In his dark T-shirt speech on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June), Andy Burnham, not yet prime minister, promised ‘good growth in every postcode’. Indeed he used the word postcode six times.
There are about 1.8 million active postcodes in the United Kingdom covering 29 million addresses. One is allocated to Father Christmas, who gets thousands of letters each year. Will he enjoy ‘good growth’?
In England and Wales, the average was about 15 addresses per postcode in 2021. About 55,540 full postcodes in England and Wales contain only one household. So, in 2011, Devon had 2,370 single-household postcodes, but Gloucestershire only 919. The Office for National Statistics won’t pinpoint where they all are, lest individual people have their privacy trampled upon. I suppose the children in single households have the best chance of seeing good growth, unless we’re talking waistlines.
On the largest scale, the United Kingdom is divided into 121 geographic postcode areas. The smallest in area is WC – London West Central – less than a square mile. The broadest is IV, Inverness, which covers 6,243 square miles. Don’t forget SS (Southend) and ST (Stoke-on-Trent), LE (Leicester) and ZE (Zetland, for Lerwick).
Postcodes came into being in 1959 when Ernest Marples was Postmaster General. In those days they were called postal codes. In 1970, Christmas mail was postmarked with ‘Remember to use the Postal Code’ even though only a handful of sorting offices used codes to sort mail.
Mr Burnham may be seeking the opposite of the dreaded postcode lottery. ‘Breast cancer victim Helen,’ the Mirror reported in 1997, ‘would have got the drug free if she lived just 20 miles away in Somerset.’ The lottery would be avoided if no one anywhere got the drug free.
My husband has just asked me if the Dead Letter Office still exists. Under the name Royal Mail National Returns Centre, Belfast, it was dealing with 20 million lost items of post a year, of which four million were successfully returned to the sender. The address and postcode of the centre were never made public.
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