Post: 12 November 2013
Regular readers will know that I have been trying to persuade Royal Mail to release the Postcode Address File cost stack figures that were redacted from the public review of PAF arrangements carried out by Ofcom earlier this year. Correspondence with Royal Mail (through the request and internal review stages) is covered in my previous posts here and here.
In May I referred this matter to the Information Commissioner’s Office as a complaint (with a lot of attachments).
Since then of course Royal Mail has been privatised, which takes the company outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has now responded with a brief e-mail that closes my complaint. The gist is as follows:
You may know that the Royal Mail is no longer a public authority since it was privatised and as such the company is no longer subject to the FOIA. Consequently, the Commissioner does not have the power to investigate the company or order disclosure of information that the company may hold.
The ICO is seeking further legal opinion on whether any retrospective measures regarding the company’s previous responsibilities under FOIA are in place. If that is the case the ICO will write to you again and your complaint will be re-opened.
Realistically this was the outcome I anticipated. However it does provide an illustration of the threat that privatisation poses to information rights and transparency more generally. The suggestion that there might be “retrospective measures” in place is interesting, but I will be surprised if anything comes of that.
Privatisation of Royal Mail is not necessarily the end of the road for efforts to secure open release of the Postcode Address File itself. Most address information is still produced by local authorities, and a future government more committed to open data could use regulatory powers to take away Royal Mail’s monopoly over the production of the authoritative national dataset. However PAF is not the only issue; there are other important datasets held by Royal Mail, such as bulk data on the location of postboxes, that have only been accessible in the past because Royal Mail was compelled to release them under FOI.