Nothing's improved since then. The PAF isn't particularly profitable (2005/6: revenue £18m, profit <£2m). There might be more numbers in the latest RM report.
The argument for making it free is as strong as ever - I think it would be persuasive to have more examples from other countries of the before/after effect: the canonical example of "free data" benefit is GPS, which costs the US ~$1bn to run annually and brings colossal economic benefit.
The people who need to be persuaded are the incoming Labour MPs who will be running Cabinet Office (fight with trading funds such as OS) and DSIT (fight with RM). The way to persuade them is to make the "this will drive economic growth" case - the present licensing system only favours big (usually American) companies such as Google and Amazon. Labour wants to talk big on economic growth.
I don't know if there's any case studies of benefits from the OGL on the OS data; those could help.
The biggest benefit will come from putting the PAF into an organisation which is most motivated to provide accurate data while not screwing money out of people; for that reason I'd suggest taking it away from RM, which can have a free licence in perpetuity, and giving it to ONS. (Is ONS a trading fund? I can't find anything on that.)
The question of whether something needs legislation or not isn't that important, in my view - what's more important is finding the right structure and then driving toward that, because if the structure's right then everything can be made to happen around it. (Getting OS to release data under the OGL didn't require legislation, even though it meant a loss of revenue.) Again, the message to push to Labour is that this is the Path To Growth which will also encourage home-grown businesses.
The funding suggestion of a small rise in LR fees has been suggested many times (I think Bob Barr was a champion of this idea). Clearly, the Tories simply don't have any interest in this topic at all, as evidenced by the GC "not having got around" to looking at the PAF in 13 years. Another possibility is that there's a charge per house registered. Apparently Labour wants to build 1.5m homes in its first five years, so £60 per house (300k houses annually, £18m annual revenue to run PAF) covers it.
This stuff is all doable, and desirable. It just requires a bit of adjustment and movement, and the trouble is this government long ago ran out of ideas for how to adjust and move things.
Finally: "I recommend reading PAF-hero Owen Boswarva’s detailed explanation for all the grizzly details." Bear with me - I think the word you want is "grisly".
Joining this late, but I very much agree that the PAF data should be opened up. Last I heard, the PAF file itself is compiled by a 3rd party company (AFD based on the Isle of Man) which presumably has a cost attached to it in addition to the costs on Royal Mail's side. I don't see any problem with continuing to pay AFD or one of their competitors to do the compilation, as long as it's not bloody Experian, may they rot in a rainy hell of Monday mornings.
On the income side, I read here that the profit in 2005/6 was <£2m on revenues of £18m, but I would be very surprised if both those figures haven't increased hugely since then, not least because I've seen the bill to my organisation for our very modest number of lookups per year which is enough for us to consider not bothering with any address validation at all. I'm terrified to think what large online retailers pay each year for address lookups in their signup workflows: it must easily cover the cost of each address update in the PAF being typed in on a solid gold keyboard by a Nobel laureate or Pulitzer prize winner and checked twice.
If the PAF data was liberated, my organisation might still pay a 3rd party to provide the software to do the lookup (currently we get this as a web service, but in the past it was local software hitting a local PAF file) but I would expect most of the per-transaction cost to go away, assuming the 3rd party passed on the saving. If they didn't pass it on, it would make it even more likely that open-source software would be produced to work with the (free) PAF file at a lower overall cost than the web service.
Related, in a way: the National Gallery (like other museums) operates a system where it "licenses" images of objects in its collection. But it turns out that doing that is actually lossmaking because having people "selling" images, dealing with licences etc isn't efficient.
(As it happens, a Appeal court judgment in November means that there's no copyright enforceable on those images, so they can't be "licensed" any longer.)
Really interesting article, and after years of reading you campaign I hope we get closer to hints that Westminster would consider this a real and pressing possibility.
The current structure of how land is registered, surveyed and addressed has changed substantially compared to even 10yrs ago when HMLR/OS used to work much closer together. Now each work as almost two completely different entities aside from particular projects. This has certain advantages as OS do a unique job but the way fees work between each other is beyond bonkers. OS Ltd really does interact with more centralised departments like a private company, almost for profit.
If a state owned free PAF service did happen it would have to be integrated into either one of these departments imo and be actually free - more than likely from the OS side as LR couldn’t handle it.
Just my two pence as someone involved in the registration side.
I know LR had a dedicated team of surveyors for new developments, boundary queries etc before that got mothballed around 20 years ago - anything specifically property registration related or disputed boundaries that sort of thing.
Since then LR uses OS like any other business, as a private company. But, that means LR have to fork out the fees every time they need a survey request - it’s maddening.
Totally agree that public data should be open. I have had reasonably good results with the Code-Point Open dataset from Ordnance Survey, although this pinpoints a kind of centroid of the postcode rather than the multiple delivery addresses it contains. Good enough for some applications.
There is another halfway house option. The historic PAF can be released for free under OGL, but realtime / rapid updates are chargeable. Under this model, anyone who *needs* the most accurate and up-to-date data can pay for it. Anyone else can get data which is X months old.
(This isn't one I personally advocate for - but I saw it being mentioned as a possible model when I was somewhat adjacent to the problem.)
I think there is scope for an innovation license that lasts (say) 6 months for registered UK businesses and is very cheap, that can be extended to a 5 year business license etc
It would not be a barrier to free apps *developing* on it which is the key problem. Once the app exists it's up to the developer to maintain it, which includes all kinds of other overhead like DNS, hosting, etc.
