A day after the launch of the data.gov.uk website, the government has ruled out supplying postcode data to developers. It now appears that the Postcode Address File (PAF) – which contains geographical data about the locations of every Royal Mail delivery address in the UK – will not be made available to non-profit and community websites.

The Government responded to a petition lodged with the No.10 website, which said, “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites,” by saying that deciding whether a copy of the PAF is provided under such terms is down to the Royal Mail and the postal regulator Postcomm.

The Guardian reports that Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at Southampton University and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, were instrumental in opening up government data for the new data.gov.uk website have been making the case inside government since June last year that data collected by government-owned bodies has in effect been paid for already by the public – and that releasing it to them enhances the economic benefits and opportunities far more than any monetising by government itself.

There is understood to be some resistance within government to Berners-Lee and Shadbolt’s manifesto – which mirrors that of the Free Our Data campaign run by Guardian Technology since March 2006, arguing that government-collected datasets including those of government-owned organisations like Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey should be made available for free to all users.