The recent victory by An Post in the high court creates an interesting situation for addressing in Ireland. To recap on what happened, An Post won a case against Comreg , where they challenged a direction forcing them to deliver to a legal or "geographical" address. A couple in Cork complained to Comreg that An Post were refusing to deliver to their address in rural Cork. The address in question was specified by the Local Authority, and as such one would imagine was the "legal" address for the property.
An Post were insisting that they referred to the address differently in their post-town system and as such could not easily deliver to the address as specified. In effect, they were insisting that the householder use the An Post version of the address (the Postal Address), if they wanted mail delivered to them. Interestingly, Comreg supported the householder in this case, and agreed that An Post should be obliged to deliver to any "legal" address in the country, even if it differed from the address held by An Post. The High Court disagreed and ruled that An Post were entitled to specify how an address should be recorded, if the householder wanted their mail delivered. It also was reported that to do otherwise would create a major difficulty for the An Post system and require a fundamental change.
From this case, we can now ascertain that;
1. An Post may specify the address structure, format, and content that they choose for an address even if it varies completely from the address specified by the local authority. If they decide that you now live in 4 Main Street, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, Sligo, Co Dublin - must you put that on your mail or become a postal pariah ? Or is the freedom for freestyling addresses restricted in some way ?
2. An Post face a major technical or systematic issue in adding aliases for addresses. For example, in our Autoaddress technology, we can easily add an alias for an address, so Ballysmallplace, would be entered as a valid alternative for Ballysmalltown, and whenever the system came upon it again, it would automatically be matched and thus sorted. It is surprising that this causes such a headache in a multimillion-pound sortation system such as that used by An Post. Its almost like Tesco's home delivery service telling you "No sir, you don't live at 4 Bezzel Ave, Clontarf, Dublin 3, you now live at 4 Bezzel Ave, Coolock Distribution Depot, Dublin. Or else we can't deliver." Who said "the customer is always right" ?
An Post, as the designated service provider have a special place in determining the official postal address. I'm not sure where competitors to An Post would stand in regards to that ? Would a smaller mailer like Citypost, for example, be afforded the same right to specify their unique postal addresses that must be used or would the regulator have more power in tackling these undesignated providers ? If not, we may be forced to have a selection of addresses ready for use depending on who we want to deliver our mail.
Feargal O'Neill
This is quite a significant ruling in favour of An Post and it goes well beyond the obvious.
ReplyDeleteThis ruling appears to help An Post maintain a market advantage, in spite of mail liberalisation since 2011;- it means that all An Post's potential competitors must deal through An Post to interpret Postal Addresses. Postal addresses reflect An Post's sorting operations and are unsuited to anyone else; An Post's GeoDirectory must be licensed by the competition to fully interpret them. GeoDirectory was not liberalised with the mail so effectively it would appear that An Post can control who has access and at what price; and it has been suggested they may have already denied potential competitors access to the GeoDirectory. It therefore seems that they may still have significant control over the mail delivery market!
This also undermines the postcode tender process(now late by 1 year, 2 years and 5 years depending on which deadline you pick)which appears to have stalled with An Post selected as one of the preferred suppliers. Yet they now say they need only deliver to a postal address - suggesting that they will never introduce or support a postcode - especially a precise one! More unnecessary cost to the tax payer - consultants reports over 7 years and an undermined tender process - none of which it would seem now will ever result in a useful postcode;- and all because a High Court judge has ruled that An Post need only deliver to a postal address! At the same time, lives are put at stake as ambulances cannot find the same postal addresses because they do not necessarily reflect the true geographic location and over 750,000 of them are non unique!
An just today (21/10/2012) the Minister on RTE radio at lunchtime seemed to take COMREG to task publicly for moving to appeal the High Court decision. As a result I am sure there will be some who might say that the Minister appears to have chosen to back An Post in what looks like anti-competitive practice which also apparently undermines a postcode tender process being run by his own department! I would imagine that the Competition Authority is watching this very carefully.... Not the first time the department of communications and its Minister have been embroiled in commercially related controversy!
In any case, this is another clear indicator that a postcode which has been proposed since 2003 with an initial implementation deadline of January 2008 and which An Post said from the outset it did not need;- is now even further away!