30th August 2026
If you live in Wick and have ever been told by an online retailer that your postcode is an "island" postcode, you could be forgiven for wondering whether somebody has looked at a map.
Wick is on the Scottish mainland. So is Thurso.
So are most of Caithness.
Yet the problem of Caithness being treated as though it were part of Orkney because of the letters KW has been going on for years — and the evidence suggests that it has still not gone away.
The postcode system itself is perfectly capable of distinguishing the areas. KW1 covers Wick and the surrounding area, while KW14 covers Thurso. Orkney begins at KW15, with KW15, KW16 and KW17 covering the islands. The KW postcode area stretches across Caithness, parts of Sutherland and then Orkney.
But some computerised delivery systems appear to have a much simpler approach:
KW = remote, island or expensive delivery.
That can have real consequences for people buying goods online.
Highland Council Trading Standards highlighted precisely this problem in evidence submitted to Parliament. It said that some carriers and retailers treated all KW postcodes as though they related to Orkney and consequently applied island surcharges.
The evidence was quite specific: KW1 to KW14 are on the mainland in Caithness and Sutherland, while only KW15 to KW17 are in Orkney. The council said that better understanding of postcode geography by carriers could improve the situation and even suggested that the postcode system might need to be reviewed in the age of internet shopping.
That evidence is several years old.
But the remarkable thing is that the problem can still be seen in delivery policies today.
Take the furniture retailer Neptune.
Its current delivery information has a section for large pallet deliveries. Under the heading "Orkney & Caithness", it lists:
"All KW postcodes"
and applies a £2,500 home-delivery charge for its particular service.
There is an obvious problem here.
All KW postcodes do not mean Orkney.
Indeed, most of them don't.
The classification lumps together Wick, Thurso and other mainland communities with the Orkney Islands.
That does not necessarily mean Neptune is deliberately trying to penalise Caithness. There may be genuine additional costs associated with delivering large furniture to the far north. But the use of all KW postcodes as a proxy for "Orkney & Caithness" demonstrates exactly the crude geographical classification that has been complained about for years.
And it isn't just about furniture.
Citizens Advice Scotland's research into what it called the "Postcode Penalty" found that people in parts of Caithness were still experiencing delivery problems because their postcodes were shared with Orkney.
The report recorded people being told that they lived offshore when they actually lived on the Scottish mainland. Some reported being asked for additional delivery charges of 50%, 70% or even 100%. One respondent said they had been told that it made no difference that Caithness was on the mainland because the postcode was KW and therefore they must live on Orkney.
That is difficult to defend as a sophisticated approach to modern online commerce.
And there is an important distinction here.
A legitimate remote-delivery surcharge is not necessarily unfair.
Caithness is a long way from many distribution centres. Delivering a large or heavy item from the central belt to Wick can genuinely cost more than delivering the same item to Glasgow.
The problem arises when the system cannot distinguish between distance and geography.
A company should be able to calculate the actual cost of delivering an item to KW1 rather than simply deciding that KW means "island".
There is also evidence that the problem has produced some extraordinary inconsistencies.
In evidence reported during the parliamentary debate on delivery charges, an example was given of a 5kg box of gifts being delivered to KW1 for £11.30, while the same delivery going south cost only £4.80. The same parliamentary discussion referred to John Thurso, the former MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, pointing out that his mainland constituency had a KW postcode which caused many websites to classify it as an island.
There have also been cases where customers were refused delivery altogether.
Scottish Government research into postal delivery pricing recorded a Caithness resident ordering a watch from Switzerland. The parcel reached Inverness within 24 hours but then remained at the Inverness depot for another 48 hours before being delivered. The same research found other examples around Scotland where goods advertised with UK-wide delivery were subsequently found not to be deliverable to particular remote postcodes.
This isn't simply an inconvenience for somebody ordering a new television or a piece of furniture.
For people living in rural areas, online shopping has become increasingly important because the choice of local retailers can be limited.
That means a delivery surcharge can effectively become a rural shopping tax.
Someone living in Wick may already have to travel considerable distances to obtain certain goods and services. Online shopping should, in theory, reduce that disadvantage.
Instead, if an automated system classifies the customer as living on an island, the internet can end up reproducing the very geographical disadvantage it was supposed to overcome.
There is another interesting aspect to this.
The delivery industry itself clearly understands the difference.
M&H Carriers, for example, operates a depot at Helmsdale specifically serving the KW1–14 postcodes and describes its operation as providing distribution services to Caithness. Its own logistics arrangements therefore recognise that KW1–14 represent a mainland northern Scotland delivery area rather than simply treating the whole KW postcode as Orkney.
So the technology exists to distinguish the areas.
The question is why some national retailers and courier pricing systems still don't.
Perhaps part of the answer is that postcode databases are convenient.
A retailer doesn't necessarily negotiate individual delivery prices for every village in Britain. It may upload a list of postcodes to its website and assign each one to a pricing category.
If the database says that KW is remote, the computer doesn't ask whether KW1 means Wick or KW17 means Orkney.
The computer simply adds the surcharge.
That may be efficient for the retailer.
It isn't necessarily fair to the customer.
And it is here that the issue becomes bigger than delivery charges.
It is about how rural Scotland is represented by computer systems.
A postcode is supposed to help identify where something is going.
But when the first two letters become a substitute for understanding geography, strange things happen.
Caithness becomes "Orkney".
Mainland communities become "islands".
And the Highlands can become one enormous "remote area", despite the fact that Inverness is a substantial urban centre and large parts of Highland are connected directly to the rest of Britain by the road network.
Highland Council Trading Standards made exactly this wider point when it told Parliament that 99.9% of the Highland area is on the UK mainland, yet large parts of the region can still be treated as non-mainland for delivery purposes.
That is why this issue deserves more attention.
The answer isn't necessarily to demand that every delivery to Caithness costs exactly the same as delivery to Birmingham.
That would ignore the genuine costs of distance.
The more reasonable demand is transparency and accuracy.
If a retailer needs to charge more to deliver a heavy sofa to Wick, explain why.
If the actual cost is £80 rather than £40, say so.
If a particular courier does not provide the service, tell the customer before they spend time selecting the product.
And above all, don't tell somebody living in Wick that they live on an island simply because their postcode begins with KW.
There is a surprisingly simple test that retailers could apply.
Does the postcode actually represent the place where the customer lives?
For KW1, the answer is Wick.
For KW14, it is Thurso.
For KW15, it is Orkney.
The difference isn't difficult to establish.
The problem is that some commercial systems apparently don't bother.
And that matters because Britain increasingly expects people to shop online, compare prices online and access services online.
If geography is going to be used to calculate delivery costs, the geography needs to be right.
Caithness shouldn't have to become an expert in postcode databases simply to prove that it is on the mainland.
Perhaps the time has come for retailers, courier companies and the organisations responsible for postcode data to look again at how these classifications work.
The problem has been documented for well over a decade.
Highland Council raised it.
Parliament discussed it.
Citizens Advice Scotland documented the experiences of consumers.
And yet examples can still be found today.
For Caithness, that leaves a rather irritating question.
How many times does the same mistake have to be made before somebody changes the computer system?