We received a petition asking:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to release the address and postal code data held within the Royal Mail’s PAF to the public.”
Details of Petition:
“The PAF is a database which contains the address and postcode of every address in the UK. While it contains other data useful to the Royal Mail, the addresses and postcodes are used by every individual and business and will be for the foreseeable future. The Royal Mail licenses the PAF to others for a fee. In the web industry, developers of e-commerce site investigate the use of the PAF as a way of reducing the risk of misdelivered packages and streamlining purchasing. Most sites do not use the PAF because the Royal Mail’s licensing terms are both restrictive and expensive. The Government should urgently review the ownership of the PAF, in the interests of stimulating innovation and growth, and ensure that it is licensed freely to all parties who require it. While this would result in a drop of revenues to this part of the Royal Mail, the reduction in costs of administering licensing should offset this and pave the way for a more open approach to maintenance of the database.”
· Read the petition
· Petitions homepage
Read the Government’s response
The Postcode Address File (PAF) dataset is an electronic database containing around 29 million addresses in the UK. The PAF is owned and managed by Royal Mail. Royal Mail developed the PAF with the primary purpose to aid the efficient delivery of mail, though over the years the PAF has come to be used for a number of purposes other than that for which it was designed and established.
Many organisations, including new postal operators, banks, insurance companies and others offering to deliver goods to your door, use the information held on the database. The PAF is also used in other business processes, including mailing list “cleaning”, anti-fraud activities and various customer services.
It would be very time-consuming and costly for anyone to try to replicate the list, so Royal Mail licenses PAF data, for a fee, allowing others to use it. Under Section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000, Royal Mail must maintain the PAF and make it available to any person who wishes to use it on “such terms as are reasonable”. This requirement is replicated as a condition of Royal Mail’s licence.
Provision exists for Royal Mail to recover a reasonable charge for the supply of PAF. However it must not impose any term or condition other than reasonable restrictions to safeguard its intellectual property rights (IPR), and to ensure that the PAF and its updates are used to support effective addressing.
Postcomm, the independent postal regulator, monitors general access to the PAF to ensure that the management of the PAF does not present a barrier to the development of effective competition in the postal market and that it is structured in the best way to further the interests of postal users.
Postcomm took all of the diverse uses of the PAF into account in reviewing how the PAF is managed under a public consultation which started in 2006 and finished in 2007. Following the consultation, Postcomm announced new safeguards for the management of the address information held in the PAF with the aim of making sure that the PAF is maintained properly and made available on fair and reasonable terms. The findings of the consultation can be found on Postcomm’s website (www.psc.gov.uk).
The question of ownership was not directly posed in the 2006 consultation, but the issue did generate responses that were considered by the regulator. In its 2007 decision following the consultation on the management of the PAF, Postcomm concluded that it did not consider that a change in ownership of PAF would be proportionate and that such change would not achieve anything beyond the recommended safeguards that emerged from the 2006 consultation.
PAF users (or any stakeholder) can complain to Postcomm if it feels that Royal Mail is not complying with the terms of section 116 of the PSA 2000 or Condition 22 of its licence. Postcomm would then consider the merits of any such complaints in the light of its statutory duties.
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