According to information disclosed during the 2006 consultation, the PAF costs about £16m a year to maintain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcode_Address_File#Costs_and_public_availability
I'm not sure how they could possibly spend that kind of money on it, but if you factor out the costs of commercial licensing, hiring lawyers to go after ErnstMarples, some ficticious internal billing, and possibly a suspiciously inflated software contract, maybe it could be divided by 2. Personally, I don't know how they could spend more than £1million on its administration, or how its costs can be separated out from the general administration of the post office. But that's not where are argument should be. It seems to me that the Department of Transport is perfectly happy with spending multi-millions on by-pass schemes and other road infrastructure, which they then give us free access to. No question. They even maintain the roads professionally at no cost to the users and hire lots of police to keep them clear and free flowing. If we could we make the case that a universal use of the postcode database would reduce the travel use so that they wouldn't have to build so many roads, maybe the DoT will pay for it. The story even works anecdotally. My sister phoned round for some quotes on double-glasing for her house. One of the workmen drove down from Norwich to Cambridge to do it. If every business directory used a combined postcode+travel planner and sorted the records according to travel distance to your home, this would not have happened. There must be thousands of good double-glasing companies between Cambridge and Norwich. ** The government should encourage the use of PAF enabled technology for exactly the same reasons that the post office encourages us to put post-codes on our letters -- because it is more efficient, saves them money, and makes all of us happier. Julian. On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Paul Waring <[email protected]> wrote: > paul perrin wrote: >> I am primarily interested in the data being freely available for >> personal, non-commercial use (let the commercial users pay for live >> systems) is that what others are after? or are you looking for taxpayer >> funding for all use? or what? > > Why charge for commercial users? That means you'd have to have billing > systems, licence enforcement etc. which just adds to the cost of running > the service. Free for everyone is much simpler and cheaper to > administrate, though if the RM still wanted to generate some revenue it > could offer consultancy services for businesses which wanted help > integrating PAF, using it for exotic services, pre-sorting mail etc. > > If the commercial users make lots of money out of the PAF being free, > the government (which owns RM anyway) will recoup some of that in > corporation tax, for which there is an existing system for collecting > revenue. > > Paul > > -- > Paul Waring > http://www.pwaring.com > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
