Should Ordnance Survey be split into two?
Following our earlier post about the Ordnance Survey losing the NIMSA contract, this week’s Guardian Technology investigates: Survey subsidy wiped off the map – and talks about the death of NIMSA to a number of people. Robert Barr of the University of Manchester mentions some possibilities:
Ending subsidies to Ordnance Survey raises another possibility: that a future government might consider outright privatisation – an option considered and rejected in the 1990s. This would be a disaster for free data. Barr suggests an alternative approach: splitting the organisation into two. One division would operate a national geospatial database, funded by the taxpayer and made available to all, while the other would compete freely in the marketplace for maps and other “value added” products.
Another model could be Canada’s Geobase project, where since 2001, mapping agencies at different levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – have agreed to share and make available geospatial data under so-called “copyleft” royalty-free licences. The database, available at the Geobase portal, includes administrative boundaries and height data, which have both been subjects of anguished controversy in Britain.
We repeat: we don’t think it would be at all good for Ordnance Survey to be privatised. For the free data model to work, you need a publicly-funded government agency.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- DCLG Select Committee snipes at Ordnance Survey; MoD says why not split it up? (7 February 2008; score: 29.54%)
- Postcode charges threatens split between councils and Post Office (16 November 2006; score: 15.88%)
- In the Guardian: what happens to the Postcode Address File in a Royal Mail split ownership? (9 March 2009; score: 15.62%)
- In today's Guardian: the problem with route data for glider pilots (15 May 2008; score: 11.58%)
- Terms of reference for government study into Trading Funds: read (and/or download) them here (15 October 2007; score: 8.49%)
November 9th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
You rightly recognise that withdrawal of the Central Government subsidy from Ordnance Survey doesn’t change very much. OS presents a different problem for the Free Our Data Campaign from many other forms of Public Sector Information as its data isn’t the bi-product of some other activity (unlike, for example, the registration of titles to land or company returns). Its function is to produce information.
The Director General (Vanessa Lawrence) is perfectly correct to say there are issues around stable funding, but it isn’t a polar choice between Central Government subsidy and naked competition in the marketplace. The real problem for Ordnance Survey is that no part of government tells it what it requires from OS, nor how much it would pay for it.
The parts of Central government that require mapping (spatial referencing) in order to function include the Land Registries, the Environment Agency, the Emergency Services and the Ministry of Defence, the Office of National Statistics, the Valuation Office Agency and all executive agencies dealing with agriculture. Spatial data is also vital to Local Government and the utilities.
It is they, who should actually specify what they require and pay for it. The reason they don’t goes back to the Survey’s military origins, funded out of military budgets.
Ordnance Survey could probably deliver the spatial data required by government for half the money that it spends at present, with fewer than half the number of employees. Anything that is not required by the government – and that probably includes publishing paper maps – should be privatised or eliminated from its remit. At that point, the underlying data could be made available at the marginal cost of dissemination (zero) to all comers.
Unless one believes that Ordnance Survey is a job creation scheme that should be preserved like a wildlife park in Southampton, then some rationalisation of its task is inevitable. There is one other way in which Ordnance Survey is a “Special Case�. Standardised spatial referencing is becoming as important in the modern world as standardised temporal referencing became with the introduction of the railway.
Modern life would be impossible without reliable clocks that operate on an agreed basis around the world. No one imagines that you should have to pay fees for accessing standard time-keeping, even if you make or sell clocks. It is equally important that we should have standard spatial referencing throughout the United Kingdom and across Europe.
This is the driver for INSPIRE, and Ordnance Survey is lobbying against INSPIRE for strictly Luddite reasons. If OS was funded in the way suggested above, it would have no incentive to spend vast amounts of money lobbying against European integration, and even larger sums on lawyers’ fees to devise ever more baroque ways of ensuring that its data cannot be used for many socially useful purposes.
Christopher Roper,
November 9th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Could this be a forerunner of what might happen if we reverted to a centrally funded model for the whole of OS?
Not sure why Michael Nicholson said:
“It seems surprising that they can be so sanguine about losing this money if they needed it so badly.”
OS have been maintaining that NIMSA has no benefit to the rest of their business and that it barely covers the cost of surveying uneconomic areas (i.e it is not a cross subsidy). Perhaps they have been telling us the truth!
November 10th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Perhaps this is a good place to posit an idea which I have had for a long time. What if there were a government re-structuring which might see the creation of a Department of Land and Property. Bring together OS, the Land Registry, the Valuation Office (am I forgetting some others?) and mandate that they work cooperatively, share data and provide services jointly and in the public interest. The cross-fertilisation would create economies of scale. At the end of the day, the cross-charging within the public sector sees only the taxpayer as the loser. If OS is looking for direction from government, as Christopher Roper states, then shouldn’t this be a directions which could be considered.
November 14th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
It’s worth checking out the Government’s own consultation on the future of NIMSA. “A twelve-week online public consultation was held from September to December 2004, during which over 300 responses were received, largely from users of mapping, via online questionnaire, via e-mail or via post. A further 30 interviews were held with selected stakeholders to assess emerging themes and areas of concern.” The conclusion: “Four potential options were presented under the consultation as possible ways forward
for NIMSA. A majority of respondents (51%) felt that the best option was to ‘broaden the definition of national interest and of which suppliers are best placed to deliver mapping services in the national interest’. The next most popular option among respondents (45% of respondents) was to ‘establish a new agreement along the same lines as the present one’. There was little support among respondents for the notions that the agreement should be ’significantly narrowed in focus’ (3% of respondents) or ’stopped altogether (1% of respondents).” One has to wonder why the consultation was held at all if they weren’t going to take a blind bit of notice. I am not bothered by the end of NIMSA, but one couldn’t help being reminded of the Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch (a million years ago) of a group of trade unionists, trying to decide if they will have tea or coffee, they all want tea, but then the T&GWU delegate uses his card vote to decide that they will all have coffee. Of course, the consultation was undertaken by the late lamented Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, who grew up with card votes. If interested, you can find the full paper at http://www.communities.gov.uk/pub/577/ConsultationontheNationalInterestMappingServicesAgreementNIMSAPDF496Kb_id1144577.pdf
November 20th, 2006 at 9:38 am
Thanks for all those thoughts.
Steven, your point is a good one (I think I said something similar towards the end of the article?). Clearly ministers with short-term horizons and the Treasury on their back will always be tempted to make “painless” economies here. Clearly there needs to be some kind of independent authority to monitor the quality of publicly available geodata.
An OPSI with teeth? Or a role for the proposed new national statistics board, or a similar body? I’m hoping to take a closer look at the statistics proposals in the next week or so. Or could Judy’s proposed Department for Land and Property fill that role? Possibly it would need to be constituted as a non ministerial department, or made accountable directly to Parliament, to safeguard it from government interference. More thoughts, please.
Christopher, trenchant observation. The hilarious – or terrifying -thing is that the DCLG actually cited the consultation as one of three reasons for ending Nimsa.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Most recent link to the CLG consultation:
http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/planningandbuilding/futurenational