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We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

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Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#221

Post by inphus0rian »

Propelloni wrote: post #133
gabesullice wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

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 le…

apartments in france often (if not always) do not have unit numbers. i always thought it is to preserve anonymity.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#222

Post by ascorbic »

InsomniacL wrote: post #182
ascorbic wrote: post #60

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 th…

> 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?

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

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#223

Post by taejo »

wongarsu wrote: post #193
myriadoptimum wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on where you are in France (especially places with lots of housing stock being older buildings), it's common (if not the norm) for there to be no unit numbers and to direct people to apartments by floor number / door position relative to stairwell.

That doesn't surprise me, same thing in Germany. However having multiple buildings with the same house number (without distinguishing letters) sounds like the much worse oversight here

Though at least in Berlin it's pretty common for multi-family houses to have a separate wing (Seitenflügel) or rear house (Hinterhaus) that are reached by entering the street door of the front house (Vorderhaus) and then exiting through a door behind the staircase into a courtyard before entering the second building, and at least in some cases each building has its own set of mailboxes, all with the same address.

I regularly have the problem that deliverers don't read my delivery note and don't listen to what I say on the intercom, and go all the way to the top of the front house before realising I'm in a different building altogether.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#224

Post by growse »

cameldrv wrote: post #213
Propelloni wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

I don’t know what’s usual in France, but it’s usual in Germany for apartments to not have numbers. You have to put your name on your mailbox, and there’s no way to address something to someone who doesn’t live in the apartment. If you’re filling out government forms, you sometimes have to put in something like “third floor left side” so they know where you actually live.

Same in Iceland I think. No name on the door? No mail.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#225

Post by jorams »

DonHopkins wrote: post #162
Muromec wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

In the PDOK viewer linked above you can enable the "Adressen" layer[1] and it will show markers on everything that has an address. Everything that has an address has a postal code, which is listed in the details if you click the address. (There might be an exception with an address but no postal code somewhere, I'm not sure, but not here.)

[1]: https://app.pdok.nl/viewer/#x=124175.54&y=471068.96&z=11.290...

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#226

Post by rswail »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #168

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 b…

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

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

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#227

Post by rivo »

TomK32 wrote: post #135
NeoTar wrote: post #48

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…

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 prob…

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.)

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#228

Post by BobaFloutist »

Propelloni wrote: post #133
gabesullice wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buil…

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 le…

Yeah wait how is it the BAN's fault that you don't have unit numbers, that's like complaining that you never receive your letters "just because" your house just fully doesn't have any street address and the post office needs to figure it out better without any involvement on your part.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#229

Post by jameshart »

HPsquared wrote: post #126
mjlee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save some maths during a crisis - 3 is ~100m, 4 is ~10m.

Lat/long coordinates and metres are actually linked quite closely: the metre was originally defined as "the arc from equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km". That is, 90 degrees is 10,000 km.

And if the French had had their way, we’d use grads not degrees and latitude would instead be 100 grads per 10,000km, so each grad of latitude would be 100km.

That kind of sanity was, of course, unacceptable to the rest of the world.

Re: We need to liberate the Postcode Address File

#230

Post by amiga386 »

willyt wrote: post #198
pjc50 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of it is Reaganism, via Thatcher. Probably dates from the Winter of Discontent. It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do not make the government look good here. On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather tha…

'The Post Office' is a private company. Wasn't the Horizon system implemented after privatisation?

No. The Post Office is not a private company, it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder.

It was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a public limited company in 2000.

Furthermore:

- Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd which runs the post office branches. This is the company that uses Horizon (since 1999)

- Royal Mail delivers mail to addresses, and owns the Postcode Address File. Royal Mail was separated from the Post Office and privatised in 2013. It has never used Horizon.

Horizon is an EFTPOS/accounting system, nothing to do with mail delivery. It was introduced to the Post Office in 1999 after Fujitsu/ICL were originally commissioned by government to build an accounting system for the Benefits Agency, and it was so awful and buggy the Benefits Agency rejected it, so the government asked them to retool it for the Post Office.

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