I love postcodes. Nearly everyone knows theirs, they cover most locations of interest, and their dozen-household level of granularity is a geographic sweet spot. They should be seen as a massive global competitive advantage for UK PLC.
So I'm delighted to see the Royal Mail doing the right thing, and allowing people entering the ShowUsABetterWay.com government data re-use competition to have access to the full postcode PAF dataset.
Well done, Royal Mail. As these things go, it's both a brave and sensible move.
Full disclosure: I'm on secondment to the Cabinet Office, helping their Power of Information Taskforce, for whom I've helped set up ShowUsABetterWay.com
