A huge street naming and house numbering project is about to be started by South Kesteven District Council to ensure all householders have access to the healthcare and financial services they are entitled to.
Currently, some isolated properties, or those on informally named roads, are getting kickback from health or mortgage providers because their address cannot be located on drop-down database lists when they apply online.
SKDC’s project will ensure that every home address meets the national standard, in line with legislative requirements.
It won’t affect existing house names, or any deliveries that currently find their way there.
However, an official house number, postcode and street name will be allocated to help meet the national required standard.
SKDC Cabinet Member for Planning, Cllr Phil Dilks, said: “Forty-one hamlets in our district have never had an official address, rather a locally accepted location.
“We know this has caused issues for emergency ambulances and has even delayed mortgage applications for people living there.
“We’re embarking on a long-term project starting with the areas where this is most common, making informal road names official where we can, and sometimes allocating a house number to be used alongside a house name where that’s all that it has.
“It may mean that ‘Back Lane’ or ‘The Cul-de-Sac’ somewhere will finally become official, as well as where one street starts and another one ends on long rural lanes.”
SKDC is holding residents’ meetings, as well as working with parish councils and other groups where appropriate, to explain the process and allay any fears people may have, explaining the Government directive and how the machine-readable UPRN, or Unique Property Reference Number, works for official address lookups.
Not all affected addresses will be worked on at the same time. Instead, SKDC will identify a small group of locations to work on, consulting with those residents and parish councils affected. As the process for these nears completion, the next group of locations will be selected and so on.
Users need property and street information with identifiers that remain the same over time and are easy to exchange between systems. Locations with these identifiers also include buildings or objects that might not have a postal address, for example, an electrical substation or a public toilet. While a block of flats, for instance, has one single grid reference, the UPRN would identify each flat.
SKDC will also be launching a poster and social media campaign to explain its obligations regarding the project and how it will work with residents.
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