The postcode is made up of five to seven letters and numbers that indicate four different levels of a geographic unit. It’s part of a coding system developed by the Royal Mail and used to sort mail across the United Kingdom. Postcodes are an abbreviated form of address, that groups together delivery points (property or post boxes).
Full valid postcodes can be validated with AFD’s address lookup solutions at https://www.afd.co.uk/try-it/
There are two elements to each postcode. The outward postcode, or outcode, is the first portion. This is separated from the second part, which is the inward postcode, or incode, by a single space.
The outward postcode allows mail to be delivered to the right local area. Both area and district are contained within this part of the code.
The inward code sorts mail at each local area delivery office. Containing a numeric character that identifies the sector in the postal district then two alphabetic characters defining one or more properties within the sector.
For example: HD3 3WZ
HD states the postcode area of Huddersfield. The UK has 124 postcode areas in total.
HD3 is the postcode district in the postcode area of Huddersfield. There are 2,979 postcode districts.
HD3 3 refers to the postcode sector. There are 11,228 postcode sectors.
HD3 3WZ. The WZ completes the postcode. The last two letters define the ‘unit
postcode’ which identifies one or more small user delivery points – in the case of HD3 3WZ, 26 delivery points.
As of January 2022, there are 1,785,571 postcodes in the UK.
Presented by Joshua Comish, DevOps Engineer for the AFD Group.
SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud computing are an extremely powerful set of tools that empower organisations to expand their IT operations quickly and cost efficiently. Companies moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud save an average of 20% – 40% on their computing resources and additional labour savings. Cloud computing has come a long way since its origins in the early 2000’s and so in this presentation Josh will guide to you through exactly what it is , and how you get started in using it in your business?
For more information and to secure your FREE place click here.
To watch this talk via live stream on the evening, click here.
These are the UK’s “golden postcodes” based on properties that have the highest value per square foot by region:
London
SW1X
SW13
NW1
SW19 Of Wimbledon fame
NW1
South East
OX2 – Oxford
GU5 – Guildford
RH5 – Dorking
East
CB3 – Cambridge
AL5 – Harpenden
South West
BA1 – Bath
TQ7 – Kingsbridge
Midlands
CV35 – Warwick
CV37 – Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare’s birthplace
S18 – Dronfield
LE15 – Oakham
Yorkshire & the Humber
LS21 – Otley
YO1 – York
North West
LA12 – Ulverston
WA16 – Knutsford
North East
NE45 – Corbridge
Wales
LL53 – Abersoch Jonathan Stocks, Head of Sales and Marketing at AFD’s favourite holiday destination
In January 2021 the Postcode Address File (PAF) contained 30,968,535 delivery points.
Just 12 months later the number of delivery points has grown by 341,379 to total 31,309,914!
This figure alone justifies the importance of having access to the latest available data to validate and cleanse address details, but as we dig deeper the total number of changes within PAF grows further:
Localities added 43
New postcodes 34,475
Delivery point changes 76,992
PAF Facts
Number of Postcode Areas 124
Number of Postcodes 1,785,571
Number of Post Towns 1,500
Number of organisations that rely on PAF 40,000
For further information and the latest data updates visit www.afd.co.uk/data-news
According to the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF), there are over 700 streets in the UK referencing Robert Burns.
The Scottish national holiday held today continues to celebrate the life and work of the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns.
We hope you enjoy your Burns supper of Haggis, neeps (swede), and tatties (potatoes).
Did you know AFD Software started in Scotland? Read more about the AFD story here.
There are 40 “New Year” addresses within the UK’s best reference point for UK addresses, the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF).
We assume the NYE parties at New Years Lane in Sevenoaks were among the best in the UK!
Other “New Year” addresses include:
New Years Lodge
Orby
SPILSBY
Lincolnshire
PE23 5SW
Newyearfield Farm Community Centre
LIVINGSTON
West Lothian
EH54 6AB
New Years Green Lane
Harefield
UXBRIDGE
Hillingdon
UB9 6LX
A recent article declared “The coolest postcodes to move to in 2022”, we didn’t completely agree and made one revision – can you guess which?
