Broadgate auditorium
Thursday 15th May
Collaboration!
Broadgate auditorium
Facilitated by subject experts, the roundtable sessions provide a collaborative space to share experiences, exchange ideas, and explore practical solutions to common challenges. Delegates can choose from 20 different topics and attend four focused 15-minute sessions, grouped under the following categories:
- Policy and performance
- Local government reorganisation
- Using address data
- Street naming and numbering (SNN)
Feel free to also choose from the sessions in the London Wall Room.
Find topics below:
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Table 1: The Best Kept Secret – Promoting the strategic value of street and address to leadership
Facilitator: Mark Williams, Senior Data Adviser, Local Government Association
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
The Local Government Association and GeoPlace are working together to raise awareness of the value custodians have and the data they hold. This 15-minute roundtable will explore a draft guide designed for senior managers and leadership teams, focused on promoting the wider value of street and address data across local government systems. Participants will have the opportunity to review the initial draft and provide input to ensure the guide is aligned with the priorities, language, and decision-making context of senior leaders.
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Table 2: Toward a data standard for vacant shops: a (funded!) path to smarter high street action
Facilitator: Craig Campbell, Programme Manager, High Streets Data Service, Greater London Authority
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
With High Street Rental Auction powers now live and MHCLG funding available to support the development of Vacancy Registers, this roundtable explores what it would take to create a consistent, fundable, and actionable dataset on vacant shopfronts. We’ll look at how London boroughs are already using shared vacancy data through the High Streets Data Service, and explore how wider datasets—especially those linked via UPRNs—could help shape a national standard. The goal: take the guesswork out of landlord engagement, unlock investment, and bring life back to high streets
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Table 3: Children's place-based data
Facilitator: Gordon Hectar, Director, Upstream
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
There is growing interest in engaging children and young people directly in local services and government. Their digital footprint creates new opportunities to understand and engage with young people. But there are complex questions about what kind of digital tools are appropriate, about the quality of some data on young people, and the handling of sensitive information. This session would explore some recent thinking and understanding participant's views on how place, children and data should interact.
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Table 4: Digital Trends: Ten key questions for public sector leaders
Facilitator: Diana Rebaza, Research Analyst, Socitm
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
This session will explore critical questions that public sector leaders must address to navigate the evolving digital landscape effectively. Topics include strategic digital initiatives, beneficial partnerships, cost reduction through technology, technological readiness, creative staffing solutions, place-based data insights, community resilience, GenAI vision, risk protection, and value and inclusion.
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Table 5: Gathering the data you need on your local area
Facilitator: Sofia Calzavara - Head of Subnational Statistics Development and Dissemination Zaffia Hussain - London Regional Lead, ONS Local
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
How do you gather data about your local area to enable evidence-based decision making? What challenges do you face when looking for local statistics? What opportunities (e.g. technological improvements) are you looking forward to in this space?
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Table 6: UPRNs: The key to cross-government data integrity
Facilitator: Tianna Barefoot, Product Manager and Owen Kew, Geospatial Analyst,Ordnance Survey
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
UPRNs facilitate data linking and analysis across different systems and organisations. This interoperability is crucial for complex analyses and for ensuring that data can be reliably shared and used by various public sector bodies. Awareness and adoption of the UPRN can aid in developing the digital competency and maturity of public sector information sharing abilities. The round table will explore:
- The current challenges that public sector bodies encounter when sharing and discovering data (not exclusively geospatial)
- Government data standards, their implementation, and ways they can be improved
- How organisations and departments are already harnessing the UPRN and OSIDs to break down data silos
Opportunities for OS and GeoPlace to facilitate data sharing and promote the use of UPRNs as the unique identifier used to traverse across datasets containing property and/or street information.
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Table 7: How can we better engage with other departments to unleash benefits of data?
Facilitator: Gary Rivington, Data Integration Officer, Hannah Brooks, Local Authority Liaison Manager: Address, GeoPlace
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
The round table discussion and outputs will explore experiences with engaging with other departments, to gain benefits from integrating via the UPRN and USRN (and including them in their systems and processes). This can include change intelligence (sharing with other depts/software) and procurement of systems to enable this.
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Table 8: Understanding and overcoming barriers to integration
Facilitator: Luke Studden, Data Integration Lead, GeoPlace
POLICY AND PERFORMANCE
Integrating address and street data can be extremely challenging, so let us help you! I am keen to hear from you directly about your integration woes, the barriers you face and the issues that keep cropping up. What would you like GeoPlace to help you with and how? Let’s have a chat about what we can do to support you and your integration journey. We have also developed a wide range of integration support tools and guides so I will signpost these where relevant – they may be exactly what you need!
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Table 9: Improving public self-service by using GIS and AI
Facilitator: Chris Mewse, Director, Geoxphere
USING ADDRESS DATA
Improving public self-service by using GIS and AI through tools like Hub, which leverage UPRN-linked data to deliver geographically tailored information and responses.
- What information do you hold that could be presented nicely to public to help with self-service?
- What could be tied to a UPRN to create new themes of information delivery?
- What could we feed into an AI chatbot to help residents to solve their problems?
