🚨 The House of Lords could liberate the Postcode Address File if they back this amendment 🚨

Time to apply some Peer pressure

Sorry everyone, I’m writing about postcodes again – but holy hell, this is some potentially exciting news!

Newbies read this: Here’s the PAF backstory you need (PAF veterans can skip this bit)

I know what you’re thinking: “Huh? Postcodes?”

The Postcode Address File (PAF) is the big database of every postal address in the UK. It’s not personal data – literally just the address of every building. It’s a critical public dataset for the digital age, and is used every time you buy something online or look up an address.

But what’s weird is that at the moment is this data is locked away. It is Royal Mail which privately owns and maintains the dataset – and charge hefty fees if you want to access it.

This means that if you’ve got an idea for a cool app, business or project that uses address data to do something clever, then you will need to pay Royal Mail upwards of £6000 every single year for the privilege.

In my view, these licensing fees amount to a tax on innovation, and they are holding back economic growth and productivity. But luckily, there is a solution: We could liberate the Postcode Address File, and open it up so that anyone can download it and build cool stuff with it for free.

It’s something lots of civic-minded nerds working in and around government have wanted for a very long time. And if you read on – it turns out that soon we might actually have an opportunity to make it happen.

But if you’d like some further reading first:

• A longer version of the case for freeing the PAF.

• A deep-dive into the actual mechanics of how the government could reform address data.

• The story of how I – somehow – memed my way into a meeting with Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow Business Secretary, to discuss the importance of the PAF.

How the Lords can free the PAF

Since I jumped on the PAF bandwagon and started banging on about it a couple of years ago, I’ve been working with three of the country’s foremost experts in the technical and policy ins-and-outs of the PAF: Peter Wells, Anna Powell-Smith, and Hadley Beeman.

I say “working with” – what I mean is that I’m basically free-riding on their years of hard work and, as regular readers will know, have turned myself into a loudmouth on the issue. But really I’m basically the cuddly toy mascot on their eminently qualified University Challenge team.

In any case, after recent discussions with some PAF-curious politicians, Peter and Anna realised that the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill that is currently working its way through Parliament presents a huge opportunity to finally liberate the PAF.

The Bill has already passed through the Commons and is currently at the Committee stage in the Lords – which puts it in the perfect place to receive an amendment.

And I’m delighted to say that working with Anna and Peter, Lord Clement-Jones, the LibDem Digital Economy spokesperson in the House of Lords, has tabled an amendment that would, in effect, free the Postcode Address File!

Here’s the text of the amendment in full:

After Clause 142

insert the following new Clause—

“Open address file

(1) The Secretary of State must regularly publish a list of UK addresses as open data to an approved data standard.

(2) “Regularly publish” means on at least a monthly basis.

(3) “UK addresses” means an authoritative list of UK address data as maintained by local authorities including, but not limited to —

(a)building number, name and street address,

(b)geographic coordinates, and

(c)a unique identifier.

(4) “Open data” means data under a licence whereby any person can freely access, use, modify, and share the data for any purpose, subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness.

(5) “Approved data standard” means such written standards, containing technical specifications or other requirements in relation to the data, or in relation to providing or processing the data, as may be published by an appropriate authority from time to time.”

Member's explanatory statement

This amendment would require a list of UK addresses to be made freely available for reuse. Making this data freely available could support UK businesses, consumers and public services.

My understanding on the text of the amendment is that the way it works is that it is not prescriptive of the precise mechanics by which the PAF be freed – that would be for the government to decide. But what this does do is create a legal obligation that commits the government to releasing regularly updated address data for free, for anyone to use and build on. It will force the government to liberate the Postcode Address File!

And no, I can’t quite believe this amendment is actually being tabled either. But let’s not get too excited just yet.

Now that the amendment has been proposed, it will need to be debated and voted on by the whole House of Lords to get included in the bill. And if it is accepted, the bill then has several further stages to go through: Report stage, and the Third Reading in the Lords, before heading back to the Commons for a final vote to see if MPs also accept the amendments. But if they do and the final bill passes… The PAF will be free!

Now YOU can help free the PAF!

Now here’s the most important part: We need you to help the amendment to pass. So if you care – even just a little bit – about the need for open UK address data, now is the time to act!

Obviously Peers are not MPs with constituents, but they are also thoughtful legislators who will listen to people who contact them. I know I’ve got a surprisingly well connected audience – I bet some of you are fancy enough to know members of the House of Lords or the people in their orbit.

So now is the time to petition them! Email! Tweet! Even make a call! And urge them to back this amendment. Whatever their party, we want peers to back the amendment, so that we can ensure that it passes through to the next stage.

This could be our moment! If you believe, like I do, that the Postcode Address File should be free, it’s time to make some noise!

All of my PAF-related content is free to read, so subscribe now (for free) to stay updated as this amendment (hopefully) moves through Parliament. Plus you’ll get my other politics, policy, media, tech and transport takes too. What more could you want?