Why Postcodes will provide joined-up Government

I had a natter yesterday on the Last Word with Matt Cooper on TodayFM about postcodes. 

Liz McManus from the Labour Party was on with me, and to put it frankly I was gob-smacked that she and her party are currently opposing the introduction of postcodes.

Postcodes (sometimes known as location codes) are a way of making it easier and quicker for post to get delivered. They also function as location codes that will allow us to better plan for services in the future whether it’s new schools or health services.

They will save lives by ensuring that emergency services can pinpoint a specific address. John Kidd of National fulltime Fire-fighters, SIPTU said:
 “It is no exaggeration to say lives will be saved”.

Dozens of street names are duplicated in Dublin, and even a moment’s confusion in despatching an ambulance can make the crucial difference. There’s a Quarry Road in Shankill, as well as one in Cabra. There’s also a Pembroke Lane in Dublin 2 as well as Dublin 4. I know this because I remember my sister telling me about the Guards battering down the door of one of her neighbours looking for a drug dealer a few years ago. The unfortunate women had to inform them that there were two Pembroke Lanes before they stopped attacking her front door with a sledgehammer.

There’s a Ballybeg in Antrim, Carlow, Down, Waterford and one in Wicklow. I’ve no idea how many ‘Old Bog Roads’ we have in Ireland but chances are that more than one or two squad cars, ambulances or letters have gone to the wrong one because we don’t have a postcode system.

Postcodes will make it easier to provide joined up government. It’ll make it easier for the Central Statistics Office to allow census data to be analysed and correlated to information held by the Department of Health, Education or the Revenue Commissioners. This will allow us to to better plan for school numbers or health facilities. The Geodirectory database developed by An Post and the Ordnance Survey is a good step in the right direction to providing postcodes in Ireland, but it needs to go further in order to allow the public, businesses and semi-state agencies to take full advantage of the benefits.

You won’t lose your old address. That’ll still be used in mailing. You’ll still be able to put Dublin 4, or 14 on an envelope, but it may also come with something along the lines of D04 123 or D14 567 to better pinpoint your position. Satnavs will operate better, and so will home delivery. Some companies have come up with good ideas for postcodes already.

I’ve been posting out 35,000 newsletters every six months or so for the last eight years. An Post as far as I know still can’t allow me the option of sending them only to constituents in the Dún Laoghaire Dáil constituency. With postcodes accurately determining the boundaries, this type of delivery will be a piece of cake. Of course direct marketing companies will be rubbing their hands with glee, but if it is done correctly it will be possible to opt out of corporate direct mailings from the An Post database. Sure, it will open up the market, but that creates opportunities as well as challenges for An Post and others. I’d say it’ll create and protect jobs. It will take us finally into the 20th, if not the 21st century.

If data protection Issues can be successfully resolved, and I don’t see why they can’t,  it’ll allow us to burrow down into data that is lost by the law of large numbers. 

-Has access to third level really increased over the last decade for people in disadvantaged areas, or do the statistics simply show that there was an influx of graduates into a gentrifying neighbourhood? 

-Is there a cancer cluster of statistical significance beside an old landfill site? 

Location codes will allow us to answer these questions. 

Of course you can still do much of this number crunching with existing data, but it’s difficult to correlate information for the Bray Road, or Main Street,  or Blackrock Stradbrook to other data. Postcodes  will provide the matrix or the glue that will allow for better government to happen overnight.

The majority of countries have post codes. Afghanistan doesn’t, Angola doesn’t, and I thought Albania didn’t but Wikipedia tells me it now does. 117 of the 190 member countries of the Universal Postal Union have postal code systems. In Canada even Santa Claus’s factory at the North Pole has a postcode. It’s HOH OHO of course.

As far as I can see we are the last country in the EU without a publicly accessible postcode system. Liz McManus feels it may cost up to €50 million to introduce. I suspect the costs will be closer to €15 million, and that the money will be recouped quickly through efficiencies in the delivery of services.

This is a modernising initiative, and is long overdue. The days of old-style protectionism are over. I fully support this initiative.