What is the value of UPRNs in the Emergency Services?

Author: Phill Ridley, Senior Business Development 

We have all been there when you are running late and can’t find the location you’re trying to get to. It may seem trivial to get stressed about an exact location of a building, until you are responding to an incident which is life critical, and you can’t find your way there. A critical situation highlights the importance and necessity of having correct, accessible and up to date Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) data.

Unique identifiers give an undisputed description of a location, ensuring complete clarity when responding to an incident but also allowing multiple datasets to be linked to the same location for a clear understanding of crime patterns and trends, enabling planning of proactive crime prevention operations.

What is a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN)?

The UPRN is a unique code for every addressable location in Great Britain, which is applied to that property location from when planning permission has been granted, right through to when a property is demolished.

They have been introduced because they create trusted connections between disparate sources of information that share a common location characteristic. Even if there are other issues datasets, the UPRN is a simple and unique reference point. UPRNs enable new data to be linked together with matching records in different databases. This means fewer errors in data exchange and communication, and far greater efficiency in all kinds of operations.

Property UPRNs are made available to public sector organisations for free via the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement and provide that clear code for an undisputed reference of a location. During the Geoplace conference this Summer, Housing Minister Christopher Pincher MP declared his support for the wider use of UPRNs in public and private sectors, particularly as they allow the emergency services to get hold of vital building information more easily, which 1Spatial supports.

https://www.geoplace.co.uk/press/2021/housing-minister-says-uprns-should-be-baked-in-to-streamline-house-buying-and-selling

https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/minister-urges-wider-use-of-uprns-in-housing/?s=03

Why not just use an address?

UPRNs are a unique identifier,  removing any ambiguity. Unique identifiers make mass data easier to differentiate. For example, when looking up a patient at a hospital it is likely there will be more than one “John Smith”, and therefore extra fields of information such as date of birth are required to work out which John Smith has been admitted. The NHS number works in the same way, to remove the ambiguity and reduce  risk of bringing up inaccurate information. The unique identifiers give the doctor confidence to make  an evidence-based decision.

UPRNs work in the same way.. For example, a large old Victorian house that has been divided into 4 flats. There are several ways you could interpret the address of one of those flats:

• Flat 1, Old House, Acacia Avenue, London, W12 5AA
• Ground Floor Flat, Old House, Acacia Avenue, London, W12 5AA
• Flat A, 5 Acacia Avenue, London, W12 5AA

The list goes on, but you can see the ambiguity in the actual property reference? Much like when trying to get John Smith’s medical records from the system. The UPRN provides each of those properties with a unique identifier, removing ambiguity and giving the responders confidence in where they need to go.

How can the UPRN be used in the Emergency Services?

UPRNs are used by the Emergency Services in both reactive and proactive situations. Reactive situations are when first responders are responding to an incident and need to get to a location as quickly and safely as possible, as detailed earlier in this blog. Proactive situations are often not discussed as much as reactive situations but are just as important, as they prevent potential incidents (risks) from taking place (becoming issues) and potential threat to public safety.

Proactive prevention work is enabled by using the POLE data model, where People, Objects, Locations and Events are  linked. UPRNs are an integral part of implementing the POLE data model as everything happens somewhere, so tying multiple pieces of data to one location is key. By using the UPRN to ensure that incidents are recorded in the correct location, hotspots of repeated incidents are produced in the correct location, enabling senior management to take the data and build a suggested prediction of what may happen in the future.

Public sector budgets continue to be ever scrutinised and restricted, meaning a limited resource (both people and equipment) have to be deployed to the correct location. There isn’t the bandwidth to deploy preventative measures in Area A, only for the problem to emerge in Area B. Validating that incidents have been recorded with the correct UPRN and in the correct location, reduces the risk of incorrect decisions due to inaccurate data.

How can Emergency Services fully utilise the opportunity presented by the UPRN?

One of the apps on 1Spatial’s Emergency Services Data Quality Hub is an automated solution to validate and cleanse addresses to ensure that they have the correct UPRN. This is done using a rules-based approach to cross check incident records with an Authoritative Data source such as the Gazetteer. Each incident is then validated using positive rules (i.e. my data must be like this) to ensure there are no records that are not missed.

The automation of this validation ensures that an organisation can have rapid access to clean address data with valid UPRNs in a matter of minutes, enabling Emergency Services organisations to respond to incidents, prevent future incidents, and ultimately protect public safety with confidence.