New postcodes to roll out in 2015

The Minister of Communications, Pat Rabbitte, TD,  announced the formal signing of the contract for the Postcode Management Licence Holder (PMLH) with Capita Ireland.

The ten-year contract signed with Capita, supported by BearingPoint and Autoaddress, provides for the design, encoding and roll-out of a national postcode due to be launched in quarter one of 2015.  It will be a world-first design that uses a postcode as a unique identifier for each and every address in Ireland.

Minister Rabbitte said: 'A publicly-owned postcode system is a key piece of modern national infrastructure, and ours will be the first in the world to be unique to each individual address.  It will bring significant benefits to the public, business and government.  I’m very pleased to announce the signing of the contract with Capita who will develop and operate the next generation postcode system for the State.  I look forward to the public starting to use postcodes, which we expect to be in the first half of 2015.”

Vic Gysin, Chief Operating Officer of Capita plc, said: “Capita is delighted to be working with the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources on the implementation of this unique postcode system for Ireland. We recognise that this is an important project that will bring many benefits to the public and business.”

The national postcode system will use a seven-character code in an alpha numeric format. Existing Dublin postal districts will be retained. The new delivery postcode will provide benefits for householders, businesses and state bodies.

Over 35% of households in Ireland currently don’t have a unique name or number in their address resulting in problems for delivery of services and goods.  Parcel and mail deliveries from An Post and other delivery/logistics companies will be able to use the new postcode system to quickly identify the location of a single house set in the countryside or an apartment in a newly-developed multi-storey.

Emergency services will also benefit according to Martin Dunne, Director of the National Ambulance Service.  State planning and development of health, education, transport, social and amenity services, will also be able to use the new postcode system.  Public service customers will benefit too with postcodes being added to address databases to improve service delivery.

Briefings and engagement with large database holders from utilities, business and commercial state bodies are planned for the coming weeks. Meetings with other stakeholder or sectoral representative organisations are also being planned to allow for IT systems and software updates accepting the new code.