We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/secret-paf-report

by edward • 2 years ago

356 310 2 years ago

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

jimbob45• 2 years ago

I can respect the arguments for making it public but there are strong arguments also to raise a high barrier of entry to discourage abuse. Further, the fewer users of the list, they easier they are to police.

xnorswap5• 2 years ago

It's a lookup between postcode and address, what is the abuse cases you're worried about?

lnxg33k13• 2 years ago

Considering that in UK if you live in a building, the door next to you can have a different postcode, I wouldn't worry at all

pjc504• 2 years ago

Crucially, it doesn't have people's names in it.

secretsatan• 2 years ago

You miss the point that it was once freely accessible, and now it is not.

scraplab2• 2 years ago

I don’t believe it’s ever been accessible for free. It’s just that ownership has moved from the state to a private company and now it’s difficult to make it open.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Yeah, maybe you should pay a subscription to know your own post code...

IneffablePigeon• 2 years ago

What nonsense. Are you worried about physical spam mail? That ship has already sailed. I genuinely can’t think of any other abuse vector for a dataset like this.

andrewjl2• 2 years ago

Would open address data create privacy risks? No. Unlike opening up more sensitive datasets such as personal location, releasing address data - a list of the physical places recognised by the government - carries few new legal or ethical risks. Many other countries are doing this, including those with strong privacy regimes. Open address data could only create new risks if it were linked and used with other datasets, and these risks should be managed in that context. The harms created by the lack of access to address data are more pressing.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee7a7d964aeed7e5c507...

mrweasel3• 2 years ago

How exactly would that be abused? Denmark have a website where you can enter any address, or an address close to where you want to be and then let you select the right house on a map. The same site will show you the owners, the purchase price the taxable value, size, number of bathrooms, stuff like that. I used it to find the address of a friend when I needed to ship him a present and I only roughly knew where he lives.

shakna2• 2 years ago

Australia also has ours locked away privately. You can purchase access, but...

You also need to sign a contract that you won't make the PDF, or anything you derive from it, publicly accessible. (At least, that was the case the ladt time I did).

[0] https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications...

tim--• 2 years ago

Isn't this G-NAF? https://geoscape.com.au/solutions/g-naf/

shakna2• 2 years ago

Not quite. G-NAF is a government owned enterprise, separate to the privitised but government body of Australia Post.

G-NAF is the equivalent to the UK's National Address Gazette.

It's a separate body of data, that sometimes disagrees with the "source of truth" that is Australia Post, and all the post systems that rely upon them.

For example, it took two years for G-NAF to notice that Winter Valley, Victoria, is not within 3356, but actually has its own brand new post code of 3358.

memorylane• 2 years ago

I think g-naf is freely available…

samwillis• 2 years ago

Sadly I don't think this would happen, particularly if Ordnance Survey is responsible, all their data is paid for access.

We have a very different model for access to data produced by government agency use to that in the US.

USGS Topographic maps: public domain / free

UK OS Topographic maps: paid access, and it's not cheep

US National Weather Service: Public domain / free commercial use

UK MetOffie: Payed access for commercial use

scraplab2• 2 years ago

OS does release a large volume of open data, but yes, the vast majority of the good stuff is not open.

https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open

normangray4• 2 years ago

I remember asking a USGS person about this. They remarked that the other difference was that, compared with the OS, the USGS data was a bit rubbish (I may be paraphrasing).

The USGS is funded by some shard of the US federal budget, and does commendably good stuff with the budget it gets; it's there for both high-minded and commerce-supporting reasons. The OS is now (in a sequence of reorganisations from 1990 to 2015) a private company with a government-owned golden share, and is expected to be revenue-positive. The fact that it has more money per square metre of country, means that it's able to be _very_ thorough, mapping down to the level of individual bits of street furniture.

Sidenote: the context I was hearing this included a talk by someone from OS describing using reasoning software to do consistency checking of their GIS: for example, if you find a river bank in the middle of a field, something has been mislabelled. I thought that was cute.

When you buy a data product from OS, you're buying some subset of the layers of the database.

As the other reply pointed out, some of these layers are available for free, and in the last few years there's been some review/churn/debate in the data subsets made available that way (I see there are more details on the Wikipedia page). One can form a variety of opinions on whether those subsets are as big as they could or should be, but there does seem to be a substantial point that the level of the detail in the master map is there because it's profitable for the company (and thus income-generating for the government) to develop it from surveys, and it wouldn't exist otherwise.

I think the Met Office is organised in a similar way.

There are a number of questions of principle and practice here, but the OS seems to me to be claimable as an example (rare, in my opinion) of a privatisation which has produced net positive outcomes.

cuonic• 2 years ago

On the other side of the Channel, the French government has managed to create the "BAN" (Base Adresse Nationale - National Address Database), a database of detailed postal addresses in the country along with precise GPS coordinates: https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/base-adresse-nationale

On top of the database they have provided an interface to view the data, interfaces for towns and cities to keep the data up-to-date, free APIs to search addresses and performing geocoding or reverse geocoding (https://adresse.data.gouv.fr/api-doc/adresse) and the data is openly licensed and available to download.

Feeding the BAN has been enforced by law, localities are required to put together and upload their "Base Adresse Locale" (Local Address Database)

The original data was obtained from multiple sources, including "La Poste", the French Royal Mail equivalent, and OpenStreetMap !

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Even in the far right US postcodes are public info :)

crote2• 2 years ago

The big difference is that US postcodes describe very large areas. A 5-digit US ZIP code describes a town or neighborhood, with on average 8200 people living in each ZIP code.

Most European postcodes are far more precise, often describing a single street, part of a street, or even part of a building. Postcode + house number is usually enough to uniquely identify a mailbox. For example, in The Netherlands on average only 40 people live in each postcode. That makes the dataset far more valuable for geolocation.

GJim• 2 years ago

GPS coordinates

*coordinates

There are four GNSS constellations, of which GPS is only one...... a statement that negates the fact ones position on Earth may be calculated using a variety of other means.

