So what is Inspire, and why is the UK lobbying against it?
In this week’s Guardian Technology, Mike Cross gives an overview of Europe’s INSPIRE directive, and explains why the UK government in particular is lobbying hard against the zero-pricing rules in it.
…Dr Max Craglia of the European commission’s joint research centre in Ispra, Italy, [notes] there is a two-metre difference between Belgium and the Netherlands in the official height of low tide – essential data for flood prevention. The anomalies multiply when many national agencies and tiers of government are involved, as can be the case when protecting stretches of coastline from damage.
…Nearly everyone supports the idea. But making geographical data freely available would destroy the business model of agencies such as Ordnance Survey, which funds activities by making a “profit” on sales of maps and geographical data. The OS warns of the threat in its latest annual report, published on Tuesday.
…The UK is unusually committed to charging users for data rather than funding its dissemination from taxation. One expert places Britain at the extreme end of the spectrum, while its system of crown copyright is unique in Europe.
(The OS’s latest reports, by the way, show a surplus of £9.58m on revenues of £118,356m. The capital employed – which John Bourn of the NAO still disagrees with, since he thinks the OS should capitalise its National Geographic Database – is given as £64m (if I’m reading the right column – tangible plus intangible assets). That’s a ROCE of 14.9%. Even if you add in Bourn’s estimated £50m for the NGD value, you still get a ROCE of nearly 7.5%. One has to think that the OS isn’t struggling yet.)
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Ordnance Survey gets its lobbying in against INSPIRE (2 November 2006; score: 51.73%)
- How the Inspire directive was watered down (23 November 2006; score: 47.2%)
- Inspire countdown (9 November 2006; score: 37.79%)
- In today's Guardian: how Inspire was watered down (22 May 2008; score: 26.75%)
- Welcome, iPM listeners (27 September 2008; score: 22.86%)
July 27th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Glad to see your campaign has belatedly recognised the benefits of INSPIRE, and removed the qualifier ‘iniquitous’ from its reference on the homepage.
July 27th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Yes, our dictionary was broken.
July 28th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Twice recently I have been phoned by people collecting data in surveys that have been commissioned on behalf of the government. My response in both cases has been “as long as the Ordnance Survey charges us for data that it collected using taxpayers’ money, the government will not get any data from me unless it pays me”.
I’d encourage others to do the same; fight fire with fire.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Etienne, as has been mentioned several time within the FOD pages, OS is a Trading Fund and therefore the OS does not “[charge] us for data that it collected using taxpayers’ money”. I am definitely not an expert in all this but I do think this claim is a bit of a humdinger.
I know that you could argue it does cost tax payers as other tax funded governement departments have to pay to use OS data but this is very different than claiming the OS is “[collecting] data using taxpayers money”.
More (perhaps biased) info is available here:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/media/features/tradingfund.html
Without a crystal ball, it is difficult to say whether the INSPIRE EU directive will be ultimately a good thing or not (I know many people do not feel they need a crystal ball to work this one out!!). My thoughts, however, are as follows:
If INSPIRE is accepted ‘as is’ without ammendment, this could lead to an explosion of innovative and useful new products for every sector of society. This would, however, require OS to continue its activities to the same scope and level of detail and expertise. My understanding is that if OS were to meet the requirements of INSPIRE, it would have to change its business model back to one fully funded by tax payers. If this were to happen, the OS might need to reduce the scope of its work, therefore making the resulting detail less useful. The knock-on effect could be that the derivative products arent the explosion of innovation that had been hoped. Of course, the other way OS could go is to become privatised, perhaps a Government Owned PLC. My limited understanding of this (I am trying to keep up with what is quite a complex issue) is that the INSPIRE requirements would no longer apply to OS, the government could still get its data (perhaps through contracts/licenses similar to those it already has, therefore not losing out), but the rest of us would have to pay for the data. Therefore, instead of acheiving the Free Data this campaign is going for, it could end up with the opposite in the case of OS. From what I gather, many key sticking points are the seemingly bizarre licensing structures that agencies such as OS use. Therefore, it might be better to focus the campaign on the change of licensing structure. However, this does not make for such catchy headlines.
Please feel free to correct my viewpoints as I am sure I still have a lot more to learn.
July 31st, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Are you sure INSPIRE has zero-pricing rules in it????
August 1st, 2006 at 8:49 am
MartinC, Ordnance Survey has only been a Trading Fund for 7 years out of it’s 214 year existence. Everything it does is based on data collected before it became a Trading Fund. All of the pre-1999 data was collected 100% at the expense of tax payer. Anything done since then would be derived from this work, and would be worthless without it.
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:35 am
The House of Commons Select Committee on European Scrutiny has considered the proposed INSPIRE directive on several occasions. The select committees reports can be obtained from the following URL’s:
Select Committee Thirty-Fourth Report (27th October 2004)
4 Infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmeuleg/42-xxxiv/4206.htm
Select Committee Fifth Report (12th October 2005)
24 Infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmeuleg/34-v/3426.htm
The above reports provide a UK Parliaments view on the proposed INSPIRE Directive.
