Revealed: how profitable Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) really is
The Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF) is pretty much indispensable for anyone doing direct marketing work. Now the Postcomm report on PAF that we mentioned last week has come up with something not seen before, at least outside RM: the profit and loss accounts for PAF. (Postcomm is the postal regulator, independent of RM.)
Turns out that PAF makes a profit of £1.58m on revenues of £18.36m, an 8.6% return on revenue. Most of the revenues come from PAF resellers (£14.9m). You’ll have to read to Annex 5 of the Postcomm report.
But we’ve looked at what this means in The Guardian. PAF underpins billions of pounds of the Royal Mail’s business, the direct marketing business, and the burgeoning market for satellite navigation (from memory, worth about £400m last year – corrections welcomed).
The price however is without any payment to local authorities, who have been cutting up rough about having no intellectual property rights embedded as suppliers of new address data. (There’s no information from Postcomm about how much PAF revenue comes from the public sector, which would be a useful figure. Royal Mail was chary about providing any information on PAF, one discovers on reading the report.)
RM told us it is “confident” about reaching a settlement. But isn’t this just more of a money-go-round, if they’re paid for supplying data to a product they then buy? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have PAF centrally funded, ringfenced by Postcomm’s recommendations and available for free to all? You might even encourage people to offer updates directly – which would cut the cost of maintenance, which at £9m or so comprises more than half the cost of running PAF for RM.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- In the Guardian: what happens to the Postcode Address File in a Royal Mail split ownership? (9 March 2009; score: 80.89%)
- In today's Guardian: who will address the postcode mess? (13 July 2006; score: 73.32%)
- Postcodes to be free? But which ones? (9 December 2009; score: 66.2%)
- Postcodes: local authorities vs Royal Mail still arguing; want to sign a petition? (24 May 2007; score: 63.61%)
- Postcomm makes recommendations on future of Postcode Address File: it should make a profit (19 April 2007; score: 61.84%)
April 26th, 2007 at 8:20 am
I requested a copy of the PAF under the data protection act for use on PlanningAlerts.com (a service run by volunteers with zero budget).
They turned it down on the basis that the data was available if I paid for it. I appealed on the grounds that we did not have the money to pay for it, and that we were having to resort to scraping a mapping website to convert postcodes to geopoints.
I’ve hard nothing back from them. Maybe it’s a battle they don’t want to have to fight as it might reveal how questionable their position is?
April 26th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
I think we should start a campaign to stop using postcodes on Mail until it’s available for free…
April 27th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
The response of “data was available if I paid for it” was what I got from the Ordnance Survey when I asked in October 2005, as a test, for a list of the TOIDs (a unique numeric identifier) of all London churches. All I wanted was a list of TOIDs cross-referenced to the name of the church, specifically *without* any lat-long coordinates. In my case there was no actual “product” that contained only the information I wanted: I’d have had to purchase quantities of data irrelevant to me, at significant expense, and disposed of the data after a year unless I relicensed, of course. Here’s the relevant part of that response:
“I regret to inform you that your request falls within the ‘Formats of documents’ exclusion under section 11.(3)(a) of the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 (PSI) whereby we are not obliged to adapt information in order to comply with a request. This exclusion applies because even though the information exists, it does so as a part of the Ordnance Survey MasterMap topography layer and is not available through us as separate information. Additionally, under section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), we would not release the information as it is ‘accessible to the applicant (you) by other means’. This same reason applies under section 5.(2) (c) of PSI.”
This get-out response simply must be challenged. If not, then governments may be tempted to “publish” various sensitive items with arbitrarily high charges, such as lists of MP’s expenses with arbitrary IP clauses attached such as “show nobody or face a £50,000 fine”.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Why not make a complaint under the PSI Regulations?
June 4th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Postcode data should be in the public domain.
Perhaps a way to force it is to reduce the value of the database…
PAF data is OUR data – surely I have a right to have my address EXCLUDED from the PAF database to protect my privacy. One of the privacy/data protection laws should prevent the Royal Mail and it’s agents from SELLING my address.
Perhaps if we found a privacy law covering our personal data in this database, and request to have it removed, and enough people do so, we will force the Royal Mail to put PAF data into the public domain
July 5th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Someone put the file on Bittorrent PLEASE