In The Guardian, we’ve followed up on the question put by the Tories’ social affairs minister (if I recall correctly) Eric Pickles, who asked about the price of the one-off census address database for 2011.

It turns out it has risen from £10 million to £12m in the space of just a few short months. Hasn’t anyone told them there’s a deflationary recession on?

As a reminder: the need for this database has grown from the fact that the Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail and local authorities can’t agree on how to build an address database that the Office for National Statistics can agree will be definitive for carrying out the 2011 census.

Well, fair enough, you might say. The ONS’s requirements differ subtly from OS, RM and local authorities. It’s possible that their interests and plans won’t be entirely congruent.

What’s mind-boggling, and completely idiotic, is that ONS is going to build this database for itself (must already be in the process, since it doesn’t have long to do it) and then is going to destroy it. Because nobody could agree to let such a thing exist independently.

It’s an egregrious waste of money – first the building, which is madness, given that the data already exists; and then the destruction. Occam’s Razor of datasets: don’t let entities multiply needlessly. And the first law of not wasting things: don’t destroy hard-won datasets needlessly.

The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
• In the Guardian: how rows over intellectual property are causing problems for the 2011 census (6 June 2008; score: 38.86%)
• Revealed: how profitable Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF) really is (26 April 2007; score: 36.02%)
• Postcodes: local authorities vs Royal Mail still arguing; want to sign a petition? (24 May 2007; score: 35.12%)
• Will the Post Office and Ordnance Survey ever agree about house names? (10 July 2006; score: 35.04%)
• A million streets, four million holes in them: why not coordinate it? (21 September 2006; score: 32.41%)