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:52 pm
THIS SITE IS SO BIASED AS TO BE WORTHY OF WHOEVER YOU CARE TO BLAME. THERE IS NO WAY I CAN SEE TO INITIATE A TOPIC so all you believe in is “guided” dissent.
AND WHEN THE GUARDIAN PRINTS AN ARTICLE LIKE 3 AUGUST “WOULD A SPEED LIMIT DATABASE LEAD TO FEWER ROAD DEATHS” THE WHOLE THING DEGENERATES INTO THE NONSENSE IT IS. OH I AM SORRY I DID NOT SEE THE 30MPH SIGN ITS NOT ON THE SCREEN I AM LOOKING WHILE I AM DRIVING. SURELY YOU WERE MEANT TO BE LOOKING AT THE ROAD AND WOULD HAVE SEEN THE SIGN.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
The UK Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment under taken by DEFRA on the proposed INSPIRE Directive can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://www.iggi.gov.uk/assets/downloads/files/INSPIRE_partialRIA_May2005.pdf?PHPSESSID=263eb44461042f842ff33dfd7015a3f1
Other UK updates on the government handling of the proposed INSPIRE Directive can be obtained from the Intra-government Group on Geographic Information (IGGI) web site at:
http://www.iggi.gov.uk/initiatives.php?PHPSESSID=205d510ed5d5664a3d775e2213c35198
For wider pan European views on the proposed INSPIRE Directive and the UK position visit the European Geographic Information Policy Forum at:
http://www.ec-gis.org/egip/
August 12th, 2006 at 6:26 am
The concerns related to the proposed INSPIRE Directive and the impact of UK policy with respect to protecting public sector Trading funds over and above any other spatial data user is one that is picked up by the Public Geo Data campaig which has the strap line State owned geographic data is public property. The Geo Data campaign is running a petition which has over 6071 verified signatures from all across Europe.
http://petition.publicgeodata.org/
The Geo Data web site also provides a wealth of information and references about the proposed INSPIRE Directive and as such is well worth a visit if you have not already done so – irrespective of your view of the proposed INSPIRE Directive.
Understanding all the views that exist about the proposed INSPIRE Directive is key if society is to benefit from developments such as a European spatial data infrastructure.
In considering all the views and if you are a UK citizen you might consider the UK Gvoernments position with respect to Global warming and then ask yourself how does one accomplish this if one constrains data infrastructures such as the proposed INSPIRE Directive.
If you are not aware of the UK spatial data infrastructure initiative then a visit to the following URL may assist.
http://www.gipanel.org.uk/gipanel/gistrategy/index.html
August 16th, 2006 at 11:49 am
The Guardian’s campaign is directed against public sector information holders as they are public. Surely the point is who is paying for this data: in the case of the Guardian the readers and advertisers (those that benefit from publication) fund the paper. In the case of Ordnance Survey the organisations that use the data pay for it. The tax payer does not “pay for it twiceâ€? as the free our data campaign suggests. Just as any other organisation that sells to both government and the private sector survives, and continues operations, based upon sales to both sectors, so does Ordnance Survey.
I fail to see how Ordnance Survey is the evil monopoly restricting access to information that the public has already paid for, when government purchases the information from OS to provide a service to the public; just as the government (and the private sector) purchase information from the huge number of subscription academic publications – there is no campaign specifying that these should also be free.
Perhaps the response to this is that the government paid for the creation of Ordnance Survey, and paid for its initial collection of data, and therefore this should be free; yet the government also set up BT, or BP, or Cable and Wireless. Now that these post-public utilities are more commercially orientated should they provide free use of all infrastructure (cables and pipes) that public funds paid for? Should everything that the government helped to set up with public funds be free, or should those that use it pay for it – after all Ordnance Survey is providing a return on investment in terms of a dividend to the government, thereby reducing the burden on the taxpayer?
Perhaps I have misunderstood the point, but it seems that the Guardian’s campaign is a little misdirected?
August 16th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
No Chris, you have not misunderstood. This is about PSIHs exactly *because* they are public. At the time of BT’s privatisation (and much later, during the broadband rollout) there was a great deal of discussion about the fair use of BT’s taxpayer-funded infrastructure. The difference between BT and OS, of course, is that the company’s new owners paid what the government considered a fair price for the asset. OS is still state-owned; were it sold off (not a solution I favour, incidentally) it would be free, subject to certain laws, to charge what it liked.
I certainly wouldn’t use the word “evil” in connection with Ordnance Survey, though perhaps it could apply to some of the trading fund system’s unintended consequences.
I think the “taxpayer pays twice” slogan, for all its glibness, does make a useful point. The best and daftest example I know is in postal addressing data. We’re here to be challenged, though.
August 18th, 2006 at 8:09 am
“after all Ordnance Survey is providing a return on investment in terms of a dividend to the government, thereby reducing the burden on the taxpayer?”
Can’t quickly find the latest figures but the 03/04 return (profit) that presumably got paid back to the central coffers was £5.6Million.
Now I don’t know the exact figure that all the County and Districts pay OS under the mapping services agreement, but a very quick calculation shows it is at least this figure.
