Crowdsourcing should make short work of the problem, with the right incentives, which the government will be able to offer.
Additionally private map providers (e.g. Google, Apple) must surely have this data (since they are able to route navigation to private addresses). Why not just negotiate with them?
They licence it from Royal Mail
The article points out that the PAF is kept up to date by virtue of thousands of postmen and postwomen physically visiting the rows in the database on a daily basis, as part of normal business, and logging updates. That level of routine maintenance is what any non-PostOffice PAF alternative would have to also do.
Amazon, and probably Google Maps, are two of the very small number of organisations which _might_ have the resources to build this postcode->GPS mapping, as a sideline to their current business.
They probably do license the PAF, of course, but they illustrate the sort of scale required to assemble that data independently.
> Oh, and it wouldn’t even be legally allowed to include, er, postcodes, as they are specifically owned by Royal Mail
Specifically Code-Point Open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/products/code-point-open which is updated quarterly, and in turn gets the postcodes from Royal Mail.
Something is missing here. If OS already has that data from RM and can make it available freely, why would they need to build another database?
That aside, a practical issue is that Royal Mail still retains the rights to _allocate_ new postcodes for any new properties. Yet another failure of this particular privatisation.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2009/10/06/uk-royal-mail-uses-copyr...