by richardh
4. August 2010 10:42
According to recent reports in the media, the Royal Mail are currently considering removing counties from the Postal Address File - PAF at some point.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10825499
This is not particularly news to anyone in the industry, counties have been disliked by the Royal Mail for some time.
They are unnecessary for the delivery of mail; an address's locality is identified by its main postal town making the county at best a piece of superfluous information and at worst a piece of conflicting vanity information. County borders have moved over time and are not clearly marked - this allows for consumers the scope to use vanity counties - "I think you'll find it's in Surrey, darling!".
The situation is confused by the fact that there are 3 different types of county in PAF: Traditional, Administrative and Postal. So, according to the Royal Mail, an address could have several different counties. Additionally, some traditional county names, such as North Humberside and Dyfed, no longer exist in any administrative fashion. Driffield is either in Yorkshire (Traditional), North Humberside (Former Postal) or East Riding of Yorkshire (Administrative).
At data8, both our postcode lookup software and our PAF cleansing service can be configured to produce addresses with or without counties. In terms of managing your database and delivering letters it seems that counties have had their day, however be aware that there are still a lot of people out there who very much prefer to have their county on their envelope!