Free our address data – or at least get them to stop charging each other: the petition
As noted in this comment elsewhere on the blog, there’s now a No.10 petition to stop the address madness:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop the expensive and damaging address ownership conflict currently existing between Royal Mail, Ordnance Survey and Local Government by definitively establishing that the intellectual property input of all three parties into derived address products such as PAF, AddressPoint, NLPG and NSG is equal in scope and value. Consequently, in the public interest, none of the three parties should charge either of the other parties for use of these products.
While we’re sceptical of the power of these petitions to change anything, they’re a good meeting point to indicate strengths of feeling.
So – sign it and then meet back here to work out what financial impact this would actually have – especially since local authorities are meant to be planning how much to charge for searches relating to homes (link to Yvette Cooper MP dithering on the matter earlier this month).
If they didn’t have to pay for that part, would searches be cheaper?
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- A new No.10 petition: free PostZon (28 January 2010; score: 60.64%)
- Postcodes: local authorities vs Royal Mail still arguing; want to sign a petition? (24 May 2007; score: 41.2%)
- Postcode charges threatens split between councils and Post Office (16 November 2006; score: 28.34%)
- Paying twice for data? Through your council, you might be paying EIGHT times (21 March 2006; score: 24.82%)
- Royal Mail threat likely to close ernestmarples.org (5 October 2009; score: 21.15%)
March 13th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Hey,if RM are making money out of this bearing in mind that they have put a lot of work and money into it in the 1st place,then i say as a Postman,who’s job is under threat because of regulation,competition ect,tough!!
They own it so they can do what they want with it.
Sound harsh,but the more money my employer earns the easier it is for me and 200,000 other employees.
Thankyou
POSTMAN
royalmailchat
March 13th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
@Postman: can you seriously say that the money gained from arguing about who owns what part of the intellectual property contained in an address really benefits the RM and all of us as taxpayers who, don’t forget, fund RM?
I suspect the reality is that it funds a few lawyers in the relevant bits of the civil service – Royal Mail, Ordnance Survey, and local authorities. Shuffling money around between departments is just wasteful – and reduces the money available for useful things like postal services.
We like the Post Office and Royal Mail; we just don’t like the idea that a taxpayer-funded concept (postcodes and addresses) should be charged for. After all, postcodes help postal workers, don’t they, because they make it easier to ensure that items go to the right place? If every piece had the right postcode, would the savings in time counterbalance the lost revenues?
It’s not even as if we can do this calculation properly because, last time I looked, RM wouldn’t say how much it gets from selling the Postcode Address File. But I may ask again.
March 13th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Hello mate 1st of all let’s get one thing straight,you or anyone else DOES NOT fund Royal Mail.
We are on our own and have been for many years,if you’re really that interested
the tax payer and Government have taken their slice off of us for many years,we,for a very long time have not kept ALL of our profits.
Give or take a few % some 50%+ of our profits have regulary been taken away from us,it may even be much higher.
We’re talking 100’s of Millions over the years,if not Billions.
Our pension plan is now in the brown stuff and over £5.BL in debt due to the Government taking a near 15yr break in paying in to it.
Ok no ones fault apart from the Governments.(whatever party happens to be in power),but i just thought i’d clear that up.
Oh,and any money we recieve now from Blair and his cronies is ours in the 1st place.
Carrying on,Pennies make Pounds,Pounds make lots of Pounds which in turn helps keep jobs.
As for this
“”After all, postcodes help postal workers, don’t they, because they make it easier to ensure that items go to the right place? If every piece had the right postcode, would the savings in time counterbalance the lost revenues?”"
If the public don’t know their own postcode then they shouldn’t be writing letters of giving out their adresses for stuff as lets be honest,stupid is what stupid does.
Sorry for some ignorance,but hey i’m a Postie :)
March 14th, 2007 at 11:04 am
@postie: I trhink that you’re missing the point here. the concerns are about the postcode database, as far as I know new postcodes are alloated between Councils (who name the road), Oridance Surey who map the road and the Royal Mail who allocate a postcode to an area on the map.
Any one who then wants that information has to buy the map from Ordinance Survey and the postcode information from the Royal Mail, including the coucil who provided the naming information to both orgainsations in the first place. Both the OS and Councils are funded by taxpayers.
Regarding your comment:
“If the public don’t know their own postcode then they shouldn’t be writing letters of giving out their adresses for stuff as lets be honest,stupid is what stupid does.”
There were 2 things that I was wanting to do that basically meant that I ended up sending mail without postcodes, or with the wrong postcodes. A few years ago we set up a website for Alumini from a university theatre group (http://www.bedlamites.co.uk) users sign up and can put in their addreses, so far this is fine. Then we decided to send everyone in our dabase a letter. What I wanted to do was to write a process our addresses and where people hadn’t put in a postcode fill in that detail. It would also have been nice to check that all the addresses and poscodes match. However without paying siginificant amounts of money to the Royal Mail there is just no way I can do that as we don’t really have any cash to spare. As a result we sent out a siginificant number of letters without being able to provide postcodes or verify that postcodes and addresses at least matched.
We would also like to do things like draw a map and put a marker on for where our members now live. But we cannot do this.
Looking at the Royal Mail webiste: http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/jump2?catId=400054&mediaId=400084
If I want the position data then this is going to cost me £2750 just for the data plus another £1000 for the system license. So we send our e-mail without fully checking it and we do without the nice map of where people live. It’s no wonder that people are reverse engineering this database… http://www.freethepostcode.org/
March 14th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Postman
This is in no way an attack at local postal staff, as a local authority we have excellent relations with the local offices and provide a good two way flow.
This is an attempt to get the silly address war over.
In summary, the local authorities create the numbers and street names.
RM adds post town and post codes
OS add the co-ordinates so it can be mapped.
The Local Authorities then keep everyone up to date when houses change their name, or get added. And yes, I know the delivery staff have a role here to.
The problem is that RM charge OS for ther part of the database.
OS then charge the local Authorities as the LAs used the OS product to create their database (NLPG), so RM and OS argue that to use our database, we need to pay OS and RM
This extends to web sites – see our site http://www.eastdevon.gov.uk/east_devon_address_connect.htm which allows our residents to check lots of info about their house.
Ever time someone uses this we have to pay RM 0.5p
This adds up over a year to a fair amount – especially when you add time processing the invoices every month.
So, in a way, the tax payers ARE funding the RM by these charges as well as the annual charge just to have the data, which we no longer use.
Later this year the LAs may start charging RM for the change information that we generate. Which will only increase this insanity.
March 14th, 2007 at 11:29 am
The Royal Mail are just a delivery company.
The only reason Local Government need postcodes (delivery points) from Royal Mail is because the general public and businesses expect them to supply the postcode along with new addresses.
If it wasn’t for this, then Local Government could stop the flow of new address information to Royal Mail at the drop of a hat, and that would cripple the Postal Address File (PAF).
As it stands however, Royal Mail accept all this lovely free information to update PAF and then sell it back to Local Government under the terms of the Mapping Service Agreement.
Ordnance Survey do the same, only with their mapping products.
Ultimately, it is the tax payer that loses out.
It is a grossly inbalanced arrangement, and it has to stop.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:14 am
It seems in parallel that I had submitted a related petition while the address products petition was undergoing approval….
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Free-UK-Map-Data/
July 28th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I think RM could learn something from the principle of open-source software. Just because they own the postcodes (no argument about that) doesn’t mean it’s necessarily in their best interest to sell it. I haven’t got an immediate suggestion as to what they could gain from ‘open sourcing’ the postcodes, but maybe somebody there should have a think about it.