DCLG Select Committee snipes at Ordnance Survey; MoD says why not split it up?
The report from the Commons Select Committee on Communities and Local Government looking into Ordnance Survey’s licensing and business model – a followup from 2002 – is now published.
It’s an interesting read, not least for some of the implications of what is said, and also for the repeated refrain that runs underneath: the government’s created a bit of a monster; but it doesn’t have any adequate way to un-monster it, unless it does what the Ministry of Defence suggests in its written evidence, split it:
Perhaps it is time for OS to split in two to have a government funded national geographic database capability and a separate commercial arm which exploits that data, with the same licence conditions as applied to any other commercial user. As the MOD is not a commercial competitor it has not been affected by this aspect of the OS role.
Now what’s interesting about that, of course, is that the government-funded NGD organisation would be, well, government-funded. OK, so there’s not a “free data” exploitation, but it’s a start.
The committee does recommend that OS’s accounts be made more transparent, to show how much of its costs come from the NGD work, and how much from exploiting that work. OS says it’s discussing this with the Office of Fair Trading (whose CUPI report suggested a similar split, along the lines of “refined” and “unrefined” data – which OS says doesn’t apply to its work). But there’s no timetable for a change, nor yet an indication of whether OS will adopt either suggestion.
There’s a brief story in the Guardian’s Technology section – “MPs rap Ordnance Survey’s ‘complex and inflexible’ licences” – , but there wasn’t really space to go into the points made – particularly in the evidence – in any detail.
But the evidence is fascinating for the picture it gives. The private company Getmapping, for example, charges that
competing with the OS in the imagery market has been a dangerous, frustrating and uncertain process
and believes that
OS is competing unfairly in the imagery market. We think that OS can do this because the boundaries between its national interest and its commercial activities are not well defined and because there is no effective regulator to whom we can appeal for help. Had OS taken notice of the recommendations of the previous 2002 Select Committee report then we think that many of our current problems would have been avoided.
We’re now all agog for the trading funds report that was commissioned by the Ministry for Justice all those months ago, which some have suggested to us might be published in time for the Budget (March 12). However, since it’s highly unlikely – even if the report suggested that all trading funds should be put under a direct taxation model (or, insanely, privatise them all), there wouldn’t be time to act on them by the budget. So the timing of the budget probably isn’t going to change the timetable. We’re still in it for the long haul, but the committee’s report has turned up some interesting grumblings within government about the way that OS is forced to cover its costs.
Tell us: what aspects of the conclusions or evidence do you find most interesting?
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- More on government departments' submissions to the Select Committee (2 August 2007; score: 52.02%)
- Departments weigh in on select committee Ordnance Survey enquiry (23 July 2007; score: 42.02%)
- In the Guardian: how rows over intellectual property are causing problems for the 2011 census (6 June 2008; score: 37.48%)
- How the Met Office lost millions of pounds trying to compete with the private sector (1 June 2006; score: 28.71%)
- NIMSA is dead: bad news for Ordnance Survey - and free data? (2 November 2006; score: 28.06%)
February 15th, 2008 at 11:31 am
The OS’s insistence that it cannot readily separate the costs of ‘unrefined’ and ‘refined’ data is extraordinary, and if this is really correct it ought to ring loud alarm bells in both ODPM and the Treasury.
The cost of the ‘unfined data’ is surely the annual cost of maintaining the topographic database up to date, taking account of direct staff costs, travel, equipment write-down and renewal, proportion of senior management expenses, etc. OS must have this data somewhere, otherwise it would not know the relative economic advantages of ground and air survey methods (unless it is still using data gathered in the 1950s and 1960s, which is unlikely!), or of contracting some survey work to the private sector (which in turn has sometimes been sub-contracted to India). ‘Refined’ data costs are surely those associated with products and databases such as OS MasterMap, which include extra software, at least some of which has had to be licensed from external suppliers, who one suspects only do this for commercial reasons!
The suggestion that the trading fund problem might be solved by ‘privatising the lot’ is interesting, but, at least in the case of Ordnance Survey, there is the problem of the Ordnance Survey Act of 1841. This gives OS (as a part of the Boasd of Ordnance: the powers have since been transferred as OS has moved from one ministry to another) a statutory right of entry onto property for survey purposes. These powers do not have to be exercised very often (most owners and occupiers are happy to grant access as a matter of public service), but they are very useful to have in reserve. Were OS to be privatised, one of two things would have to happen: (1) the powers lapse, and the new owner of OS would be in no better position than any other private survey company, or (2) an amendment to the 1841 Act would give OS’s new owners privileged access to private propery, for purposes of private gain without any benefit to the property owner (unlike, say, a utility connection): this would be a novel departure, and the furore in certain sections of the press can easily be imagined! Lest this be thought a little imaginative, this was apparently the main hurdle identified when the then Conservative government investigated privatising OS in the early 1990s.
However, were the MoD’s suggestion of splitting OS into two to be followed up, it would open up the possibility of privatising part of OS’s current operations. The ownership and maintenance of the topographic database would remain in the public sector (together with the access powers under the 1841 Act), whereas the processing and marketing of the ‘refined’ data would be handled by a separate, fully commercial, organisation. Given that even its fiercest critics concede that ‘Ordnance Survey’ is a guarantee of quality, it would seem sensible for the data-collection organisation to continue to be called ‘Ordnance Survey’, and the commercial data-processor to be called something else. The ‘Ordnance Survey’ could be funded either by its sales or (but perhaps this is a little radical) by the taxpayer, at a cost of perhaps £50 million per annum.
And no, I’m not a fan of privatisation!