EDIT: In response to replies below; One isn't questioning the coordinate system (!), rather the assumption as to how they have been calculated.

arnsholt• 2 years ago

In this context, it's not terribly hard to divine that they probably mean EPSG:4326 coordinates. I was going to comment that one of the ETRS89 UTM zones might be easier to work with, but on second thought the data almost certainly includes the DOMs if not the TOMs, so a global coordinate system is probably best.

defrost• 2 years ago

There are many ways to calculate an earth position, sure - to name a few; triangulation from stations, LORAN, or a combination of the two with a frequency change and some moving stations such as one of the five GNSS constellations.

There are many coordinate systems; these days in 2024 it is almost universal to calculate from various stations to a WGS84 position, in that coordinate system and using that geodetic datum.

Back in the day, there were many datums in common use, based on a plurity of reference ellipsoids, with a multitude of pojections in common use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_ellipsoid#Historical_Ear...

To this day there are several thousand indexed earth coordinate systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSG_Geodetic_Parameter_Datase...

https://epsg.org/home.html

pjc504• 2 years ago

Like "Hoover", "GPS" is now a generic term for positioning systems.

yard2010• 2 years ago

Fun fact: the word Νερό (nero) means water in greek. The actual meaning is fresh (I think it's the source of the word "new" too). It turns out, that many years ago you meant something else than fresh water by saying just water, so you have to be specific when you're talking about fresh water. In ancient greek water is ὕδωρ (hudr, think hydro, water) and fresh water is νεαρὸν ὕδωρ (neron hudr). Sometime in the past, the ancient Greeks were sick of saying 2 words to say water. So they dropped the second one.

Something similar happens with GPS coordinates. People are just saying GPS when they mean coordinates. even though the logical thing to do is drop the GPS (neron) and just say coordinates (hudr).

Personally, I think that language is just a bunch of symbols that have no real meaning. Each symbol means something only in a context, no matter how broad or specific. I would argue that it doesn't matter which word is more logical to use because logic is just a part of the context.

But you are right.

stef25• 2 years ago

Very cool. Nice effort by France.

For a while I played around with that kind of data here in Belgium, it's not easy to get it all standardized and "usable".

mormegil• 2 years ago

We have the same in the Czech Republic (Registry of territorial identification, addresses and real estate; https://cuzk.gov.cz/ruian/RUIAN.aspx (sorry, Czech only)). I would even expect it to be the case in more EU countries, cf. the INSPIRE directive.

gabesullice6• 2 years ago

A cautionary example of how data meets reality…

My address in France is listed in the BAN… but only to the granularity of my street number (e.g., 123 Main St.).

Unfortunately, that number corresponds to at least 7 different structures, 5 of which are apartment buildings.

Of those 5 buildings, each has multiple stairwells with their own door and no line of communication between them—they might as well be separate buildings.

My particular building has 8 levels with 2 flats per level. No flat has a door number or letter, meaning I must say 'Nth floor, door on the right' to give directions to a visitor. And I could not receive mail until I affixed my name to my postbox on the ground level.

None of that is in the BAN as far as I can tell.

Finally, on OpenStreetMap, the coordinate for the the street number address in the BAN actually corresponds to an island in the street that happens to face a private road that enters the property. There is more than one entrance :)

tomsmeding• 2 years ago

That sounds like chaos. Who thought constructing multiple apartment buildings without any kind of sensible post code or address was a good idea? Sure, this being reality BAN does not apparently meet reality, but it does sound like someone had the opportunity to keep reality sane here, and they didn't.

Propelloni2• 2 years ago

This sounds like bad design by the property developer and a sloppy building authority. The first is corroborated by the lack of unit numbers. Who does such a thing?

The BAN actually only tracks down to the plot level, so I assume all your structures are on the same plot. From there on it is the building authorities job to check building plans and to enter the substructures into the cadastre, where they are usually lettered. It's the developer's job to mark the buildings and entries. Sloppy work, all around. So sad.

tacostakohashi• 2 years ago

Frankly, that just sounds like a fire code / building code issue. Are these "apartment buildings" legal for habitation, with actual legal separate apartments, and not some weird subdivision/subletting situation?

In every place I have ever lived, having a clearly marked addresses and door numbers for apartments is required by the fire code. If there's an emergency that requires a fire or ambulance response, smoke in the air, etc, then "Nth floor, door on the right" is not a good thing to be explaining over the phone.

riquito• 2 years ago

On the bright side, you know about this and you could potentially suggest and follow any changes, which would be impossible without a single source of truth

Wizzah2• 2 years ago

Belgium is a shitshow of governments (We have 7) but somehow one of these got to achieve a geolocated address register. Publicly available and they also have an API available to build your own application around.

https://www.vlaanderen.be/datavindplaats/catalogus/adressenr...

ikr678• 2 years ago

Australia is similar, howeve, irrespective of how perfect your national addressing standards are, companies ingesting this data providing any sort of to-the-premise service still have to mash and clean and dissect it to fit whatever legacy system they are running.

I am aware of one utility provider that is locked into a custom network modelling solution that was officially sunset in 2014 and employs 3 ftes to manually create and delete addresses because the old address import tool broke.

rtpg• 2 years ago

So many Australian sites use some data source that has an old name for the building I'm in, and sites are so convinced their address databases are right that I can't do anything about it! Mildly frustrating

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Is there a a reason this hasn't been pushed for at the EU level?

lukan• 2 years ago

Next step, automatically feed all the roads, speed limits, temporary blocks/construction sites automatically into OSM or similar accessible data.

b1125• 2 years ago

Sad to see a reasonable article with a "This one weird trick could save..." as an ad inline, pointing back to his own page. I tend to think of such ad tactics and wordage to be associated with used car salesmen. Certainly, with scams.

tomstuart• 2 years ago

That’s the joke.

b1125• 2 years ago

If I call some place I've never heard of before, know nothing about, my first interaction with them on the phone shouldn't result in "Oh my god, these people seem like scammy used car salespeople!"

If your assertion is true, that it's a joke, it's going to backfire. That's because that call is the equivalent of what's happening here. I called, and the person on the other end ... thinking it a joke, funny, did their best to convince me that they're scam artists.

