The Government’s data tsar is risking the wrath of Royal Mail – as well as some established businesses in the data industry – by demanding that the postcode address file (PAF) is made available free of charge to all firms.
The move will in one fell swoop wipe out £26m from Royal Mail’s revenues and hit firms like Experian QAS and Postcode Anywhere, which charge a premium for added-value services that rely heavily on PAF data.
Many data bureaux are likely to welcome an end to charges, however, and to what one chief described as “the ludicrously complicated PAF licences”.
But there are serious concerns about how often a free address database would be updated. Currently Royal Mail’s 65,000 postmen and women capture thousands of address changes every day and the company offers daily, monthly and quarterly updates.
The call for free access is the brainchild of Heather Savory, chair of the Open Data User Group, who was appointed by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. She claims that it will benefit businesses which want to use accurate addressing but find PAF fees too much of a burden.
“This is data which comes from publicly funded, publicly owned bodies. Royal Mail is very opaque about the costs and profits of keeping PAF up to date, but we’re pretty sure they could afford to make it free,” she said.
Whether the Treasury, which is plotting a part-privatisation of the postal operator will agree is a moot point. According to Royal Mail’s own records, PAF brings in about £26m in licensing revenue every year, but costs £24m to run – a figure many in the industry dispute.
In a paper to be published tomorrow (Thursday), the ODUG argues that PAF should be released along with the Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase Plus database and the National Street Gazetteer (NAG). Together they would make a comprehensive national address dataset.
But the move will not automatically translate into mass adoption across the board, according to Postcode Anywhere chief executive Guy Mucklow. He said: “The PAF database is provided in eight separate files, it has to be normalised and assembled for it to make sense and then technology needs to be applied to enable the information to be easily searched and then kept up-to-date.
“While I would agree that small businesses benefit from having access to the latest addressing details, to suggest they are being priced out of getting their hands on such information is wide of the mark.”
And one data bureau chief added: “If Royal Mail is forced to give PAF data away there will be concerns about how up to date the file will remain. After all, why would Royal Mail bother with regular updates if it won’t be receiving any income from it?”
The quality fears expressed are unfounded. Royal Mail have a statutory responsibility to maintain PAF as part of their universal service obligation. Plus they need it themselves in order to deliver the mail 🙂
Raw PAF is a pain to work with, but that is an argument in favour of making it open data not keeping it locked behind complex licensing. Businesses like postcode anywhere earn their keep out of the skills of their team at doing the smart data manipulation and processing, that won’t change whether the data is open or not, but it will introduce more competition which is a good thing for UK PLC.
I managed the PAF in the 1980’s we didn’t need information from postmen it all came from local authorities the Address management centre claims about this need is spurious.
Why would RM keep PAF up to date, well PAF is needed to realise the investment in mechanisation so RM needs PAF irrespective of income. There are some evidence that OCR has now made the actual postcode irrelevant. This can only ever be partially true since the removal of counties from postal addresses requires postcodes to resolve all ambiguous streets and localities including the whole of London. So RM require a good PAF .