So the government has decided that they will privatise or sell off the Royal Mail. Not much surprise there, the previous government would have done the same except it couldn’t face off the unions over this one.
I can’t see a long term future for delivering bits of paper to households across the country, I wonder if t wouldn’t be cheaper to give everyone a broadband connected network printer and then work out a way to print documents etc in their homes rather than shunting them round the country. If it was really neat perhaps I could have a vaporise button for the junk that seems to slip past the Mailing Preference Service.
In this sell off process it would be great if St Vincent could be persuaded to somehow hold onto PAF or at least to ensure that as part of the sale agreement the Royal Mail is obliged to make the full PAF freely available to all for “use, re-use and commercial exploitation” perhaps that could be one of the quid pro quo’s for the inevitable end of the Universal Service Obligation.
That would certainly be a red letter day for the Open Data community.
One thought on “Let’s hope Vince remembers to liberate PAF when he flogs off Royal Mail”
Perhaps the maintenance of the postcode list could be undertaken as part of the maintenance of a national spatial addressing gazetteer super dataset.
With postal addresses a subset of the entire gazetteer? Anyway just a thought, but probably a bit to sensible