Could free data have helped the Rural Payments Agency?
The Rural Payments Agency has quickly become famous, at least in Westminster circles, for losing £20m of our money and seeing its head fired for the failure which left farmers out of pocket.
This week’s Technology Guardian looks at the extent to which bad mapping led to the problems, and asks whether free data – on the lines we’re advocating – could have averted it.
The answer in truth is “not on its own”, because the RPA was a many-headed failure: the principal cause of problems was that the RPA decided to go beyond the European recommendations, and provide payments for parcels of land as small as 0.1 hectare (1,000 square metres) – one-third as large as required under the European Union rules.
That followed all sorts of problems where maps were inaccurate or out of date, and where changes noted by farmers weren’t incorporated.
Maps printed from the Land Register were sent to every farmer claiming subsidy to check. According to Julie Robinson, a lawyer with the National Farmers’ Union, this is where the system went wrong. “Many of the maps sent back to farmers to check turned out to be seriously inaccurate.” The maps missed land lost to floods, hedges and shadows from lines of trees. “It is all at the mercy of accurate mapping. The farmer depends on them to get it right.” The main problem, she says, was that the system was not matched to the needs of the users.
Somehow we do feel that the Ordnance Survey and its Master Map would have coped better with the problem, as well as giving the Land Registry a huge boost in its attempts to find out who owns what parts of England. (Scotland and Wales coped better.)
Could free mapping data have prevented the disaster? Probably not – mapping was only one factor in a complex mess of policy and management failures. But the fact that Defra was allowed to commission its own geographical database to an unworkably high specification suggests flaws in the government’s current way of working.
There are two opportunities for change. One is a new geographical information strategy for the UK, now before ministers and expected to be published this summer. The second is the process of implementing the European Inspire directive, to create a “geospatial data infrastructure” across Europe. The lead department in transposing this directive into UK law is Defra. We suggest that when implementing Inspire it errs on the side of openness.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Delivery drivers can't find you? Tell Navteq (24 April 2006; score: 43.72%)
- Absolutely anyone can play and profit: Canada makes mapping data free for any use (11 April 2007; score: 25.34%)
- Infoworld writes on Free Our Data campaign; know about address data? (14 April 2006; score: 23.77%)
- "There's no economic incentive to free data - until we produce one" (11 May 2006; score: 20.59%)
- So here's the Ordnance Survey's public task, for the record (15 May 2008; score: 16.2%)
April 20th, 2007 at 9:04 am
After the DEFRA disaster it’s interesting to see History repeating itself in Scotland, where SEERAD (The Scottish Environment and Farming dept) is effectively merging with the Scottish Forestry Commission (FCS). One of the outcomes of this is that all forestry areas seeking grant aid (often for environmentally beneficial projects) need to be IACS registered to qualify for grants. This involves drawing up and submitting accurate maps to SEERAD, which must then be processed and tested by SEERAD. These unregistered Forests represent a huge land area where ownership boundaries and mapping is often problematic.
Both the FC and SEERAD are not intending to increase resources to cope with this unprecedented demand, and there is no provision to provide digital data to applicants. OS Mastermap data is prohibitively expensive for the large forest areas; yet providing this data to applicants would reduce SEERADs costs and greatly speed up the process.
Some months ago, prior to the absorption of the FCS into the collective, the FCS were talking of making OS digital data freely available to applicants via their website, but this excellent and progressive idea seems to have died a death.
In the past, when SEERAD implemented the Whole Farm Payment system it adopted a different approach to DEFRA, with the commendable result that it all worked in Scotland. Many of the factors that led to the DEFRA disaster are now being happily loaded into the new SEERAD project, and one of the key common factors is the restriction on the free (or even reasonably priced) availability of quality mapping data.
All of this information is obvious to everyone involved with the issue in Scotland, and it’s equally obvious that it is going to cost the Government a lot of money one way or another. Someone should start keeping a balance sheet of Ordnance Survey net revenue vs. all the myriad costs associated with the high price of data.