In the Guardian: the mystery of the vanishing addresses
Thursday’s Guardian Technology looks at the mysterious ways in which addresses within some postcodes are simply vanishing from the Postcode Address File (PAF) – that enormously useful index of places in the UK which can receive mail. A new Highland clearance? Well, sort of.
In January 2008, the picturesque west Highland village of Applecross contained 32 buildings with postal addresses. A year on, it has only 24. This is not the result of some new Highland clearance, but an absurd consequence of UK government bodies treating data collected in the course of their work as a commercial asset rather than a national resource to be shared.
It’s not that the houses are going away; they’re very much still there. And they’re still owned by people. But Royal Mail, in attempting to maximise the value of the PAF, is removing them because that makes PAF more valuable to direct marketing companies – even while it reduces its utility to local authorities, which initially gave Royal Mail the details of the addresses, because they need to know about habitable locations in order to do things like emergency planning and other local services (dustbin/recycling runs, anyone?).
Royal Mail says it has a policy of removing addresses from the database when houses are unoccupied. “If the postie can no longer reach the delivery point, or if a house is obviously completely unoccupied, the postie informs us and the address is removed from the PAF. If it later becomes occupied, it would be put back on.”
And then…
Turf wars between Royal Mail, local authorities and Ordnance Survey over the ownership of postal addresses have a long history, imperilling everything from emergency services to the national census. Local authorities are particularly bitter about the current state of affairs because they have the statutory job of creating addresses in the first place. As one council specialist put it: “Local authorities create addresses, Royal Mail adds the postcode – then this data is sold back to us by Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey.”
Any other examples of this that anyone has come across?
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January 9th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Why remove records? Why not simply add a field to contain a binary flag “deliverable/undeliverable”?
January 10th, 2009 at 8:24 am
In case of any misunderstanding, I should stress that I don’t think Royal Mail is doing anything wrong here: it’s their PAF. (I’ve heard the system was originally developed to help managers copes with strikes by postmen – can anyone confirm this?)
However given the system’s importance to the rest of the economy I think there’s a strong case for PAF being re-nationalised, as it were, and made available to all comers through the national geoportal. Royal Mail would then be free to download a version for editing, cleansing, posting on Second Life, whatever, so long as it helped them do their core job better.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
“Local authorities create addresses, Royal Mail adds the postcode – then this data is sold back to us by Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey.”
If you think that’s bad take a look at the National Street Gazetteer. Now that is a mess.
January 11th, 2009 at 10:43 am
PAF was designed to assist RM to deliver mail. No mail delivery no need for a record apparently, although it would be more sensible to flag the record in some way as Andy Mabbet suggests. the problem here seems to be that many applications/businesses are dependent upon PAF but have different expectations of it to the standards that RM are applying (to deliver mail).
RM do seem to be shooting themselves in the foot here as by making PAF less useful they are likely to reduce revenue from licensing which they are going to need as the core business of delivering snail mail nosedives!
Re-nationalising (was it ever nationalised or de-nationalised?) sounds quite sensible as long as RM retains a statutory obligation to continue uploading new records – otherwise we will be left with an out of date records set that will also not be fit for purpose.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Here’s the Herald’s take. http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.2480944.0.Hundreds_of_remote_homes_lose_their_postcodes.php
January 13th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
The trouble is there’s an inevitable delay between postcodes being “re-added” to the PAF and that update trickling through to the businesses who use it. So when you move into that empty house and start renovating it, you’ll have endless trouble ordering and taking delivery of that new cooker/fridge/furniture you need, because the suppliers and the courier companies don’t believe your house exists.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Andy Key is correct – which is why the PAF would be much better treated as a public, freely available, resource. There are many businesses working on out of date copies of the PAF, and this is a significant frustration to people who restore a derelict house. It is not very helpful to be told that your home does not exist.
January 18th, 2009 at 4:29 am
We’re having to pay £1000’s for PAF annually but only need 5% of it. Royal Mail refuse to sell us portions of it as they used to (i.e. by postcode area), thanks to tougher illogical licensing our costs have trippled this year. WRONG WAY! Tax payer funded data is supposed to be become more open, flexible, and cheaper, no the reverse! :-( Tom Watson MP please take action or rattle some chains.