Lancashire to vanish from postal addresses

Royal Mail

Lancashire is set to be dropped from postal addresses because Royal Mail bosses say county names are no longer needed.

The move is likely to anger campaigners who refuse to recognise the county boundaries brought in by the Government in 1974.

Lancashire’s area was drastically scaled back, creating the metropolitan areas Merseyside and Greater Manchester – names which are still used even though their authorities were abolished in 1986.

Many people in historical Lancashire towns such as Rochdale, Bury and Bolton, still use the historic county in their addresses.

Under the proposed move, county names could disappear from the Postcode Address File, a database containing 28 million addresses.

The database is used by thousands of private companies and public bodies.

The postal service does not strictly need county names to deliver mail, instead using house names and numbers, street names and postcodes to identify locations.

Ian Beesley, chairman of the board that advises the Royal Mail on running the database, told The Daily Telegraph county names had become "a kind of vanity attachment".

He added: "People will still use counties, but for postal purposes you don't need it."

A Royal Mail spokesman said: "Following Postcomm's request, Royal Mail has consulted with PAF (Postcode Address File) users including government departments, solutions providers and postal operators.

"Users have raised concerns at the disruption to their services that the immediate deletion of this data would bring.

"They have requested that Royal Mail continue to provide this information as a separate file until the review of the licence in 2013, and that after this point there should be a transitional period if this data is to be removed."

The firm has revealed plans to remove all county titles from its official Postcode Address File database by 2016.