest blog
- UPRNs: Unlocking safer homes and tenant wellbeing under Awaab’s Law
- Picking up the UPRN pace in the UK property market
- Ensuring safety in high-rise buildings: the need for accurate data and classifications
- Using UPRNs to link housing data and support a data community
- First homes built on UPRNs
How UPRNs can help
UPRNs offer something the housing safety and quality system needs: a single anchor point that links all data, inspections, compliance checks, complaints, and regulatory actions back to the right property every time.
This provides:
Clarity and consistency — one number per property
A UPRN doesn’t change, even if:
- a street is renamed
- a building is converted into flats
- ownership changes
- the address formatting varies across systems.
That means everyone — councils, regulators, landlords, managing agents, owners, tenants, conveyancers, surveyors and lenders — can attach information to the right property, and retrieve it accurately later. This avoids the confusion caused by duplicated addresses, conversions, shared buildings, or outdated records.
Joining up data across the whole system
Because UPRNs are an open standard used across government, they allow datasets to be connected reliably. These can include:
- land and property ownership information
- planning records
- building control inspections
- fire safety and HMO licensing
- energy performance certificates
- damp and mould cases
- complaints from tenants
- previous enforcement actions
- physical accessibility of rental property.
The result is a ‘single version of the truth’ about a property, without complex, error-prone matching supporting transparency, accountability and safety.
Better oversight, monitoring and enforcement
When information is consistently linked to the correct property, councils, regulators and importantly the emergency services can:
- spot high-risk homes much faster
- identify landlords or managing agents with repeated issues
- see patterns emerging across a building, street or neighbourhood
- carry out targeted, risk-based inspections rather than blanket audits
- avoid gaps where safety issues slip through the cracks
A safety and quality history for every home
Using UPRNs in resources such as property logbooks makes it possible to build a longitudinal record of a home, extremely useful important in older stock, converted properties and buildings with multiple owners/agents over their lifetime:
- what improvements have been made
- who has been responsible for it
- what work has been done
- how the property has changed over time.
Empowering residents with better information
UPRN integration opens the door to more accessible, resident-friendly information. It can support initiatives such as the Private Rented Sector (PRS) Database - see GeoPlace conference session on Safer, more secure homes and buildings. Theresa Wallace, Chair of the Lettings Industry Council has outlined her vision for how UPRNs can revolutionise the Private Rental Sector (PRS). Dan Hughes, CEO, Alpha Property Insights comments;
"In recent years, the property sector has made real progress in improving its data usage, but aligning data sets is now crucial to achieving industry and governmental goals. The adoption of the UPRN is a significant step forward in enabling this alignment.”
Initiatives such as this could help renters, buyers or leaseholders look up the UPRN and see:
- the home’s inspection history
- EPC rating
- fire safety status
- any recent enforcement activity
- previous complaints or hazards (where appropriate and lawful to share) such as through the database of rogue landlords and property agents
- suitability of the property for wheelchair users or older tenants.
This creates a much more transparent system where residents can make informed decisions and hold landlords and managing agents to account.
Practical ways UPRNs can strengthen the system
Here are some ideas to help achieve these aims:
- require all housing-safety-related datasets to include UPRNs. Planning, building safety, HMO licensing, environmental health, social housing, complaints systems should link records with UPRNs
- use UPRNs to support risk-based enforcement. Cross-matching data helps identify unsafe or poorly managed homes before crises occur
- support the collection of material information to enable the digitalisation of the home buying and selling process, allowing information to be shared electronically between all parties involved in conveyancing
- provide residents with better access to property information. Whether via local portals or a national service like the PRS database, UPRNs could help residents see the true condition and compliance of their home.
The MHCLG Digital team’s work highlights just how complex and interconnected the housing safety and quality system is. By adopting UPRNs consistently across the system, government and local authorities can:
- reduce fragmentation
- improve safety
- increase transparency
- strengthen accountability
- empower residents
- use data more effectively
Of course UPRNs are not the whole answer - but they are a foundational building block to help unlock complex building safety challenges to put tenants and owners at the heart of the property system,
