Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 14 June 2016
532. Deputy Timmy Dooley asked the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the reason his Department did not adopt the national postcodes project board's recommendation in its final report for the adoption of a hierarchical code but adopted a non-sequential system instead; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [15339/16]
View answerIn 2006 the National Postcodes Project Board (NPPB) recommended that the optimum technical solution to be adopted for a national postcode was the 'Postal Sector Model'. This uses an 'ABC 123' structure to reference in the first instance the relevant Post Town, and secondly the 'Block Face' (a grouping of approximately 40 to 50 dwellings); it was, however, recognised at that time that there were advantages in introducing a postcode based on a unique identifier.
In 2010, 54 interested parties were consulted as part of an extensive consultation process on the introduction of postcodes. The consultation exercise concluded that for the postcode to be of real benefit it had to be unique to each address. Following consideration of the matter by Government in 2010, the Department proceeded to the first stage of procurement to launch a National Postcode System. The procurement documentation, having regard to the output from the stakeholder consultation process, envisaged that the postcode model would be capable of being refined into a location based code – in other words of identifying each individual property within a post town.
The reason for the adoption of the unique identifier approach was to resolve two addressing challenges:
- 35% of addresses are non-unique which means many properties, particularly in rural areas, share the same address; and
- in both urban and rural areas, the same property can have multiple forms of address.
A hierarchical based code is not the optimum solution for Ireland as it does not have the capacity to uniquely identify premises nor is it future proofed as it is not possible to assign a sequenced code to new builds (for example any infill development will break the sequence of the code in the event that a sequenced code were used).
