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.

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

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.

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.

See also HS2.

But they already have. The Post Office was still nationalised when post codes were distributed.

True, but it's specifically the modern UK government - with its penchant for outsourcing jobs to ministers mates and bloated contractors - whose competency at large scale projects I dread.

Just modify the law so that databases of postal addresses are not copyrightable.

so modify the law to deprive an owner of their legal property which was given to them by the law?

Not sure that's a precedent I'd want set in a common-law country, and not sure that would hold up to judicial review under common law.

The government made a bone-headed mistake when they included the postal data as an asset in the sale. The solution is for them to admit their mistake and pay for it. It's fiat money anyway, so it doesn't really cost anything. Having them abuse their government power to cover up their mistake is not an approach I endorse.

Not that this hasn't happened before, think postal scandal or yesterday's comments on the Hawke and Curacoa https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285275

It would just be a change of law or regulations. Governments change these all the time, and sometimes it costs people or businesses money.

In any case, nationalisation has a long history in the UK, so it would hardly be setting a precedent.

I'm in favour, but that leaves RM holding a database of non-copyrightable addresses.

One way or the other, a private asset must be either nationalised or compelled to be released.

Gradual renationalisation of the rail network was in the manifesto. That's not particularly contentious, as rail franchises have fixed terms. But the manifesto is all about steadying the ship, and militant nationalisation risks spooking investors, so whether the government has any appetite to nationalise anything by fiat is questionable.

Nonetheless, there's public support for renationalisation; and, for such a low-value asset, this might be a nice test of the waters.

I'm surprised it is copyrightable. It wouldn't be in the US.

Well we already have UPRNs[0] but they're a little unwieldy for human use.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Property_Reference_Numb...

I'm unable to think of any reform in British history where 'throw everything out and start again' had successful outcomes. The British state runs on two principles: maximum effect for minimum effort, and the Ship of Theseus.

I know the UK gov has enjoyed causing a lot of chaos over the past few years but my god that would be on a whole other level...

Come on, “we’ve always done it that way” is a base ground of UK.

"The government are going to reintroduce ID cards! Panic!"

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/