Last week we were alarmed – and then intrigued – when an enquirer told us that her postcode was not recognised in our system. She explained that it was a new postcode, and we did some delving.
Apparently, Royal Mail has allocated c.2 million postcodes to cover c.30 million addresses in the UK. So that’s a mean of c.15 addresses per postcode, but delivery points within a postcode range from a single property to over 100. Because addresses are continually changing – particularly where there are new roads and developments – several thousand postcodes are changed, added or deleted every year. Consequently it’s something of a challenge to keep postcode related software up to date. Happily, Royal Mail maintains its PAF (Postal Address File®) which it quite reasonably claims to be the UK’s most up-to-date address database. www.poweredbypaf.com
Where To Sell uses Google as data source; for well established postcodes this has proved very fast and problem free but it does mean that we rely on Google to be quick off the mark in accessing PAF – and historically there have been some comments about delays in updating their database. We gather that the system is now being improved, so we hope that “unknown postcode” will become a very rare occurrence.
