The integrity of the quarrel remains....

Published : 09 April 2010

The “dreary steeples” of the longstanding debate about Ordnance Survey’s role in the national and commercial infrastructure are now rapidly being submerged in the ascending waters of a general election campaign.

The publication of the Government’s response to the OS consultation was announced on 1st April (serendipitous scheduling only). It was a curate’s egg document which perhaps was to be expected, given the history, the pre-electoral timing and the variety of viewpoints it had to incorporate.

First, credit where credit is due: the launch of OS OpenData is a significant step forward in opening up data for innovation and use. And the Government has listened in the consultation and made changes to ensure that vector data, which is manipulable and useful to developers, is included among the free datasets. It is a significant victory for the Free our Data campaign. It is also implicitly a challenge to the innovations and PSI  lobbies -  for them to  prove their point, as the Government’s response also administered a sideways swipe at the conclusions of the Cambridge report (verdict: not proven!).  The combination of the free mid-scale Vector mapping, OS Locator, Codepoint and Streetview means that other bodies should be able to compete effectively with OS Mastermap for many applications. Let's see how they respond.

Not that this was sufficient to silence critics – Ben Macintyre’s romantic article in The Times lingered on the non-availability for free of the popular Explorer and Landranger series in digital formats.  But the Government was quite right in our view – OS should not be deprived of these revenues from the charged for online and printed series. And the rambling public does not mind paying modestly for the significant added value of expert  production and widespread distribution.

But significant areas of dispute remain unresolved and even threaten to plunge the debate, so far advanced, backwards several years.

The announcement of a Public Sector Mapping Agreement, which is  OS's to have (along with an enhanced role in implementing the INSPIRE Directive), may be in itself a good idea but it is beset by troubling accompaniments.  OS is declared to be a commercial enterprise – but this is an unprocured endowment. Given this and the lack of definition of core, essential reference datasets, plus the unbundled public task and commercial operations of the OS, how is the public sector to ensure it will achieve Value for Money from OS?

And what of Governance – which for this column has always been of greater significance than the unprovable economic arguments of the Cambridge debate?  Previous OS commitment to separating its public task and commercial operational roles has been quietly downgraded.

Yet these issues are central to Government’s own governance principles (from State Aid through to the Information Fair Trading Scheme) and to the proper role of the public sector within a competitive market.  The consultation confuses and further dissipates regulatory influence on OS – e.g. no less than three bodies are to be involved: OPSI on the public data public task; an expert panel appointed by the Government and reporting to CLG ministers to monitor the OpenData; and a representative and expert customer body reporting to a government minister to define the products and services in the Public Sector Mapping Agreement. 

So in fact it is not clear who will define OS' public task (who would not prefer to report to three masters?). In addition OS will decide on its own derived data policy for the commercial sector, in liaison with the Cabinet Office and OPSI.

So a curate’s egg of a response which stores up much debate for the future when the waters of the General Election subside. Central to that debate is not the issue of which approach leads to most economic benefit (this is not an argument definitively measurable by other than clairvoyants). It is more fundamental and integral, for it is about the role and conduct of publicly owned bodies in a marketplace which by tradition and history they control.

Government should not continue to allow the divergence of its governance and legal framework and its rhetoric from the operations of one of its most critically placed digital market makers.

And so  "...the integrity of their quarrel remains undiminished...”