That's what's happened here. I know nothing about this website, and this was my first impression. And no... my initial reaction isn't "Hmm. This website seems scammy and lame. Maybe I should spend my time investigating to determine if I'm right or wrong!". If I did that, I'd spend my entire life looking at scammy websites... I have better things to do.

Like I said, it's a shame to see this on what seems to be reputable website. But I literally stopped reading, and moved on to other things when I saw it. The website owner should take that into account.

(And indeed, I may be some small ratio, 2% of users, but it could be higher. It could be a lot higher. Or it could obviously be 0.2%. But that's a bold move, putting a big "I'm a scam artist!" sign on a website, first engagement is going to bite.)

Heck... if I was Google, any page with "One * trick" on it would be downranked.

TL;DR don't put a massive sign on your website that reads "I'm a scam artist, clickbait website!"

robin_reala• 2 years ago

For non-GB people, a postcode gets you to ~1-15 buildings, not (for example) a town or region.

mrweasel3• 2 years ago

The British mail addresses are pretty interesting. We quickly learned that, as you say some postcode have just one or two houses, which may not have numbers, but names.

I'm sure there is a "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" somewhere.

darrenf3• 2 years ago

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

wiredfool4• 2 years ago

Ireland can have:

  Foo House
  Townland
  Large town somewhat nearby where the mail comes through but only tangentially near the actual house
  County Bar

Where Townland is optional.

There's a bank address in my town: PTSB Kennedy Road Navan Co Meath

Kennedy Road is about 2 blocks long with ~ 30 shop fronts, and there are numbers on all but one of them.

maccard2• 2 years ago

Except when it doesn’t, of course! This [0] post has some examples of interesting post codes. They’re really more just a collection of addresses that are usually near each other, but require you to know the area. So much fun!

[0] https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/what-are-fun-postcodes-...

jasoncartwright• 2 years ago

There are some fun 'special' ones. Banks, governmental, BBC etc and... because UK... football teams. https://www.ukpostcode.net/special-postcodes-wiki-3.html

tialaramex• 2 years ago

Well, how many buildings, and of what sort, varies enormously, but yes it won't be a whole town or region.

Most of my street is a single post code. Once upon a time it was a street of single family dwellings, so that's maybe a 3-4 dozen homes, but this is a city suburb so densification means some of those homes were modified and cut up to form flats, one large family home becomes six smaller homes - and some were purchased, knocked down and replaced by buildings which don't look out of place but aren't what they were before. I live in a purpose built four storey block, but it's designed to look superficially like a big house, the bottom floor is below street level (it faces out over the hill), the top has only loft-style windows at the front like somebody did a loft conversion.

It's all still one postcode though, so I share a code with maybe 100+ households. Recoding is disruptive and it's not really worth it, so they mostly don't do it.

Remember for actually delivering the post the postcode is just a convenient human readable part of an address, the machines (with occasional human help) turn any arbitrary address into a unique destination code, and then that's literally barcoded (albeit not in a code you're used to from like UPC etc.) onto the post. So for the Royal Mail the postcodes not being as descriptive as they were fifty years ago isn't a big problem.

Take some mail you've received, preferably over several days and study the outsides carefully. Two fluorescent orange bar codes have been jet printed onto the mail during sorting. The upper code is "just" a temporary unique ID, every piece of mail in the sorting system is issued a code, when they run out they start over, this helps with debugging and statistics. The lower case is in some sense the successor to the postcode, it'll be identical for every item delivered to the same address and distinct for other addresses. In fact it's encoding the "Delivery Point" which is what PAF handles, the location to which the Royal Mail employee delivers mail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM4SCC

The use of these "real" postcodes also enables the Royal Mail to more readily accede to impractical "vanity" postcode requests. If the rich people in this part of Dirt Town think they ought to have postcodes from the adjacent and posh sounding Upper Niceton, RM can allow that, because in reality their teams are working from the purely numeric code which will still treat all these new "Upper Niceton" homes as being where they actually are, in Dirt Town.

cjs_ac2• 2 years ago

The upshot of the research then, is that building an accurate database is really hard. OS concludes that it would have to check the 4.2m bad addresses manually to make its PAF-less database a viable dataset that would actually be useful.

The secret to the Royal Mail's success with the PAF, and the reason why only the Royal Mail can maintain the PAF, is that the Royal Mail has people walking and driving to all those delivery points six days every week.

Compare the Freedom of Information requests to Royal Mail from OpenStreetMap contributors concerning the locations of post boxes, which were refused ultimately because that information was handled only by local sorting offices.

chihuahua• 2 years ago

Maybe they can use the TV detector vans used for TV license enforcement to collect the data, if they're already surveilling every single building in the country on a daily basis!

dambi0• 2 years ago

Checking buildings you already know to have a license seems wasteful, but perhaps I missed something?

Normal_gaussian• 2 years ago

As censorship for FOIA requests is done manually, it may be beneficial to request the missing figures directly without noting you have them in a censored context. Censoring is subjective, so that would at least draw out either the figures or a justification.

nly2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the British mindset these days is to either rent it out or sell it but, whatever the hell you do, don't grow it.

Somehow these idiots managed to strike a deal to keep the sovereigns figurehead on stamps (which has no economic value whatsoever, and actually the Crown should be compensated for this) but, in this data age, didn't safeguard such a critically important database to e-commerce

It's like selling off the Tower of London because you can't afford to repair the roof and forgetting you left the crown jewels inside

TechTechTech• 2 years ago

For comparison, in the Netherlands all postcode data is open data, including detailed building outlines as well as almost all other related information.

See https://app.pdok.nl/viewer for most datasets.

Muromec3• 2 years ago

This creates a very special Dutch thing —- my neighborhood had the roads on the map before the map itself was updated to show landmass instead of the body of water.

anticensor• 2 years ago

Same in Turkey, except the map data is subject to certain limitations.

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

I wonder if all the houses on disconnected long islands without roads in Vinkeveense Plassen have postal codes? It's hard to get a pizza delivered there.

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2307079,4.9365182,1869m/data...

crote2• 2 years ago

This also leads to some very interesting issues, as third parties who automatically ingest the data have a habit of just reading the docs and making the wrong assumptions about what it means in reality.

