Richard Rundle wrote:

"Aidan Stanger" wrote...
1. If you live in Bexley, how much of your council tax goes to Kent
County Council?

None now, but AIUI some did before the GLA was created, as KCC were
responsible for some of the roads.

2. The Royal Mail dropped the requirement for county names in
addresses many years ago.
Type your postcode into their address finder.

A significant proportion of mail is still hand sorted, and that is still
done by county.

Are you sure ?

The last time I was in a medium-sized sorting office, all manual sorting was
based on the PostTown and the first half of the Postcode only.

That, plus the fact that counties are now not part of the recommended postal
address, makes me doubt your statement.

It was true when I worked for them (back when they were called
Consignia) but I suppose they could've changed it since then (though
somehow I doubt it).

Your statement is partly correct - they were sorted by post town.
However, there are too many post towns for single stage manual sorting,
so letters were sorted in two stages. Primary sorting was done mainly by
county (or in some cases, groups of counties). There were also boxes for
London sectors (W,N,SE etc) and the busiest London postcodes (mainly in
Central London) had their own boxes, as did several cities.

Where the county boundary did not match the postcode boundary (e.g. the
part of Bedfordshire with an MK postcode) they generally went with the
county rather than the postcode. I can recall only one exception:
anything with a CH postcode went in the Cheshire box, even the places
that were actually in Wales!

Anything ambiguous (such as letters addressed to Keston or Kingston
without a postcode or county) went in the "Blind" box.