The implications are bizarre here. Only software/database impacted by this change is something custom for the city, anything more widely used must handle apostrophes etc anyways because other places have them too. And also this being a change now implies that whatever custom software in question is something new, because any old software must have been dealing with these street names with apostrophes.

So first question in my mind is what/why is this software that they are attempting to accommodate??? Or is this all just based on misinterpretation of the mentioned BS7666 and nobody thought to check it??