One example I often encounter myself is Google Maps trying to geolocate my address (city, street name, house number), and then reverse-geolocate that into my postcode. Which sounds like it would work - until you realize that the postcode polygons can overlap. I live in a building where (roughly) each floor has its own postcode, so whenever I try to fill in my address on a website which uses Google's API, it'll "helpfully" auto-fill or "correct" my postcode from 1234AB to 1234AZ. It'll essentially pick a random postcode, because all of them share the same coordinates!

That's Really Really Bad, because the postcode plus house number combination is supposed to uniquely identify a mailbox: it's only a matter of luck that the house numbers aren't reused in the set of postcodes used for my building. They could've just as well reused the numbers at the individual building entrances...

agolio• 2 years ago

I am a bit surprised by how hard this article makes out the problem to be.

Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer.

Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?

darrenf3• 2 years ago

How would crowdsourcing solve this problem?

Oh, and it wouldn’t even be legally allowed to include, er, postcodes, as they are specifically owned by Royal Mail

moring2• 2 years ago

How does OpenStreetMap solve it? OSM, more specifically OSM Nominatim, shows postcodes. Example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?lat=53.151778&lon=-1.16...

RossM• 2 years ago

I can't find any good information post-privatisation, but at least before 2013 the postcodes themselves were copyrighted by Royal Mail (likely Crown Copyright as with government data). There were attempts to enforce this in 2009[0]. I suspect the copyright is now owned by Royal Mail Group Ltd.

That aside, a practical issue is that Royal Mail still retains the rights to _allocate_ new postcodes for any new properties. Yet another failure of this particular privatisation.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2009/10/06/uk-royal-mail-uses-copyr...

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?

They licence it from Royal Mail

normangray4• 2 years ago

Probably, but not necessarily.

The article points out that the PAF is kept up to date by virtue of thousands of postmen and postwomen physically visiting the rows in the database on a daily basis, as part of normal business, and logging updates. That level of routine maintenance is what any non-PostOffice PAF alternative would have to also do.

Amazon, and probably Google Maps, are two of the very small number of organisations which _might_ have the resources to build this postcode->GPS mapping, as a sideline to their current business.

They probably do license the PAF, of course, but they illustrate the sort of scale required to assemble that data independently.

epanchin• 2 years ago

Google will surely have a PAF license?

andrewjl2• 2 years ago

There's a writeup linked to in the OP comments about how this can happen.

https://www.centreforpublicdata.org/blog/freeing-the-paf-our...

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Off topic but this is a bizarrely weird take:

Sadly because of the NIMBYs, this map doesn’t include a London version of The Sphere.

"NIMBY" implies they're objecting to something useful and not actually that bad, like a solar farm or a mobile phone mast or a housing estate. Not a giant advertising billboard.

lol768• 2 years ago

I think it's a joke.

robinhouston2• 2 years ago

This is a long-running battle. Those with long memories may remember the skirmish 15 years ago, when a small group of developer-activists set up a website that allowed free access to postcode data (ernestmarples.com, named after the inventor of the modern British postcode system).

Needless to say, it was rapidly shut down following threats of legal action by Royal Mail.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/05/ernest-ma...

https://blog.okfn.org/2009/10/05/ernest-marples-uk-postcode-...

michaelt• 2 years ago

The postcode-to-coordinate data is now freely available as "CodePoint Open"

So there's already data for people who want to know postcode AB10 1JL corresponds to the area around 57.14677,-2.09873

The PAF is a more detailed data source, as seen in https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode which can tell you that AB10 1JL specifically covers the addresses

102-104, Union Street, Aberdeen

82, Union Street, Aberdeen

Timpson Shoe Repairs Ltd, 86 Union Street, Aberdeen

Smart Mobile, 88 Union Street, Aberdeen

92 Union Street, Aberdeen

98 Union Street, Aberdeen

The PAF is useful if you want to provide a "quick address entry" option on your website - and to validate address data. But if you just want postcode-to-location conversion, that info is already available.

robinhouston2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the clarification. I’d forgotten that ernestmarples only offered postcode-to-location lookup: it was a long time ago.

I suppose this is encouraging! It shows that the forces of openness are gaining ground in this battle.

sahmeepee5• 2 years ago

Given that OSM has a lot of building addresses and locations (at least it has building names and numbers and the streets they are on, plus their outlines) I wonder how much of the PAF could be recreated from the data in CodePoint Open combined with OSM. If adding more house numbers etc to OSM would help improve that then it could be crowdsourced quite quickly via Street-Complete or similar.

For the purposes of the quick address lookup it doesn't even need to be 100% accurate. If a property is incorrectly listed against two postcodes it won't really cause problems, so the lookup could err on the generous side

NeoTar5• 2 years ago

Some context, for people not located in the UK - A full British postcode typically aims to cover around 15 buildings (sometime a single building, sometimes a street of 50 houses). This is in contrast to many other postal code systems which cover relatively broad areas).

Or to put it another way -

UK - 2,643,732 codes, 1 code per 25 people,

USA - 41,700 codes, 1 code per 8000 people,

Germany - 8,200 codes, 1 code per 10000 people,

This means that post-codes are often used as a proxy for an exact location - e.g. if I am going to visit a relative, I can enter their postcode into my sat-nav, and be confident that most of the time I'll get to within a hundred meters of their location.

This doesn't work so well in rural area or on large estates where the access point may different from the location, leading to places sometimes advertising a different postcode to put into your sat-nav (e.g. of where the site entrance is) to that of the location itself.

simonbarker872• 2 years ago

Hence why a house number and postcode constitutes a complete address in the UK, we’ve sort of already got What Three Words with “a number and 5-7 characters” - not quite as catchy though

beardyw2• 2 years ago

We needed an ambulance off road in the middle of Richmond Park where a postcode would also not help. We didn't have WTW either, which they asked for and would have helped immensely.