So what central government gets from the OS doesn’t compensate for what local government has to spend.
Who would you rather spend the £5million – central government or local government?
August 18th, 2006 at 9:39 am
I think that the Mapping Service Agreement likely costs a bit more. this document from Richmond, from last December, shows how much was being paid to OS annually (about £115,000
per annumover the MSA’s life [corrected - see AC Marsden comment below], for a single local authority; the UK has hundreds).So there’s a carousel of money going around here, it seems to me: taxpayers’ funds come from local authorities to pay the ostensibly non-taxpayer-funded OS. Yes, the OS gets money from private industry, but nothing like the £110m or so it claims as revenues. More like half of that.
In other words, the OS avoids costing £100m of taxpayers’ funds (if it was directly vote-funded) but costs at least £50m of taxpayers’ funds drawn from elsewhere, plus all the wrangling and time spent on contract and IP issues.
This is the madness of the trading fund model: the apparent efficiencies of letting an organisation run like a commercial entity displaces costs out to its suppliers and customers.
August 18th, 2006 at 10:40 am
Mapping Service Agreement (MSA)
As posted elsewhere on this blog the Official Journal of the European Communities contains a notice dated 20th September 2005, which announced who the contracts were awarded to under the MSA, and states the following:
Ordnance Survey – £68,700,000
Intermap Technologies – £650,000
Intelligent Addressing – £7,100,00
Total cost of contract awarded = £76,450,000
Research undertaken by myself during 2005 (based on information in the public domain and that obtained via FOI requests) indicates that the cost per head of population within England and Wales over the 4.34 year period that the MSA runs for is in the region of £0.30 per annum of which £0.28 pence per annum goes to the Ordnance Survey.
If one then uses a ball park figure that local authorities obtain roughly 25% of their income from local taxation and 75% from central government one can then arrive at figures for what percentage of the payment that local government organisations make to the Ordnance Survey that comes from local taxation and what comes from central taxation.
The MSA also separated out police authorities and fire and rescue authorities – for many the MSA was the first time that they had to make payments directly to the Ordnance Survey as previously they came within payments made by County Councils or Unitary Authority’s whom were making the payment under the previous Service Level Agreement.
Similar costs can be determined for the central government pan government agreement (PGA), which is currently within the procurement process.
These supply agreements then raise some interesting aspects related to when the public sector works in horizontal partnerships when they share geographic information as some of the partners within a partnership may fall under the PGA, some under the MSA, some under the NHS agreement and other under individual licences with the data suppliers or perhaps not licenced at all for any of the data being shared.
The MSA also brought in other charges such that local authorities that enable visitors to their web sites to enter a post code will either pay a sum per click or an annual sum per server to the Royal Mail for the use of postcode – I wonder how many citizens that pay taxes are aware that each time they enter a postcode via a web site they are increasing the financial burden to that local authority – one in theory could break financially the local authority – who would no doubt either with draw the service or increase the local taxes to stay afloat!
There is no doubt that the Ordnance Survey receives via its public sector customer’s monies that are derived from taxation. As such it is an internal money churn within the public sector. The key to this is then whether the costs of the administration bring value for money by the Ordnance Survey acting as a trading entity or fund as opposed to being a parliamentary vote funded organisation. As the data for the value for money of this particular aspect is not available within the public domain and assuming that audits have been undertaken by the responsible department of State (in this case DCLG) or the Auditing authorities, then the case is not proven that public sector bodies trading internally benefiting society as a whole with regards to public sector data and information. Trading in this way then raises further issues of competition as the Ordnance Survey is active on the open market (mixed economy) and hence the reason that these agreements (apart from the National Health Agreement) have to abide by the European Union public sector procurement directives. Further aspects then arise related to regulation of the market. The situation is complex and everyone including the public sector itself finds it time consuming and not easy to handle whether one is a public sector employee or otherwise.
The cost of putting the MSA in place and then administering it across the public sector bodies involved is significant as it is in the region of £10 million plus – an interesting figure when one thinks of the overall value paid to Ordnance Survey under the MSA.
August 18th, 2006 at 11:19 am
“I wonder how many citizens that pay taxes are aware that each time they enter a postcode via a web site they are increasing the financial burden to that local authority – one in theory could break financially the local authority – who would no doubt either with draw the service or increase the local taxes to stay afloat!”
Only in the LA was VERY stupid, as we have a choice, either pay 0.5p per click or a flat £3000 – as we have to make monthly returns, only the very silly LAs would continue to pay the 0.5p when the monthly returns go over £250.
August 18th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Charles – you mis-read the Richmond paper – that figure is for the course of the MSA (see sectio 3.3)
August 18th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
“Only in the LA was VERY stupid, as we have a choice, either pay 0.5p per click or a flat £3000 – as we have to make monthly returns, only the very silly LAs would continue to pay the 0.5p when the monthly returns go over £250.”
Quite! An alternative view of this might be – that this option was a clever way to encourage local government bodies to sign upto the £3000.
There are other interesting aspects of the MSA with respect to OSCAR and whether the constant reviews make it difficult for local government bodies to budget and forward plan!