Here’s a story from FreeOurData which is, quite frankly, incredible. The Office of National Statistics, in preparing for the next census, has found that the postcode databases offered by the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey aren’t accurate enough for their purposes. Their solution: to build their own database. This is fair. The postcode database is not amazingly accurate, and ONS have different requirements anyway.
Unfortunately, Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey make good money from selling the postcode databases to other organisations. These datasets are very valuable: you’ve probably made use of them whenever you’ve put your postcode into a website. Royal Mail and Ordnance survey did not — apparently — like the idea of ONS making another postcode database with which they’d presumably have to compete. So, rather than take that nice dataset and do useful things with it — like giving it back to us taxpayers — the ONS have pledged to build the database, use it for the census, and then destroy it.
Postcode databases are almost a holy grail. Of all the datasets in the country, liberating the postcode database for free reuse would probably create more value than any other. The thought of spending £12m on a new, super-accurate postcode database and then destroying it is wasteful, a huge missed opportunity and to be frank, completely idiotic.
We implore you: don’t do it.
I find this astounding. This needs to be stopped. There has to be a governmental route to stop this: the public accounting office or some-such?
I woukd love to work out what percentage of Royal Mail’s budget was met by selling PAF and what revenue the OS protect from blocking public bodies using their data in mashups etc. I bet it is so neglagable that if the government went down the US route of it is public domain for the UK we wouldn’t notice the extra tax cost. (The OS would still have to sort out the licence clash with google maps though
Not sure what the percentage is, or about the OS thing, but iirc Royal Mail make ~£18m a year from the PAF, so it’s not a small thing.
Maintaining OS data is actually quite complicated — I don’t think it’s a small sum. That said, I _do_ think it’s a small sum compared to the value it would generate if reusing their data was free and easy.
I think the OS should be made into an NDPB/exec agency, and I said as much on the PoI taskforce beta report — but I don’t know if they included that
Does Tom Watson know this ?
These millions might be better spent combating the recession
[...] busy creating a more accurate postcode geodata resource for the 2011 Census, which it is promptly going to destroy after it’s finished. Closer to home, I created an election map of the UK for the 2001 & [...]