DaiPlusPlus3• 2 years ago

What Three Words

W3W's closed, proprietary scheme is arguably worse than the PAF - as seen on HN previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183533

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19511917

rootusrootus3• 2 years ago

I noticed that W3W showed up in a number of places, typically on advertisements, at least around London. Is it used universally across the UK? I don't know of anyone using it in the US aside from a few enthusiasts. I had forgotten about it until a few weeks ago when we were visiting London.

wordofx• 2 years ago

Singapore - 1 code per building.

mtmail• 2 years ago

Similar in Ireland, the last country in Europe introducing a postcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ... They didn't learn from the UK and the postcode data is also closed.

CaptainFever• 2 years ago

Yep, one code uniqely identifies a block/building. The only thing it doesn't identify is the unit number.

yardstick• 2 years ago

sometime a single building

Fun fact- some postcodes cover only a fraction of a building. There’s buildings where 3 postcodes are used. Same street number, same main entrance, but different post codes.

Edit: A 2-postcode building example is “M3 7GW” and “M3 7GX”, both go to 55 Queen St, Salford.

NeoTar5• 2 years ago

Apparently the worst case in the opposite direction is the University of Warwick, where a single postcode (CV4 7AL) covers 5000 individual residences (so probably about 5000 people given these are likely to all be student rooms, and sharing a room is uncommon in the UK).

creesch• 2 years ago

Dutch post codes actually do specify the street.

It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part of) a street.

So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front door.

To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous level. This being a good example.

Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of course did not go very well in as far as actually properly maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized again where now Network Rail is responsible.

In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning it is still effectively a public company, so things did result in such dire conditions as the UK.

pas• 2 years ago

the problem with UK privatization is the same as with California PG&E ... it's private in name, but the incentives are all bad.

there was (is) no point for optimization on costs as the profit was a fixed percentage (so it ended up quite the opposite) instead of a price cap. (ideally the cap would be a simple formula based on input prices, to at least make the lobbying transparent. sure, this also has a built in profit percentage, but the important difference is that the profit is not fixed, so the private company is incentivized to push the costs down.)

see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/energy-bell-the-sketch-of-an-i...

shiandow2• 2 years ago

In the Netherlands the situation wasn't too far removed from the situation the UK is in now. The postal codes are managed by a private company (PostNL), and while the details are scarce and hard to find there was a fight between them and the government party responsible for managing addresses over who got had the rights to the postal codes data (see [1] for the current truce).

[1] https://www.geobasisregistraties.nl/basisregistraties/docume...

svpk• 2 years ago

The USA does have zip+4 which is an extension on the zip code system and sounds like it’s about as specific as the UK one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code#ZIP+4

mynameisvlad• 2 years ago

In some cases, your zip+4 is uniquely your address, too. My townhouse was a new development and after complaining for over a year that I wasn't able to sign up for Informed Delivery, I was assigned a new unused +4.

That said, most people don't use the +4 when getting directions or the like, it's just used for postal service.

TomK32• 2 years ago

8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts. According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the problem was fixed in 2015. Yes, they forgot Gutsbezirk Reinhardswald (a quarter the size of Frankfurt/Main) which is almost all forest but has a forester hut with two people. There are even four Austrian villages that also have a German postcode in addition to their Austrian one, and a swiss one. There are even still four-digit postcodes with no five-digit update in use: Feldpost, the Germna army postal service.

NeoTar5• 2 years ago

Sorry - I was lazy and just asked ChatGPT for "how many German postal codes are there"!

rivo• 2 years ago

Some larger retail stores in Germany ask you for your postcode during checkout, presumably to learn a bit about their customer base. I don't mind telling them mine, there are about 16K people with the same postcode. But I'm pretty sure I would not tell them if I was one of the two forest rangers in Reinhardswald. (And yes, I do pay cash whenever I can.)

mywacaday2• 2 years ago

You can put Ireland at the top of the list, one postcode for every address, every house has one, every apartment has one, every building has one, even some old ruins have one.

justinclift4• 2 years ago

Sounds like the IPv6 version of postcodes. ;)

dghf• 2 years ago

Yeah, but Irish posties mean you don't actually need them. You can just put stuff like this on the envelopes:

    Your man Henderson
    That boy with the glasses
    who is doing a PhD up
    here at Queen's in Belfast. 

    Buncrana
    Co. Donegal
    Ireland

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33581277

wkat42422• 2 years ago

And in Ireland 1 postcode (eircode) for 1 address. Very handy.

Having said that, they took their time, postcodes were only introduced a few years ago!

extraduder_ire3• 2 years ago

Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes.

IIRC, we were going to implement UK style postcodes much earlier but the OCR machines that an post had were good enough to read the whole address reliably by the time they got around to considering it. So they deemed it unnecessary.

shiandow2• 2 years ago

For what it's worth in the Netherlands you have about 1 postal code per 21 addresses. Typically one code is a street or the even/odd half of the street.

sib• 2 years ago

US 9-digit postcodes ("ZIP+4") were introduced decades ago (1983?) and are publicly findable online given an address.

The US also has a full 11-digit address code that is printed (by the USPS) on mail in a bar code when you mail a piece. This should take the mailpiece to a unique address.

zeristor• 2 years ago

Case in point, going to a funeral the post code for the crematorium was for a 2km stretch of road, and going by foot I realised my folly and so had to run to make it time.

maccard2• 2 years ago

At least the Uk has the the defence that postcodes are 60 years old and that the legacy cruft that comes with that is part of life.

Meanwhile Ireland introduced Éircodes less than 10 years ago, chose an opaque format that uses a central database that you have to pay for access to for anything more than a handful of lookups, only covers homes (so you can’t give an eircode of a park, or a walk). It’s pretty much what you’d expect to be designed by a modern government.

chgs• 2 years ago

I’d expect a modern government to design something as clear and well regarded as the GDS stuff in the U.K.

I’d expect a corporation like ibm etc to design the total mess we see with any large project

jetbooster2• 2 years ago

Sadly I feel GDS is more of an outlier than the rule.

7952• 2 years ago

Postcode data is already freely available. You can even get coordinates of where the properties are. What is lacking is the actual addresses within a postcode.

wiredfool4• 2 years ago

Essentially the same deal in Ireland, with Eircodes. They were originally created as private dataset with ownership, and now you have to license access to it to use it.

Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.

The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)

NeoTar5• 2 years ago

I was impressed when I first heard about the objectives of the Eircode system, but it seems the implementation is lacking.

wiredfool4• 2 years ago

The implementation was captured by a private party.

closewith• 2 years ago

Eircodes also aren't used by An Post, to add insult to injury.

The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)

The HSE National Ambulance Service (NAS) National Emergency Operations Centres (NEOCs) have a GIS package that resolves Eircodes (and other traditional and colloquial addresses) to actual buildings and building entrances in real-time, which actually quite impressive. The directions can be transmitted to ambulances and other assets in real-time and has reduces delays in clinical services due to address confusion enormously since 2016.

So the country is capable. Eircode is what we chose as a country, not what we were limited to.

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining the data. At a time of cuts of budgets this would be a hard sell.

knallfrosch• 2 years ago

If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail.

You can pass the law, get sued and pay whatever the PAF is worth. But that's just.. fair? The govnerment spent 5 mio just for a survey concluding that it's impossible to recreate the PAF. So hundreds of millions sounds like a good deal.

scott_w6• 2 years ago

Just to be clear: UK Parliament is sovereign. If it passes a law forcibly legalising it, the privatised Royal Mail can sue the government but would need to find an international treaty obligation to win. Even then, if Parliament flagged it and said "we're ignoring this treaty in this case" then the courts are bound to the law, not treaty obligations.

If it has knock-on impacts in other areas, it's hard to say, but that's separate to the law.

keyringlight• 2 years ago

Another part to this is that there's a certain amount of cooperation between Royal Mail and councils street numbering and naming. Councils are the first authority over new streets/locations, changes like a property being split or merged (i.e. landlords converting to a property of multiple occupation and not telling them for various reasons, and then residents have issues getting post), residential/commercial, etc, and then that gets passed onto Royal Mail to update the PAF. If there's an issue with an address you've got to check with the council first, so there would be some good fit for centralization there.

pjc504• 2 years ago

Obvious solution is for the councils to start charging extremely high fees to Royal Mail for such cooperation.

pkw2017• 2 years ago

"without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail" < the Royal Mail makes about £3m/year in profits from selling the data. It would cost a lot less than hundreds of millions to bring it back into govt

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

They made about £18m in revenue though. It depends who'd be taking on the costs. If they still need to maintain the PAF (they need it themselves), then it's the revenue that would need replacing. The best solution would probably be to say that the OS will take over the maintenance (presumably funded by central government if it's going to be open data), and then Royal Mail will have access to the data and can be paid a lot less in compensation.

pbhjpbhj3• 2 years ago

Why can't it be taken for free? The system and data was created by a publicly owned body, surely Crown copyright.

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

It was (stupidly) included in the assets when Royal Mail was privatised, so it's no longer publicly owned.

bluGill5• 2 years ago

I have no idea what UK law is. In the US the data itself is public domain, but the compilation is of data is copyright. Maps commonly would intentionally have errors in to detect copying - the error is creative work and so a copyright violation to copy so if someone copies your map you can sue them for copyright violation for not just the errors but also that compilation. If you take someone else's map and then use that to create own map off of (thus finding and fixing the errors) it is legal, but that is as much work as just creating a map from scratch.

bluGill5• 2 years ago

Why can't it be taken for free?

It can be, but that has unknown long term effects. If you do this it shows everyone your government cannot be trusted and so other good ideas will not happen because people cannot trust the government. We probably do not agree on what is a good idea so I'm going to leave this vague - whatever your political side there is a good idea that is suddenly unworkable because the government cannot be trusted to hold their end of the deal.

spacebanana75• 2 years ago

The government gave up its property rights when the Royal Mail was privatised.

Taking it would be like taking back a Rolls Royce factory, BP oilfield or other formerly state owned asset.

The state could nationalise the asset in theory, but that’d involve leaving international treaties and causing foreign copyright issues.

qingcharles• 2 years ago

If only Crown Copyright worked like the US system where the output of the government was generally considered public in almost all cases.

I just checked the status of OS maps copyright and it looks like a Dumpster fire:

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/governance/crown-copyright

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

So it turns out that James O'Malley has written a post that addresses all the details of this already (of course), including several options for how it could be done affordably. https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/heres-the-plan-to-actuall...

InsomniacL2• 2 years ago

profoundly stupid mistake

Surely the PAF formed part of the sale price when privatising Royal Mail?

So if you removed it before selling (at a lower price), or you buy it outright after, is there really that much difference making it a profoundly stupid mistake?

willyt5• 2 years ago

I doubt they thought about it at that level of detail. I think it was just sold off on the cheap through a share offering with an initial offering[0] of underpriced shares? There was some kind of scheme where a private individual could buy a small number of shares before they went on general sale. Could be wrong though.

scott_w6• 2 years ago

To never have given would have simply required the government to say "this is not part of the sale."

To take it would likely require either lengthy court battles or legislation. Given the priorities of the Labour Party, the latter isn't likely to happen within the next 5 years (when they'd have to add it to their manifesto).

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

Privatisations, like most IPOs, are deliberately under-priced, and I'd very much doubt that the valuation of Royal Mail would have been affected by adding "The universal service provider must maintain the postcode address file and make it available under the Open Government Licence" to the Act

petesergeant• 2 years ago

it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail

Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

aylons• 2 years ago

Parliament absolutely can, legally. The issue is that it’ll set a bad precedent that’ll get brought up by the buyer the next time the government want to privatise something.

