MPs: selling off UK’s postcode database with Royal Mail was “a mistake”
A committee of Britain’s House of Commons has criticised the government for including Royal Mail’s national database of addresses within the company’s privatisation.
The Public Accounts Committee issued a report on access to data today in which it said the Postcode Address File (PAF) should have been retained as a public data set, a “national asset, available free to all, for the benefit of the public and the widest benefit of the UK economy”.
The MPs said evidence in its review cast doubt on the government’s and Royal Mail’s assurances that the PAF will continue to be made available to small businesses following the company’s stock market flotation last October.
The Committee said disposing of the PAF as part of efforts to boost Royal Mail’s share price would impede economic innovation and growth in the UK.
“This was an unacceptable and unnecessary consequence of privatisation, and is at odds with the Minister’s general argument that open data should not be “swallowed up… by big global companies,” the MPs concluded.
“The sale of the PAF with the Royal Mail was a mistake. The Government must never make a similar mistake. Public access to public sector data must never be sold or given away again.”
In July 2013 Royal Mail announced that its PAF would be available free for independent micro-businesses for one year – businesses under £2m annual turnover. MPs were told by open data company FlyingBinary that the offer of a year’s free access was “no help” considering the months it could take bringing a product to market reliant on PAF data.
Jacqui Tayor, the FlyingBinary CEO, told MPs that for small businesses there was “no guarantee” on future prices of PAF data following Royal Mail’s privatisation.
Ministers told the Committee that the government’s decision was that the PAF was an “integral part” of Royal Mail. Business minister Michael Fallon said: “it is a fundamental operating asset on which the business depends. It is the Royal Mail that collects the data and makes sure it is up to date.
“Royal Mail incurs considerable costs in collecting and maintaining this data and keeping it up to date. It is only reasonable that they should be able to recover some of those costs from the companies that use this data.”
But MPs said information from the Danish Government suggested that when the Danes issued their public address file as open data, the estimated return was up to 40 times more than the costs involved in making the data set accessible to the public.
