|In Thursday’s Guardian: want to know where post offices are? Sorry, we can’t (or won’t) tell yoyu
The latest edition of Guardian Technology looks at the peculiar question of the locations of post offices, in “Want to know where the UK’s post offices are? Sorry, you can’t“.
It’s the by-now familiar story: you can get a little data free (the ten nearest post offices to a particular postcode), but the whole lot – no.
Demographer Keith Dugmore has been trying for the past couple of years to get hold of such a list. He runs the Demographics User Group, made up of people who use information such as census returns to make business decisions. A list of post office locations would be of great interest to other retailers, he says. It might also be of use to people publishing online guides, or to campaigners against the current programme to cut the network by 2,500 branches.
As a state-owned company (a subsidiary of Royal Mail), Post Office Ltd is in theory subject to the Freedom of Information Act. “I made a freedom of information request to the Post Office asking if they would be able to supply a single file of all post office addresses in the UK,” Mr Dugmore said.
The answer was no: first because it might have value to competitors; secondly because such a file would have commercial value in itself. He is now considering his next move. He could either appeal to the information commissioner or create his own list by “scraping” data from the Post Office website.
But as the article points out, you could ask now for that dataset from OPSI through the Re-use request service forum – the web channel that has been set up precisely for requests like this. Use it early, use it often. We ought to know what datasets government departments have.
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October 13th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
That’s so odd. It’s such trivial information…
October 15th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I’ve been after this for ages too – I have had our members giving me info, but out of district stuff is hard.
There is a web site, but it is out of date and you can’t get the raw data.
If wnyone gets it the great!
October 16th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
The article also refers to the database of school details, now known as edubase (but previously known by the less-snappy title of the “Register of Educational Establishments.”):
[quote]
One request, from a school governor, is for access to the government’s schools database at edubase.gov.uk. As with the Post Office, the site limits the number of records released per request. The idea behind the request is to create an online community for school governors.
[/quote]
You may not be able to get the whole database from the edubase site, but you can get historical snapshots of it from the National Digital Archive of Datasets at http://www.ndad.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, a service run for The National Archives (of whom OPSI are now a part, as I understand.)
The data is still subject to some usage restrictions, and some parts of it (such as governor’s email addresses) aren’t released, but for the sort of non-commercial purpose that was referred to in the article, that would not appear to be a problem. TNA, through NDAD, has been quietly making government data like this available for nearly 10 years.
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Re edubase
I got postcoded data for my entire GO Region from helpdesk@edubase.gov.uk