Details
Postcodes were devised solely for the purposes of sorting and directing mail and rarely coincide with political boundaries. However, over time they have become a geographical reference in their own right with postcodes and postcode groups becoming synonymous with certain towns and districts. Further to this, the postcode has been used by organisations for other applications including government statistics, marketing, calculation of car and household insurance premiums and credit referencing.
There are several groups, mostly on the fringes of major population centres, who are affected in one way or another by the associations of their postcode. There is a movement in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead to change the first two characters of their postcodes from SL to WM for vanity, so as not to be associated with Slough. A businessman in Ilford wishes to have the postcode district of IG1 changed to E19 as he claims customers do not realise his business is based in London.
Residents of West Heath in SE2 wish to have their postcodes changed to that of adjacent Bexleyheath, citing higher insurance premiums as reason to change. Some residents of Kingston Vale in SW15 wish to have their postcodes changed to adjacent Kingston upon Thames for the same reasons. Residents of Denham, Buckinghamshire have postcodes associated with Uxbridge, which causes confusion to delivery drivers.
In all these cases Royal Mail has said that there is "virtually no hope" of changing the postcode, referring to their policy of changing postcodes only to match changes in their operations. Under this policy residents of the Wirral Peninsula had their postcodes changed from the L (Liverpool) to CH (Chester) group when a new sorting office was opened.
Some postcode areas straddle England's borders with Wales and Scotland. Examples of such postcodes include CH4, SY10, NP16 and TD15. This has led to British Sky Broadcasting subscribers receiving the wrong BBC and ITV regions, and newly-licensed radio amateurs being given incorrect call signs.
Postcomm says the following regarding the extended use of postcodes and the Postcode Address File (PAF):
| “ | Many organisations – including new postal operators, banks, insurance companies and others offering to deliver goods to your door — have a need for this information. It would be very time-consuming and costly for anyone to try and replicate the list, so Royal Mail licenses PAF data, for a fee, allowing others to use it. ... Although we have a role in ensuring that PAF is managed well, Postcomm does not intervene to resolve disputes involving individual postcodes. A postcode is a routing instruction, allowing a postal operator to sort and deliver mail accurately and efficiently. It is not necessarily a geographically accurate description of where a property is located. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Postcode Lottery
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)