No open national address file: PAF remains a proprietary Royal Mail asset

The Postcode Address File and its 32.1 million delivery addresses went private with Royal Mail in 2013, and in 2025 Royal Mail successfully defended its database rights in court. Anyone needing address data pays layered licence fees under complex IP restrictions. The partial substitutes fall short. The ONS Postcode Directory gives postcode centroids rather than addresses, Ordnance Survey opened UPRN identifiers in 2020 without the addresses themselves, and OpenStreetMap coverage is incomplete. The ODI-incubated Open Addresses project died in 2015 for lack of legal access. The Centre for Public Data's Open Address File UK campaign and a House of Lords proposal have put the issue back on the agenda, including a request that Ofcom review PAF licensing.

Address lookup works as a tax on every delivery firm, emergency service, council and startup in the country. Denmark, France and the Netherlands opened their address files and documented net economic gains. The UK re-buys its own geography millions of times over.

Government acquisition or mandated open licensing of the PAF, with an Ofcom review of its terms as the first step. The alternative is an openly licensed national address register built from councils' AddressBase source data and published through the National Data Library.

// State-led: Instrument: Ofcom PAF review, government acquisition, or National Data Library register; AddressBase licensing blocks outside builds.

The drag on every delivery firm and emergency service is large, and Royal Mail's 2025 court win makes acquisition or mandated opening a slow, contested lift.