A lot of people are unaware that the UK’s 1.7 million postcodes are subject to changes – new additions, deletions and restorations every 3 months by the Ordnance Survey. And really quite a lot. We’ve just had 2,650 new additions, 1,103 deletions and 809 restored postcodes. You can always check how up to date on everything we are on this page.

As long as there is data to upload to our system, we will keep updating. No coronavirus problems – touch wood – with us.

It’s an interesting question though, how will the level and type of crime change during this period?

One hopes of course that it will go down and there’s a good chance it will. People are certainly going out less and that reduces the opportunity for criminals and victims of crime to interact. High Streets and railway stations because of their daytime population density tend to have much higher concentrations of crime. That is going to change because both these places are now deserted. Even burglaries are likely to go down because so many people are sitting this out at home.

So which crimes are likely to go up?

I shall leave that for another blog post. In the meantime, stay well and safe.

Still no Greater Manchester Police data from July 2019 onwards – this does seem to be taking them a really long time, so please take what looks like really low crime in that area for that time period into account.

On a separate note, we are also moving to ONS codes for all our subdivisions – in the url, export file and tables. I realised we had to do this when I found out how time consuming it was to match the slightly different names from the Ordnance Survey to those from the Office of National Statistics. The former also classifies for example different types of local authority – e.g. Borough Council or Unitary Authority or District Council – but the latter just goes by code and a one word name.

So we have just started offering GoCardless as a method of payment for membership. GoCardless is an increasingly popular automated direct debit system, doesn’t require an app and can be a lot less trouble than a recurring Paypal payment. Not everyone likes Paypal and from a commercial point of view, it’s also takes quite a big margin from the value of the goods. Gocardless takes approximately half as much.

Anyway, we are giving you the choice – you are free to use Paypal or GoCardless when you subscribe.