"All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.

"This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems."

This seems like a dumb line of reasoning. The problem has never been the signs or punctuation in a database. It's that the people in charge don't even know what BS7666 even says.