On 27th October 2009 Royal Mail finally delivered the new PAF® Data Licence Agreement that will be effective from 1st April 2010. Although this agreement does not contain the new licence structure for products derived from Postzon (e.g. our GIS Base Table),  we have extracted the relevant matrix of fees which is presented below. There are significant changes which we believe will have considerable impact on some existing BPH product licences.

1. Royal Mail have completely removed LOCALITY level licensing although we begged them not to. The "Part PAF®" fees will cover data at Thoroughfare level or below.
2. The per user licence fees for Full PAF® and Part PAF® have been reduced.
3. There  are no "System" or "Multi-System" licences. Instead volume licensing is by 300 user blocks with a cap at 900 for internal use, or unlimited external transactions.
4. From April 2010 BPH will be able to offer various additional options to licence access to PAF® on a transactional basis reflecting the true usage of the data. (Transaction licensing is not allowed under our current reseller agreement)

The licence fee matrix for April 2010 is as follows:

^1. LRS = "Limited Record Selection" (i.e. max 200k records over up to 4 adjacent areas).

The April 2010 licence also includes advanced options for "Associate User Group", "Broker Group" and "Extended Use" solutions. Definitions and parameters are quite complex so please contact us for further details.  

Please note that any changes to the Royal Mail licence fees will be effective from the first annual renewal date following the introduction of  the new Royal Mail licence in April 2010.

For a copy of the main terms and conditions of the new PAF® licence, ensure you have a few hours spare, take a very deep breath - and click T's&C's.

Update Monday 8th February regarding Postzon.

On Friday 5th Feb we received an update on the Postzon licence. The principles (i.e. terms and fees) will be outlined "in the coming weeks" and Royal Mail still intend to implement the terms of the new Postzon licence on 1st April 2010 when the replacement PAF® terms come into effect.  

Royal Mail recognise that we need time to review, communicate and integrate the new terms and therefore we understand they are now proposing a grace period of up to 6 months during which we can renew our Postzon clients on the existing (1995) terms.  

(BPH products which use data derived from Postzon include our GIS Base Table, Gridloc, Postcode Lists, and any other datasets that contain grid references, Lat/Long co-ordinates and local authority district/ward codes)   

We are very sorry - and frustrated - that we still can't confirm the new licence fees for Postzon effective 1st April.....

BPH Data Ltd, February 2010

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