Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The simple solution here is a threat from the government to Royal Mail.

Give us your postcode file for free, or we will simply make up a new numbering scheme, send an address card to every house telling them of their new number with their next council tax bill, and postcodes will become a thing of the past.

The new numbering scheme will be unique to each house too, and have a check digit so the number alone is sufficient for 3rd party logistics companies like Amazon to use it for deliveries.

View on HN

Every property already has a UPRN (unique property reference number). If you go on a council website and find a recent planning application it will be linked with this UPRN in the council's database. If I ever want to find a postcode I go to the find a planning application map and look it up there. I've not checked this in England, but it's definitely the case in Scotland. e.g. here's a random example; the entry for St Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow:

https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/case...

You can look it up here:

https://www.findmyaddress.co.uk/

To have a unique id for each house is neat but I think there are loads of situations you’d have to account for so that there isn’t any ambiguity in the assignment of unique ids. If any ambiguities exist inevitably you will have exceptions in the system which defeats the point. For example -Subdivision of a lot. -Joining of lots. -You said every house… what about two houses on the same lot? -What about apartments buildings? -What happens when one or more houses are demolished and an apartment building goes up? Etc etc

I work in manufacturing and this sounds a lot like the problem of part numbering, and let me tell you, it’s not a trivial problem and the company I work for thought it was and got it wrong.

entity resolution is hard everywhere. Because the world is dynamic, but the common understanding of "entity" is a static object.

and the only perfect description of the world is the world, just like on a more trivial scale the only perfect description of what a piece of software does is to run it and see what it does.

So the best I know is to find a level of abstraction that captures enough stability to be useful, with enough flexibility to enable the classification to adopt.

In math, phylogenetic trees might be an example; think Dirichlette processes and exchangeable stochastic processes.

The idea of the UK government attempting to do such a thing fills me with the utmost dread.

When did this almost Reaganite sentiment ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help") make home in the UK? I know it's not recent: I remember similar arguments coming from the No2ID camp in 2005 at-least.

For ID cards specifically most of the hostility was towards Blair's specific implementation which had a wide-ranging database that pretty much everyone and their dog in the public sector and beyond would have access to. While the arguments are perhaps a bit weaker in the modern day where the government taps the internet backbones and surveillance is a major category of business model, there were definitely good arguments against Blair's proposals that weren't necessarily applicable to ID cards in general.

I don't think it's necessarily Thatcherism that made people like this, just a slow erosion of trust that the government has the competency to carry out the tasks of a modern country that's accelerated as time's gone on. Anecdotally Liz Truss's episode as Prime Minister seemed to be the final straw for a lot of people's goodwill towards the government.

Quite a lot of it is Reaganism, via Thatcher. Probably dates from the Winter of Discontent.

It's not entirely without merit, but only because there's a tendency to drastically underfund and micromanage state services. And things like the Post Office Horizon fiasco do not make the government look good here.

On the other hand GDS is excellent - but that's almost entirely as a result of staff professionalism, rather than being driven by whichever ministers had the leadership of the civil service.

An odd outcome of the ID discourse is that we now have an extremely high tech biometric identity system .. but only for immigrants.

'The Post Office' is a private company. Wasn't the Horizon system implemented after privatisation?

No. The Post Office is not a private company, it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder.

It was changed from a government department to a statutory corporation in 1969. It was then changed to a public limited company in 2000.

Furthermore:

- Post Office Ltd owns and runs Post Office Counters Ltd which runs the post office branches. This is the company that uses Horizon (since 1999)

- Royal Mail delivers mail to addresses, and owns the Postcode Address File. Royal Mail was separated from the Post Office and privatised in 2013. It has never used Horizon.

Horizon is an EFTPOS/accounting system, nothing to do with mail delivery. It was introduced to the Post Office in 1999 after Fujitsu/ICL were originally commissioned by government to build an accounting system for the Benefits Agency, and it was so awful and buggy the Benefits Agency rejected it, so the government asked them to retool it for the Post Office.

> it's a public limited company with the government as sole shareholder.

...isn't that PR China's business-model: state-capitalism?

It's the other way around here; the Post Office is effectively a government department, cosplaying as a commercial business. It has never posted a profit. It's up to the government to bail it out, every time. It's controlled at arms length by a body called UK Government Investments (UKGI) who crack the whip at it and try to ensure "value for the taxpayer".

The rest of the UK government is capitalism on stilts, and is forever outsourcing everything to the private sector. There was a scandal when the outsourcing firm Carillion went bankrupt - we learned that the cleaners in Parliament were under four layers of subcontracting - i.e. four sets of middlemen taking a cut between the government paying for cleaning Parliament and the people who actually do the cleaning. One of those middlemen was Carillion, which had just paid £79m of dividends to investors and then collapsed with £7000m in liabilities and £29m cash. That's because capitalism is perfectly efficient, and it's not just a bunch of crooks cooking the books to appear to be perfectly efficient, right?

There's certainly been distrust/mild distain for the govt in Scotland, Wales, and The North since Reagan's gender-swap, Thatcher, for broadly similar reasons Reagan is maligned

I'm saying this as quite a strongly left-wing person. I am very much in favour of competent government intervention and regulation of markets. But the current government, probably since Thatcher, has shown themselves to be incapable of delivering large-scale national projects.

Take the aircraft carriers for example, we’ve currently got 2 but only purchased enough aircraft for half of one.

Whether you view this as a mistake of over investment or under investment, it’s clearly a mistake of some sort.