Royal Mail Postcode File
The Postcode Address File (PAF) is a database that contains all known 'Delivery Points' and postcodes in the United Kingdom. The PAF is a collection of over 29 million Royal Mail postal addresses and 1.8 million postcodes.[1] It is available in a variety of formats including FTP download and compact disc, and was previously available as Digital Audio Tape. As owner of the PAF, Royal Mail is required by section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000 to maintain the data and make it available on reasonable terms. A charge is made for lookup services or wholesale supply of PAF data. Charges are regulated by Ofcom. It includes Small User Residential, Small User Organisation and Large User Organisation details. There have been requests as part of the Open Data campaign for the PAF to be released by the government free of charge.[2]
The Royal Mail Postcodes file is available as a Comma Separated Variable (CSV) text based file and updates are included in the licence fee. Licence Options Postcodes Explained Full Postcode The Full Postcode is the Postcode as most people would generally know and love it as written on envelopes for mailing purposes.
Usage[edit]
The 'delivery points' held on the PAF are routing instructions used by Royal Mail staff to sort and deliver mail quickly and accurately. Elements of the address, including the post town and postcode, are occasionally subject to change, reflecting the operational structure of the postal delivery system. Each address is therefore not necessarily a geographically accurate description of where a property is located.[3] Buildings which contain internal flats or businesses but have only one external front door will only have those internal elements recorded in PAF if the Royal Mail have direct access to them using a key or fob.
File structure[edit]
| Element | Field name | Description | Max length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organisation | Organisation Name | 60 | |
| Department Name | 60 | ||
| Premises | Sub Building Name | 30 | |
| Building Name | 50 | ||
| Building Number | 4 | ||
| Thoroughfare | Dependent Thoroughfare Name | 60 | |
| Dependent Thoroughfare Descriptor | 20 | ||
| Thoroughfare Name | Street[4] | 60 | |
| Thoroughfare Descriptor | 20 | ||
| Locality | Double Dependent Locality | Small villages[4] | 35 |
| Dependent Locality | 35 | ||
| Post town | 30 | ||
| Postcode | Postcode | 7 | |
| PO Box | PO Box | 6 |
Some versions of the PAF also contain the 'Delivery Point Suffix (DPS)' used in CBC (Customer Bar Code). Alternatively the DPS can be found using Royal Mail's 'Postcode Information File (PIF)' .[5]
Licensing[edit]
The PAF licence sets out what PAF can be used for. Licensing options include internal and external use and also more advanced options such as bureau services and broker groups.
An example of typical internal use is an employee of a licensed call centre who uses a PAF-based solution to look up and verify customer addresses. The PAF data is only being used within the licensed end-user and is not passed on to any other legal entity.
On the other hand, an example of external use would be a company which provides a PAF-based address look-up on their customer facing website for their own customers to use when they order goods or services.
Royal Mail provide licensing advice on their website.
Public Sector Licence[edit]
Public Sector Organisations can now apply to use PAF under the Public Sector Licence Use Terms. The Public Sector Licence will be fully implemented on 1 April 2015.
Royal Mail has worked along with the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) & the Scottish Government to develop the Public Sector Licence. The Public Sector Licence is being centrally paid for by these organisations so individual public sector organisations will no longer need to return PAF licence fees to Royal Mail.
The eligible public sector organisations will be able to use PAF within their organisation and on their website for non-commercial purposes. In addition, licensed public sector organisations will be able to share data with other licensed organisations and work collaboratively on. Powered By Paf. Royal Mail Group Ltd. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
|dead-url= (help)|dead-url= (help)|dead-url= (help)|dead-url= (help)External links[edit]
- Technical guide to using the PAF file – A document that explains the PAF file in some detail.
Royal Mail should make its paid-for postcode address file (PAF) listing the locations of 29m residences available for free, says the Open Data User Group, whose chair was appointed by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.
Heather Savory, who chairs the ODUG, told the Guardian that freeing up the data would bring benefits to businesses that want to use accurate addressing but find the cost and licensing regime imposed by the Royal Mail on PAF licensees too onerous.
She said that PAF should be regarded as 'core reference data' for businesses whose broader availability would have wide-ranging implications and benefits for the economy and society – while redressing an imbalance in its collection and use.
'This is data which comes from publicly funded, publicly owned bodies,' she told the Guardian. 'The 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.'
There is a precedent for such a freeing-up of government business-owned data: large amounts of map data belonging to Ordnance Survey, the government-owned trading fund which produces the UK's definitive maps, have been released under a similar licence since April 2010.
As part of that initiative, driven by web architect Sir Tim Berners-Lee – and at the urging of the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign – the Royal Mail also released its database which maps the UK's 1.8m postcodes to geolocations for free use. Royal Mail previously imposed charges for use of the postcode location file.
However, the PAF contains for more detailed information than the postcode location file. Where that only gives the location corresponding roughly to the centre of a postcode – each of which covers between 1 and 100 addresses, with an average of 15 – the PAF also gives the names of the residences.
ODUG quotes Royal Mail figures showing that PAF brings in about £26m in licensing revenue every year, but costs about £24m to run. Savory suggests that a substantial part of those costs lies in administration over the licences for PAF, which is sold in multiple forms and for which Royal Mail operates a stringent intellectual property regime.
In a paper to be published on 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 the three databases comprise the elements of the long sought-for national address dataset. While the PAF contains the names of residences to which post can be delivered, there are many more – such as graveyards and other uninhabited locations – in the OS's AddressBase collection.
The UK has never had a single address dataset – apart from the one that was created for the most recent census, but was then immediately destroyed because it was only allowed to be used for that one purpose.
The ODUG's radical call would make a huge amount of formerly commercially-charged information which generated revenues of about £26m annually for Royal Mail available under an 'Open Government Licence' – letting businesses use it for free. The ODUG argues that any loss in revenues for the Royal Mail would be more than made up by the revenues generated for businesses which would not have to go through onerous licensing procedures to use PAF.
Royalmail Postal Code Finnder
Dr Rufus Pollock, the founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, said making address data easily available was essential: 'Every shopping site and delivery service needs up-to-date information of this kind – not only to use on its own but to combine with other sources of data. The lack of open information here is an often invisible barrier to innovation and efficiency. This is not just about the private sector – the government itself lacks a central national address register which hampers the delivery services and benefits to the public. It is high time this national resource funded by the taxpayer is made openly and freely available.'
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Royal Mail Postcode Enquiry
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