Championing excellence and presentation of the Exemplar Awards

Recordings of the 2025 conference talks can be found here

SPEAKERS:
- Rachel Antcliffe, Deputy Principal Chair of the DCA Regional Address Group
- Kerry Pearce, National Address Data Manager, GeoPlace
- Dave Matthews, Deputy Principal Chair of the DCA Regional Street Group
- Jonathan Bates, National Street Data Manager, GeoPlace

Rachel and Kerry celebrated the significant contribution of outgoing Principal Chair Cathy Coelho, together with the other Chairs and Deputies who completed their terms. They outlined the regional structure and acknowledged the dedicated work of several technical working groups, including:

•    Data Entry Conventions Technical Working Group – which delivered comprehensive lifecycle guidance and best practice documentation.
•    Improvement Schedules Working Group – who reviewed over 40 proposals and refined the process for the next cycle.
•    Data Testing Group – which collaborated on Royal Mail data testing and improving checks on personal information.
•    Applications Testing Group – which prioritised and tested enhancements to GeoGateway and the GeoPlace Services website.

The presentation highlighted key address data achievements from the year and ended on a light-hearted note. Rachel shared a series of address-themed holiday photos submitted by group members—featuring quirky signs, amusing street names, and nerdy geospatial finds—proving that even on holiday, the passion for data never truly switches off!

Street Data Highlights
Jonathan Bates, National Street Data Manager, and David Matthews, Deputy Principal Chair of the DCA Regional Street Group (Cheshire East Council), reflected on a demanding but highly productive year for street custodians.

Two major efforts defined the year: improving the quality of the geometry of historic records and implementing a consistent approach to the street life cycle. Dave and Jon offered a heartfelt thank you from ACE and the Regional Chairs for all of work undertaken by LSG Custodians to achieve these improvements.

Changes to the NSG Upload process at GeoPlace mean that it is now significantly faster for Custodians to submit and easier to fix errors.  This along with DataVia moving to daily updates means that authorities are now submitting much more often.

These daily updates are also reflected in FindMyStreet, which is helping authorities reduce the number of highway queries that they receive and has seen phenomenal interest in our data with over 16,000 searches per day. 

We have also seen an increase in the use of the NSG to power to highway reporting tools, which provide much greater experiences for members of the public and streamline the process of going from a fault to a fix, with the USRN at the heart.

Jonathan said that “Looking forward we know that there is uncertainty ahead with changes to authority boundaries on the horizon, but having worked on many of these changes in the past, this is one of the ways that the USRN and UPRN shows its strength as the unique identifiers remain consistent throughout all of the changes and allow linked data to remain unchanged.” He reassured Custodians that GeoPlace will be available to walk authorities through the process and reassure users of the data.

Presentation of the Exemplar Awards
Nick Chapallaz, invited Juliet Whitworth to the stage to present this year’s Exemplar Awards, widely regarded as one of the highlights of the GeoPlace conference. 

These awards celebrate outstanding achievement across the DCA community, recognising the value that address and street data brings not only to individual authorities but to the nation as a whole.

Juliet introduced the key award categories: the Exemplar Award, Data Linking Award, Lifetime Achievement Award, Peer Award, the Improvement Awards for both addresses and streets as well as the Data Quality and Improvement Awards. Winners in each category were highlighted on accompanying maps, showcasing platinum and gold standard performance across the country. Attendees were invited to find their own authorities among them.

Exemplar Award
The Exemplar Award recognises the most impactful use of local address and/or street data to deliver clear, measurable benefits to citizens, local authorities, regions, or the nation. Two authorities—Lancashire County Council and Somerset Council—were highly commended this year for their contributions.

The overall winner was Westminster City Council, acknowledged for transforming public service reporting through geospatial intelligence and AI. Their cloud-based Report It platform integrates SRNs, APIs, geocoding, and automation to revolutionise how waste and street issues are logged, triaged, and resolved.

Data Linking Award
The Data Linking Award honours authorities that have used data integration to improve collaboration or deliver savings.

This year’s winner was Camden Council, for its innovative use of UPRNs to align LLPG data with national non-domestic rates records. The result: the discovery of millions in unbilled commercial revenue, now being actively recovered by the council’s business rates team. 

Lifetime Achievement Award
Given only once before, the GeoPlace Lifetime Achievement Award celebrates long-standing contributions to the nation’s address and street data infrastructure. This year, the honour went to Cathy Coelho of Oxford City Council, who also served as principal chair of the DCA Regional Address Group.

Cathy has long been a consistent and pragmatic leader, known for challenging decisions where needed and supporting the wider custodian community through her work. Though unable to attend, her influence and legacy were warmly recognised by all.

Peer Award
This year’s Peer Award went to Rachel Antcliffe, Principal LLPG Officer at Leeds City Council, for her unwavering commitment to the addressing community.

As Yorkshire & Humber regional chair and newly appointed chair of chairs, Rachel has been a trusted presence across forums like the Knowledge Hub, offering guidance and elevating key issues. She was praised for both her technical excellence and her generosity of time, knowledge, and spirit.

Data Quality and Improvement Awards
These awards, judged by GeoPlace using centrally held data, recognise authorities excelling in year-on-year data quality. The margin between top-performing authorities continues to narrow, making these awards especially competitive.

For addresses, the Improvement Award went to Tewkesbury Borough Council, recognised for systematically raised data quality across nearly every key metric – with a particular focus on Data Matching, Priority Errors, and Residential Classifications. These targeted improvements have led to increased accuracy and timeliness in the authority’s address data, with direct benefits to users across internal services and the wider public sector.

For streets, the award went to Somerset Council, for its work on resolving a substantial number of Street Life Cycle errors. More importantly, the team has implemented sustainable workflow changes that prevent these issues from reoccurring – ensuring higher-quality data for users and supporting the long-term integrity of the Local Street Gazetteer.

Platinum and Gold Awards
189 authorities were recognised as Platinum Award winners, having maintained the highest standard in meeting address data improvement schedule criteria between April 2024 and March 2025. 99 were recognised as Platinum award winners for the same criteria with street data. 

31 authorities were recognised as Gold award winners address data; 35 authorities were recognised as Gold award winners for the same criteria in street data - these awards reflect an across the board achievement worthy of commendation.

Closing Thoughts
The session closed with a note of optimism. With potential boundary changes on the horizon, the work done by custodians - maintaining clean, consistent, UPRN and USRN-linked datasets - has laid an incredibly strong foundation. 

GeoPlace reaffirmed its commitment to supporting authorities  –  and the final message was one of gratitude: for the countless hours of work, collaboration, and care going into the UK’s address and street data infrastructure.