It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part of) a street.
So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front door.
To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous level. This being a good example.
Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of course did not go very well in as far as actually properly maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized again where now Network Rail is responsible.
In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning it is still effectively a public company, so things did result in such dire conditions as the UK.
the problem with UK privatization is the same as with California PG&E ... it's private in name, but the incentives are all bad.
there was (is) no point for optimization on costs as the profit was a fixed percentage (so it ended up quite the opposite) instead of a price cap. (ideally the cap would be a simple formula based on input prices, to at least make the lobbying transparent. sure, this also has a built in profit percentage, but the important difference is that the profit is not fixed, so the private company is incentivized to push the costs down.)
In the Netherlands the situation wasn't too far removed from the situation the UK is in now. The postal codes are managed by a private company (PostNL), and while the details are scarce and hard to find there was a fight between them and the government party responsible for managing addresses over who got had the rights to the postal codes data (see [1] for the current truce).
It's four digits and two letters. The digits cover an area (can be a city, town, neighborhood) and the letters cover the specific street or part of the street. Technically, they cover a range of house numbers, which in 99.9% of the cases is (part of) a street.
So just like in the UK a postcode is enough to get you pretty close. A postcode and house number will get you to the front door.
To get back to the article. I always feel like the UK manages to take privatization of public services to a next ridiculous level. This being a good example.
Another one is the rail network where the company that owns all the infrastructure and is responsible for maintenance (Railtrack) was fully privatized and even stock listed. This of course did not go very well in as far as actually properly maintaining the network. Resulting in it being nationalized again where now Network Rail is responsible.
In the Netherlands the company that owns all rail infrastructure and is responsible for it (ProRail) is a private company but with just the government as a shareholder. Meaning it is still effectively a public company, so things did result in such dire conditions as the UK.