UK counties to be axed from postal addresses?

Counties are to be removed from postal addresses on letters and parcels in the UK, reports The Daily Telegraph. The article continues:

By 2016, the Royal Mail is likely to have deleted county names from the official Postcode Address File that is used by thousands of private companies and public bodies.

They are being removed because the postal service now only needs the house number, street name and the postcode.

It means the letters and parcels people receive from companies or official bodies will no longer feature the county name in their postal address.

Householders will officially also no longer have to write the county when sending a letter, although this has already been the case in practice for several years.

Royal Mail will start by removing more than 100 obsolete postal county names like Sussex, Gwynned, Cleveland and Avon from its official address database from 2013.

Forty-eight obsolete county names in England will be deleted. A further 54 will go in Scotland, eight in Wales and six in Northern Ireland.

Three years after that, all current county names are expected to be removed because they are no longer needed to ensure a letter is delivered to a correct postal address.

Some 28m residential and businesses addresses for every home and business in the country are listed on Royal Mail’s official Postcode Address File.

Tens of thousands of companies, public bodies and Government departments pay an annual licence fee to access it for addresses to send out letters and packages, or for market research.

Ian Beesley, the chairman of the board which advises Royal Mail on running the database, told The Daily Telegraph: “For good addressing, the thing to do is to get the number of the street right and then the postcode right on a separate line at the bottom.”

In postal terms, the use of the name of a county in an address was an unnecessary “vanity attachment”. He said: “Once it is not longer necessary for business and administrative purposes then it becomes a kind of vanity attachment.”

Some people may be upset when the names of centuries-old counties stopped being used in addresses.

Beesley admitted: “People do get very worked up about it and one has to recognise it. It is in our history and our heritage. I want to say I was born in Lancashire, not in ‘M20’.

“People will still use counties, cricket teams will still be called by counties, but it will be no different from now in that for postal purposes you don’t need it,

“If you are going to withdraw it you have got to start preparing the market for that, you can’t do it suddenly.”

Counties have not been formally required when sending a letter since 1996 when Royal Mail’s new automated technology was able to recognise postcodes in sorting offices.

However Royal Mail continued to list counties on its database because of requests from companies, which used the information to organise sales forces and delivery networks.

The process to cull the counties from the database started in May when Postcomm, the postal regulator, asked Royal Mail “to discontinue provision of” defunct county names “at the earliest opportunity”.

Royal Mail said the process was now likely to start after 2013 because Government departments, companies and postal operators had “raised concerned at the disruption to their services that the immediate deletion of this data would bring”.

A spokesman said no decision had yet been taken to remove all counties from the database.