NG1, Hockley, Nottingham
NE67, Beadnell, Northumberland
SA3, Mumbles, Swansea
M4, Ancoats, Manchester
TA13, South Petherton, Somerset
DT7, Lyme Regis, Dorset
PO40, Freshwater, Isle of Wight
IV26, Tanera Mòr, the Inner Hebrides
L39, Aughton, Lancashire
IM7, Ramsey, ISLE OF MAN
BN1, Brighton, Sussex
TQ13, Widecombe in the Moor, Devon
Twenty years ago, two friends had a goal to provide health insurance policies tailored to people’s specific needs and started “Right to Health Ltd”. This customer-first focus has allowed the organisation to grow into one of the UK’s biggest healthcare intermediaries with over 30 specialists helping protect 45,000 loyal customers.
We spoke to Gary Marney, Co-founder and Director, to understand more about the organisation and the importance contact data accuracy plays in helping people find the right solution for their needs:
“Getting the right policy for a customer requires a conversation with a specialist who has both the knowledge and experience to ask the right questions and use those answers to find the best cover at the best price. We are an ethical company who truly value our integrity, so if the best advice for a prospective client is for them to stay with their existing provider, we advise them accordingly.
All conversations and recommendations are medically driven rather than price driven – which may mean a client is advised to take a policy that is more expensive if we know that the underwriter is more sympathetic to a particular condition affecting that client. Because of our many years of experience in the field and experience with various underwriters, we can be confident that we are offering the very best advice tailored to each individual situation.”
Due to the medical intricacies of the policies provided, customer contact is of vital importance and data quality is a very sensitive matter. Right to Health needed a solution to help ensure more clients could be reached and given the best advice for their needs.
Gary continues: “We can’t provide the right policy to a client without talking to them, so it is essential that we are able to actually reach the people who have requested information. We have relied on AFD’s residential address, name and telephone solution, Names & Numbers for over 15 years to help our specialists reach these prospective clients and to turn them into valued long-term customers.
After switching purely to the internet to generate new leads, we found that when people used the contact forms to obtain a quote, they would make mistakes in the details entered or not submit their phone number.
Using Names & Numbers, we can often look up the phone number of the name and address provided which enables us to improve contact rates by around 6%. That may not sound much, but with 50,000 leads generated annually this equates to an extra 3,000 contactable leads each year – which might equate to around £250,000 of potential profit as we help protect more people.”
In discussing the importance that the data quality partnership has played to the organisation, Gary goes onto say: “AFD Software, The Postcode People, have been and continue tobe instrumental in the growth of our business. We have been able to reach more customers as a direct result of their Names & Numbers product and provide them with the right health insurance solutions for their specific requirements. As a quality data partner, I would recommend AFD to any organisation wanting to improve conversion rates via the quality of contact data.”
Gurnam Singh, Enterprise Architect at DPD: “With AFD, we are equipped with the very best means of rapidly ensuring data integrity in a pressurised environment. We work at the cutting edge of technology and AFD’s solutions meet our data quality.
Every minute counts, and ten to fifteen minutes makes a significant difference – the equivalent of 2- 3 extra deliveries… and when you have thousands of drivers you can see the effect. Equally important, as a people-focused business we want to minimise stress for our drivers. We have achieved this by minimising the time taken to validate, correct or complete addresses at the point of collection or in the depot. The result of raising data integrity is that drivers now spend less time in the depot, are out on the road earlier and have more time available to deliver parcels.”
AFD’s logistics specific data solutions contain address, location and property characteristic data for 33 million unique properties in Great Britain. Every record has unique identifiers in the form of Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) from OS and Unique Delivery Point Reference Number (UDPRN) from Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF). These identifiers specifically help with logistics companies needing to identify the correct delivery point, avoid data errors and link other datasets. Automatic data updates help ensure your organisation benefits from the latest available data and minimise errors that may occur from older data.
Getting to the postcode is easy, getting to the right address is where the value lies for logistics companies. Many deliveries rely on postcode level grids at the centre of a postcode, in some instances this can be 15 minutes away from the destination potentially leading the delivery to fail or knock on effects on the rest of the driver’s deliveries. Property level grid references give you full confidence that your customer’s address can be navigated to precisely and the delivery will be successful.
What’s the split between B2B and B2C deliveries for your organisation? Are deliveries failing because a driver tried to deliver after 6pm to a Commercial address? All addresses have a property classification, e.g. Residential or Business, allowing for time sensitive deliveries to be planned properly and for insight into the types of deliveries that are taking place each day.
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.