Comment by ascorbic

As he points out, this was a profoundly stupid mistake made when privatising Royal Mail. It would have been trivially easy to do at that point, but now it's a lot harder. If the government decided that it does want to do this, it can't just pass a law that says "the PAF is now free" without paying hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation to Royal Mail. That's quite apart from the ongoing costs of maintaining the data. At a time of cuts of budgets this would be a hard sell.