Great, maybe they'll be more wary of taking advantage of this kind of blunder if they can get corrected.

pxeger1• 2 years ago

it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail

Why not? Parliament has the ability to make whatever laws it wants, no?

sowbug• 2 years ago

In the US, the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution says the government cannot take private property for public use without providing just compensation. I don't know whether any similar right exists in the UK.

psd12• 2 years ago

No mistake; Hanlon's Razor does not apply; the current situation is a desired outcome.

ascorbic11• 2 years ago

No, I'm pretty sure this one was incompetence. It came at the same time that the government was going all-in with open data in other areas, and this was a really stupid omission.

cibyr• 2 years ago

Privatising Royal Mail was itself a profoundly stupid mistake.

intellix• 2 years ago

it would be nice if the postal system in the UK and anywhere in the world supported what3words to be honest

NeoTar5• 2 years ago

Replacing one proprietary database with another? Is that truly useful?

manarth2• 2 years ago

Replace one proprietary format owned by a private organisation with another proprietary format owned by a different private organisation?

duncans• 2 years ago

Plus, fraught with usability issues https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

askvictor• 2 years ago

Our company started operating in the UK recently, and some of our customers were very surprised we didn't charge for a subscription for part of our product. The idea would have no legs in Australia (our homeland) but is completely normal in the UK. So, new revenue stream for us, and some learnings about the UK culture.

lewispollard• 2 years ago

It is, but at least in my experience, we do it for the 10% discount and then immediately cancel the subscription every time we want to make a purchase.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail.

Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past.

The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is sufficient for 3rd party logistics companies like Amazon to use it for deliveries.

n4r93• 2 years ago

The idea of the UK government attempting to do such a thing fills me with the utmost dread.

DaiPlusPlus3• 2 years ago

When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.

devnullbrain2• 2 years ago

But they already have. The Post Office was still nationalised when post codes were distributed.

billpg• 2 years ago

"The government are going to reintroduce ID cards! Panic!"

left-struck• 2 years ago

To have a unique id for each house is neat but I think there are loads of situations you’d have to account for so that there isn’t any ambiguity in the assignment of unique ids. If any ambiguities exist inevitably you will have exceptions in the system which defeats the point. For example -Subdivision of a lot. -Joining of lots. -You said every house… what about two houses on the same lot? -What about apartments buildings? -What happens when one or more houses are demolished and an apartment building goes up? Etc etc

I work in manufacturing and this sounds a lot like the problem of part numbering, and let me tell you, it’s not a trivial problem and the company I work for thought it was and got it wrong.

throwway_2783142• 2 years ago

entity resolution is hard everywhere. Because the world is dynamic, but the common understanding of "entity" is a static object.

and the only perfect description of the world is the world, just like on a more trivial scale the only perfect description of what a piece of software does is to run it and see what it does.

So the best I know is to find a level of abstraction that captures enough stability to be useful, with enough flexibility to enable the classification to adopt.

In math, phylogenetic trees might be an example; think Dirichlette processes and exchangeable stochastic processes.

neo1908• 2 years ago

I know the UK gov has enjoyed causing a lot of chaos over the past few years but my god that would be on a whole other level...

incompatible2• 2 years ago

Just modify the law so that databases of postal addresses are not copyrightable.

throwway_2783142• 2 years ago

so modify the law to deprive an owner of their legal property which was given to them by the law?

Not sure that's a precedent I'd want set in a common-law country, and not sure that would hold up to judicial review under common law.

The government made a bone-headed mistake when they included the postal data as an asset in the sale. The solution is for them to admit their mistake and pay for it. It's fiat money anyway, so it doesn't really cost anything. Having them abuse their government power to cover up their mistake is not an approach I endorse.

Not that this hasn't happened before, think postal scandal or yesterday's comments on the Hawke and Curacoa https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285275

psd12• 2 years ago

I'm in favour, but that leaves RM holding a database of non-copyrightable addresses.

One way or the other, a private asset must be either nationalised or compelled to be released.

Gradual renationalisation of the rail network was in the manifesto. That's not particularly contentious, as rail franchises have fixed terms. But the manifesto is all about steadying the ship, and militant nationalisation risks spooking investors, so whether the government has any appetite to nationalise anything by fiat is questionable.

Nonetheless, there's public support for renationalisation; and, for such a low-value asset, this might be a nice test of the waters.

Aloisius• 2 years ago

I'm surprised it is copyrightable. It wouldn't be in the US.

cjs_ac2• 2 years ago

I'm unable to think of any reform in British history where 'throw everything out and start again' had successful outcomes. The British state runs on two principles: maximum effect for minimum effort, and the Ship of Theseus.

M2Ys4U• 2 years ago

Well we already have UPRNs[0] but they're a little unwieldy for human use.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Property_Reference_Numb...

KermitTheFrog• 2 years ago

Come on, “we’ve always done it that way” is a base ground of UK.

willyt5• 2 years ago

Every property already has a UPRN (unique property reference number). If you go on a council website and find a recent planning application it will be linked with this UPRN in the council's database. If I ever want to find a postcode I go to the find a planning application map and look it up there. I've not checked this in England, but it's definitely the case in Scotland. e.g. here's a random example; the entry for St Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow:

https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/case...

masfuerte• 2 years ago

You can look it up here:

https://www.findmyaddress.co.uk/

darau1• 2 years ago

I hope this happens. I can only dream of the day when my country gets something like this.

librasteve• 2 years ago

great article, this demonstrates just how bad the civil service & politicians are when it comes to negotiating contracts with private investors… or trade deals, or brexit if it comes to that

sschueller• 2 years ago

In Switzerland anyone can use the national database of addresses.

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/official-directory-of-buil...

justinclift4• 2 years ago

This doesn't seem correct:

    The problem is it’s not an easy dataset to get hold of, as it cost a lot of money.
    This is because the data has to be licensed from Royal Mail ...

It seems to be talking about the National Statistics Postcode Lookup UK, which is officially published here: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/7ec10db7-c8f4-4a40-8d82-8921...

It's been there from at least 2017, which is when I first came across it.

There are later version of the data set online too: https://open-geography-portalx-ons.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/o...

The license: https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/licences

    Under the terms of the Open Government Licence and UK Government Licensing Framework
    (launched 30 September 2010), if you wish to use or re-use ONS material, whether
    commercially or privately, you may do so freely without a specific application for a
    licence, subject to the conditions of the Open Government Licence and the Framework.
    If you are reproducing ONS content you must include a source accreditation to ONS.