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Table 10: Unlocking the OS National Geographic Database with UPRNs
Facilitator: Andy Wilson, PSGA Futures Lead and Ellie Harley, Associate Product Manager, Ordnance Survey
USING ADDRESS DATA
Come and explore:
- The current challenges faced by custodians in accessing and adopting OS NGD
- Success stories and case studies showcasing how local authorities have used OS NGD
- Opportunities for OS and GeoPlace to provide support and guidance to custodians in their mission to maximize the value of geospatial data.
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Table 11: An address focus: Helping to shape the future of GeoPlace support and training
Facilitator: Stella Loftus, Head of Support, GeoPlace
USING ADDRESS DATA
An opportunity to feedback to the GeoPlace Helpdesk ways in which they can improve their support, guidance and services, and ideas for any training you would like to see available.
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Table 12: The Improvement Schedule process
Facilitator: Kerry Pearce, National Address Data Manager and Steve Clelland, Deputy National Address Data Manager, GeoPlace
USING ADDRESS DATA
- How do you find the process of introducing changes to the Improvement Schedule? How can it be improved?
- How is the consultation process for LAs? What information do you need to see in order to make a decision?
- Are there any particular improvements you would like to focus on next year?
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Table 13: Accurate addressing: navigating the challenges of a changing landscape
Facilitator: Josh Gooch, Senior Spatial Data Analyst, GeoPlace
USING ADDRESS DATA
In today’s rapidly changing world, maintaining high quality address data can be challenging. New developments, changes within the built environment and raising standards all add layers of complexity. From ensuring precise positional accuracy to staying on top of property lifecycle and keeping up with organisation changes staying ahead is not straight forward.
What aspects of managing address data do you find the challenging? What additional support do you think GeoPlace can offer to help overcome these challenges? -
Table 14: Taking advantage of linked data
Jon Saunders, Head of Data Insights, GeoPlace
USING ADDRESS DATA
Linking the USRN and UPRN to different systems and datasets has often been a way of ensuring the gazetteer isn’t missing a property or street. In an ever-changing world, the importance of data linking is growing, and it would be great to hear from participants as to how GeoPlace can assist them with data linking and the datasets that can help keep their gazetteers as up to date as possible
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Table 15: From avenues to accuracy: Why SNN matters more than you think
Facilitator: Claire Russell, Senior Consultant & Product Manager, Idox Group
STREET NAMING AND NUMBERING
With 1.5 million new homes on the horizon by 2029, smart street naming and numbering has never been more crucial. Join our roundtable to help shape Idox’s next-gen SNN tool—built for your needs, and the future.
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Table 16: Using historical place-names to inform modern street naming
Facilitator: John Baker, Associate Professor & Abigail Lloyd, Research Fellow Institute for Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham and the English Place-Name Society
STREET NAMING AND NUMBERING
Historical place-names typically arose as descriptive labels created in everyday speech. As such, they are a rich source of local language and earlier perceptions of the landscape. They shed light on the distinctive character of a place and its people. The Institute for Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham is currently carrying out a pilot project with GeoPlace LLP and various local authorities across the country. The project explores the ways in which historical place-names can be used today in modern street naming. This round table session will discuss the benefits and challenges of using this evidence, as well as how to go about it.
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Table 17: Shaping the future of SNN: magic wand thinking for year 2 and beyond
Facilitator: Holly Westwood, Local Authority Liaison Manager: Change Intelligence Lead, GeoPlace
STREET NAMING AND NUMBERING
To gather bold, honest ideas from the SNN community about what changes—big or small—they believe would most improve the SNN landscape. This discussion will directly inform the ongoing work of the SNN Working Group as we reflect on Year 1 of the 5-year SNN Working Group strategy and look ahead to year 2. -
Table 18: Devolution – what are the impacts for the disaggregation and merging of local authorities?
Facilitator: Dave Matthews, GIS Data Manager, Cheshire East Council
LOCAL GOVERNMENT REORGANISATION
Dave will lead a discussion looking at issues such as:
- How do you determine, without prejudice, which streets and addressing software to use for the new authority?
- If dealing with a change of software, what technical problems may arise, such as uploading problems, authority codes etc.
- How do I merge data from different authorities?
- How do I break streets and addressing data up?
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Table 19: Devolution – what are the impacts for the disaggregation and merging of local authorities?
Facilitator: Clare Welford, GIS Manager, BCP Council
LOCAL GOVERNMENT REORGANISATION
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council came together as a unitary authority in 2019. We are still working on combining a variety of datasets and, from a GIS perspective, have worked with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Our key lessons learnt have been:
- How good is the data? Understand the Quality of the Data on Day One
- Are the right people around the table?
- Does everybody use the same terminology?
- Has everybody agreed on how the data will be processed going forwards?
Away from Addressing Solutions data, we have been flying the flag on the importance of UPRNs and USRNs. If there is the opportunity to improve this data when bringing areas together, it is that step closer to being able to provide a Single View of the Citizen
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Table 20: Devolution – what are the impacts for the disaggregation and merging of local authorities?
Facilitator: Ben Wright, Head of Shared ICT, and Debbie Renwick, Authority Address Custodian, part of the newly merged Gazetteer Team, Westmorland & Furness Council
LOCAL GOVERNMENT REORGANISATION
Speak to a recently created unitary authority on their experience along with hints and tips to complete a project to merge multiple gazetteer systems into a successful, single merged authority gazetteer in time for vesting day of the new authority. Consider when to begin the process, procurement, who needs to be involved, timescales and what may need to be considered involved along the way.