GeoPlace announces Winners of the 2025 Exemplar Awards

These honours recognise the outstanding, truly transformative work being done by Street and Address Custodians across England and Wales – modernising systems, improving processes, and delivering real-world impact for citizens through better data.

Across England and Wales, the GeoPlace awards highlight not only technical excellence, but also the wider civic and operational value of great spatial data – improving services, strengthening collaboration, and delivering lasting benefit to communities.

The Exemplar Award  

The Winner of the 2025 Exemplar Award is Westminster City Council, for its innovative work in transforming public service reporting through the use of geospatial intelligence and AI. The team’s cloud-based Report It platform integrates USRNs, Google Maps API, geocoding and automation to revolutionise how waste and street issues are reported, triaged and resolved.

With report accuracy rising to 86% and submission times cut from five minutes to just 88 seconds, the platform is delivering clear benefits to residents and teams alike. What makes Westminster’s work exemplary is its blend of human-centred design and technical innovation – combining user engagement with real-time location data to drive faster responses and better outcomes. Already in use for highways, streetlighting and anti-social behaviour, Report It is setting a new benchmark in local service delivery.

Data Linking Award  

The Data Linking Award goes to authorities who show how data linking has improved collaboration and/or delivered savings, while meeting a clear user need.  

The Winner of the 2025 Data Linking Award is Camden Borough Council, for its outstanding work in using UPRNs to connect and cleanse business rates data. By aligning the LLPG with National Non-Domestic Rates (NDR) records, Camden uncovered over £3.5 million in previously unbilled commercial revenue – income that is now being actively recovered by the council’s NDR team.

This achievement reflects more than just financial recovery. It demonstrates the power of data linking in practice – linking systems, unlocking siloed records, and turning manual review into a catalyst for smarter, more integrated operations. The work has also led to real-time updates from the Valuation Office and laid the groundwork for similar improvements to council tax records. Camden’s approach exemplifies how a single custodian’s insight can have a borough-wide – and potentially national – impact.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

The GeoPlace Lifetime Achievement Award marks an extraordinary level of commitment to formative work that has helped to develop the nation's street and address gazetteers over a period of many years.  

The Award was presented to Cathy Coelho from Oxford City Council and Principal Chair of the DCA Regional Address Group. Cathy has been a champion of address and street data and all the other roles that great Custodians undertake on a daily basis.  Her contributions to the Regional Chairs Group have always been invaluable, putting the needs of local authorities first and challenging decisions wherever necessary. This is combined with her thoughtful, consistent and strong leadership on ACE over the years, which has required a pragmatic, fair approach.

The Peer Award

The 2025 Peer Award has been presented to Rachel Antcliffe, Principal LLPG Officer, Leeds City Council.

Rachel was nominated by her peers for her unwavering commitment to the community – both in her leadership roles and in her everyday support of colleagues. As Address Chair for Yorkshire and Humberside and newly appointed Chair of Chairs, Rachel is a visible, trusted presence across forums such as the Knowledge Hub, regularly offering guidance and raising important issues on behalf of others.

She has also maintained a gold standard for addressing at Leeds City Council over many years. This award reflects not only the excellence of her technical work, but also her generosity of time, experience, and spirit. She exemplifies the values at the heart of the custodian community.

Data Improvement Awards

This year, Tewkesbury Borough Council and Somerset Council have been recognised for delivering the most significant year-on-year improvements in address and street data respectively – each authority making exemplary progress against GeoPlace’s improvement criteria.

Tewkesbury Borough Council is the 2025 winner of the Improvement Award for Addresses. Over the past 15 months, the team has 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.

Somerset Council is the 2025 winner of the Improvement Award for Streets, having resolved 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.

Both authorities have shown what’s possible when data improvement becomes part of a long-term commitment to excellence – not only fixing legacy issues, but also embedding resilience and clarity into day-to-day operations.

• 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.

Nick Chapallaz, Managing Director of GeoPlace said:  

“These awards reflect the scale, complexity and ambition of work being done by Street and Address Custodians across the country. They’re not just maintaining standards – they’re driving transformation, from financial insight to frontline service. My congratulations go to every winner and every nominee, and my thanks to the community that makes these achievements possible – and as always, I’m looking forward to these results being shared among colleagues seeking inspiration. GeoPlace team is always on hand with insights and support to help deliver better services for residents and businesses.”

Ends

Notes:

GeoPlace’s Exemplar Awards

The Exemplar Awards highlight Custodians' roles within their authorities and enable their work to be more widely promoted to all parts of the organisation. They spotlight the high standard of local address and street data and show how it underpins efficient, effective services.  

From radical transformation projects to essential system improvements, the awards showcase innovation at every scale – all rooted in the thoughtful, accurate curation of location data. Promoting this work helps highlight not only the importance of these datasets, but also the pivotal role played by Street and Addressing Custodians in delivering better outcomes for communities.  

GeoPlace's awards highlight the work in curating and maintaining that data. Promoting this work helps to highlight the importance of the Custodians’ role, and the potential for this data to deliver ever-more efficient and effective services for communities.

About GeoPlace

GeoPlace LLP is a public sector limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association (LGA) and Ordnance Survey.

GeoPlace is a world class expert in address and street information management, working internationally as well as in the UK to help our partners and customers maximise the value of their spatial information for better decision making.

GeoPlace maintains a national infrastructure that supports the address and street information needs of the public and private sectors. Its work relies heavily on close working relationships with every local authority in England and Wales.  

This relationship has been developed over 15 years, to build the National Address Gazetteer infrastructure and National Street Gazetteer. Ordnance Survey develops the range of AddressBase products from the National Address Gazetteer and OS MasterMap Highways Network from the NSG. Both datasets underpin efficient and effective services, bringing direct service delivery benefits to users.

The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) and the Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) are the unique identifiers for every addressable location and street in Great Britain. They are created by local authorities who have the statutory authority to name and number every street and property and Ordnance Survey who identify objects on the landscape which may otherwise not attract an address.

These unique reference numbers link datasets together and share information with other organisations who also use them. They provide a comprehensive, complete and consistent identifier throughout a property's life cycle â from planning permission or street naming through to demolition.