London: 9 December 2009

The UK Government plans to give free access to postcode data from 2010. This announcement is part of the UK Smarter Government Strategy commitment to make more use of technology and the web to transform official services. The Government strategy released earlier this week outlined plans to radically open up public data as well as to start consulting on making Ordnance Survey mapping and postcode data available for re-use by April 2010. Currently, the postcode data is only available at substantial cost.

The BBC News channel story, ‘Postcode data to be free in 2010’, makes the following comments in these excerpts (full story online):

“… As part of this push, the government said it would start "consulting on making Ordnance Survey mapping and postcode datasets available for free reuse from April 2010."

A spokesman for the Ordnance Survey said the consultation would begin before Christmas 2009.

"It's a chance for anyone who has views on what can be given away to make those views known," he said.

"It's more a question of how not if," he said. "It's something that's going to be happening."

The dataset that is likely to be freed is that which ties postcodes to geographic locations. Many more commercial organisations use the Postcode Address File (PAF) that ties post codes to addresses. Currently access to either data set incurs a charge.

In October 2009 the Royal Mail took legal action that cut off the access many websites had to such data.

Sites that used the postcode feed included Job Centre Pro Plus, HealthWare (locates nearby pharmacies and hospitals), Planning alerts.com (monitors planning applications), Straight Choice (finds out who sent political leaflets).

Services online Harry Metcalfe, who helped sites get at postcode data, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the decision to open up the OS data sets. "If the right data is released in the right way, this will be a positive development," he said. …”

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