Our British Cousins Have Their Own Problems of Identity

This is a post from Musings of a Stonehead, a "crofter" in Scotland dealing with his problems with credit rating agencies. I found it fascinating. Reading between the lines, in the UK the social security number (or its British equivalent, if any) is not used to coordinate financial data between the different credit raters (apparently the UK has the same ones we do). That puts the burden on matching names and addresses. As in the U.S., rural addresses are likely more free form than urban ones, which is the problem the Stonehead ran into. It's not clear whether the UK has the equivalent of 911 addresses. (For city readers, most, perhaps all, rural counties in the US have now assigned numeric street addresses to their rural residences so that responders to911 emergency calls can be given a specific destination.)