Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system they are running.
I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manually create and delete addresses because the old address import tool broke.