“When compared to AddressBase, the new dataset was only 90.8% accurate, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that translates to 2.9 million dud addresses”
Britain sold the Postcode Address File along with Royal Mail in 2013. Now using UK address data in an app can cost upwards of £6,000 a year. George Osborne spent £5 million in 2016 trying to build a free replacement, and Ordnance Survey’s attempt left 4.2 million addresses missing or wrong. The report sat unpublished until a Freedom of Information request. The government paid to prove it can’t rebuild what it gave away.