If the article is talking about a different postcode address file though, then the above doesn't apply. ;)

jokethrowaway2• 2 years ago

That's not the https://www.poweredbypaf.com/product/paf/

justinclift4• 2 years ago

No worries. :)

jokethrowaway2• 2 years ago

Or we can just start using https://what3words.com/ and geolocation.

I disagree with the report, I think it's feasible with a bit of creativity.

The government also has this: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/091feb1c-aea6-45c9-82bf-768a...

We could also start with an imperfect solution, offer it as a free API (maybe even self-hosted and communicating with other services p2p) and wait for users to select or insert missing addresses, until we eventually converge to a good OSS database. If it's a single service being shared by everyone, you would need to insert your address once and then it would be part of the database forever, and you would get the right result at any other time in the future.

There is also a dirty but hard to attack option: - Start from the NAG - Build an opaque AI process which is hard to audit and that is tuned until it produces a result close to PAF but with a few extra errors - Sell the new database to the government, government open sources that - Directors get paid their share - Company get sued out of existance by RoyalMail - Government pays a few millions in 20 years, if the RoyalMail experts can prove anything in court

MSFT_Edging• 2 years ago

It blows my mind how many public services have been privatized in the UK. It just feels like they're selling off the shoes they're standing in. When their railways got privatized, the service didn't improve, the price just ballooned.

Even in the states, the USPS has resisted privatization this far. For the love of god I hope it continues to. Protect our boys n girls in blue and tell your congressman you want postal banking.

normangray4• 2 years ago

Yup. The Post Office, the railways, the water system, for heavens' sake!

The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive things about privatisation, as part of the process of Being Sensible About The Economy (there is a much longer alternative version of this comment!).

The US -- the world temple of capitalism -- seems to be oddly principled (viewed from outside) about keeping certain things such as the postal service, or USGS, as part of the service to the public realm.

The one service probably immune from privatisation is the Health Service. It's only the most frothing-at-the-mouth right-wingers, the provocateurs just one step away from a rabies injection, who'd even admit out loud to a desire to do that. A politician talking about privatising the NHS would I think be pretty much equivalent to a US libertarian politician talking about privatising the armed forces.

(there's a longer version of that comment, as well...)

johneth• 2 years ago

Minor pedantic correction:

The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.

rswail• 2 years ago

The USPS is a constitutional creation. That's why it can't be privatized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause

alexchamberlain2• 2 years ago

To be clear, is the National Address Gazetteer open? As far as I can tell, it isn't, but I don't know if that's because they're trying to obfuscate it.

nickdothutton• 2 years ago

Recent history teaches that the Post Office should be the last company on earth to be anywhere near creating a nationally important IT system. Their technology team have been useless for decades.

dan-robertson• 2 years ago

The PAF is maintained by Royal Mail, a different company from the Post Office.

frereubu• 2 years ago

I've used https://postcodes.io/ on a number of projects.

There's information about it here - https://postcodes.io/about - which doesn't fully answer where the data comes from, although it mentions OS, so I presume it's based on the OS AddressBase product?

I also wonder how complete it is now, although the sites we've built haven't had any issues as far as I'm aware.

gorgoiler• 2 years ago

As the tenant, once, of a new build home in the UK it’s not just the file that’s important: it’s the channels to patch the file too.

I spent almost a year having to enter my address manually because the postcode DB — or whatever old version pets.com, cameras.com, and looroll.com had — lagged behind the reality of my infill bungalow for seemingly forever. I’m 8A godamnit, not 8. (Thank you Mrs. No8 for accepting my packages throughout those dark months btw.)

It’s just like tzdata. A precious resource not just because it compiles the history of geopolitical wallclock settings, but also because it is meticulously updated, on time and on budget.

It’s all very well liberating PAF.v2024_08finalfinal_v3_final.doc, but who is also going to keep it up to date?

I’m not a hater, just a realist. TFA is spot on: we’ll never be able out compete with or recreate or leak a sufficient version of the PAF. It, and it’s entire infrastructure, needs to be wrested into public hands ASAP. And we should be prepared to fund the updates.

sahmeepee5• 2 years ago

I've been a consumer of the PAF for many years through work.

In the bad old days (10 years ago), when we got it from a well known credit check company, it came on CDs. We then moved to "automatic" updates via their rubbish, buggy software to our on-premise install. That wasn't such a huge upgrade, because as soon as you looked away from that software it would stop working.

Now we pay a different, altogether better company to access it via a web service. I would expect that the speed of updates through to websites is now mostly as good as the frequency of PAF releases. Unless this has changed recently, the PAF isn't created by Royal Mail itself, it's outsourced to a company called AFD based on the Isle of Man.

My only complaint with the service we get now is that the value is quite poor - our total cost is somewhere around 30p per lookup on average for addresses which I suspect are rarely even used in our line of work.

mjevans• 2 years ago

They could also link tax filings and a Plus Code for physical location: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://github.com/google/open-location-code

gregsadetsky• 2 years ago

Canada is in the same spot with the postal code data being for sale only.

Relatedly and famously, Canada Post sued [0] geocoder.ca [1] years ago because it made available a crowdsourced database of postal codes...

Years later, the case was settled [2] but yeah. You still have to pay for the "real" data.

[0] https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2012/04/canada-post-geocoder-sui...

[1] https://geocoder.ca/

[2] https://geocoder.ca/?sued=1 (nice url...)

ss64• 2 years ago

The PAF file only returns a 9% profit (based on a 2009 report) https://web.archive.org/web/20090324084021/http://www.psc.go...

kwhitefoot2• 2 years ago

Why bother paying attention to all this legal mumbo-jumbo?

Just have someone exfiltrate the file and post it on Anna's Archive. Or extract them from Open Street Map.

Just bypass the Royal Mail altogether.

Or just ignore the postcodes. For most private individuals an ordinary street address works perfectly well and is needed anyway even if the postcode is provided.

sahmeepee5• 2 years ago

It's mostly used to get clean address data on form inputs. The user thinks they are being given an easier way to enter their address, but really it's so that the PAF can be used to ensure the address lines are used consistently and there are no typos or other rubbish. If the person has to pick their address from a list after entering the post code it's also a data input check of sorts.

We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

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