The practical reality is that the data is not just a static asset one can "release" like a caged bird and be done with it. It is a job that someone must continuously do. All of the address data must be constantly updated, purged of errors , backed up, and made accessible.
I understand the argument that this is a public good. The problem is that the maintenance of the public good is not free and establishing a reciprocal system where its maintenance is supported by its use just makes sense.
What you're proposing, that the government subsidizes maintenance, squanders the demonstrable self-supporting revenue from businesses happy to pay for the API. With the money saved on maintenance the government could even offer grants to those who want to make free apps for the public good.
The underlying thinking here is “things government does should pay their way directly”. This is false. The NHS provides healthcare out of public taxation because everyone being healthy has a wider public benefit than just individual health. GPS costs $1bn for the US DOD annually; we all benefit from not getting lost and getting traffic updates. The cost of upkeep for the PAF is minuscule compared to almost anything else in government: £18m max (likely quite a bit less if you streamlined the processes by which postcodes and UPRNs are allocated) and the benefit sure to be bigger because it’s certain that some economic activity is forestalled by the cost of access.
If you put a price on something, you restrict demand. That's axiomatic; even if the price is fractions of a cent/penny, someone has to set up a system to record transactions and tot up the money owed, and a would-be user of the thing (in your case a developer) has to promise to pay, and if they don't you have to chase them, and if they let someone else use it without permission you have to get people to chase them and/or sue them, and on and on. Setting a price on digital goods that are collected by (what used to be, and should be the responsibility of) a government body only makes sense if you want to restrict their use, or there is a very small but niche market for them. Postcodes aren't like that: they have wide-ranging applications.
Contrast with: free to use. No recording transactions, no chasing people. But those who use the data can apply it to whatever they want without concerns that they'll hit some level at which they have to pay more (or the government will change prices, etc). That encourages economic activity, and a multiplier effect - just as one sees with GPS, which enables colossal amounts of commerce - certainly more than the $1bn it costs to run. The government (if it owned postcodes) could reap the benefit through taxes from the companies whose costs are reduced by not having to pay PAF fees and which can now expand their business by using applications with postcodes without worrying about IP problems.
Your idea (charge on app success - though you haven't defined "success": operating profit? Pre-tax profit? Post-tax profit?) is applicable to private companies operating APIs (Google with Maps, Apple with Maps, Twitter) but my (and I believe James's) opposition to PAF pricing isn't because it "smells like capitalism" [side note: please don't insult your interlocutors if you don't know everything about their political and economic views], but because it *restricts* capitalism. We should not be washing money around inside government, and a now-privatised organisation which used to be part of government should not own a digital product that has a status as a public good.
The OS made a lot of map data free to use back in 2010. The OS has not sunk into the sea. Linux exists, costing nothing, and so does Windows, costing something. Both models can exist, but you probably don't need me to tell you that Linux installs far outnumber Windows installs. There's a reason why.
Exactly this - address data is a fundamental digital building block in our lives, and should be free and unrestricted, funded as a public good, so that public and private sectors can take the data and build cool and useful things on top of it.
Perhaps this could be one for the Competition and Market Authority. Royal Mail holds a monopoly on this data so it should be forced to provide it for free, or hand it over to the state or somehow allow competitors into the space.
A third solution would be for the government to mandate that Royal Mail provide an API to get data as needed and charge for production, but not development API use.
For example if a developer made
an app that used address data to locate restaurants there would be no charge for the developer to access the API while building the app. On launch each API call generated by an end-user would be charged.
This takes away the high barrier to entry without removing the financial incentive for Royal Mail to produce a reliable service. Plus the developer only pays if they are successful. This is quite a common model.
That's still a barrier and would prevent free apps from using it. Just make it free and fund the cost of maintaining a database out of general taxation.
True that's a good point about the address as just checked and the lat-lon to plus code conversion is free but the address conversion stuff at scale needs google APIs or a mapping base. Which brings us back to the discussion about opening up OS data or getting Open street maps to have the address data open.
The big advantage of plus codes is that it's international, so would allow UK orgs to scale.
I also personally would prefer orgs to use something other than post codes, as it doesn't work for me living in a big block of flats, as one post code does not reflect the multiple entrances to the building and depending on the service, I need to be able to direct them to a specific entrance.
Bloody hell, all the same circuitry and obfuscation from RM and OS, just the same as - can it possibly be true - *13* years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/22/postcode-petition-fails-blocked-number-ten
Nothing's improved since then. The PAF isn't particularly profitable (2005/6: revenue £18m, profit <£2m). There might be more numbers in the latest RM report.
The argument for making it free is as strong as ever - I think it would be persuasive to have more examples from other countries of the before/after effect: the canonical example of "free data" benefit is GPS, which costs the US ~$1bn to run annually and brings colossal economic benefit.
The people who need to be persuaded are the incoming Labour MPs who will be running Cabinet Office (fight with trading funds such as OS) and DSIT (fight with RM). The way to persuade them is to make the "this will drive economic growth" case - the present licensing system only favours big (usually American) companies such as Google and Amazon. Labour wants to talk big on economic growth.
I don't know if there's any case studies of benefits from the OGL on the OS data; those could help.
The biggest benefit will come from putting the PAF into an organisation which is most motivated to provide accurate data while not screwing money out of people; for that reason I'd suggest taking it away from RM, which can have a free licence in perpetuity, and giving it to ONS. (Is ONS a trading fund? I can't find anything on that.)
The question of whether something needs legislation or not isn't that important, in my view - what's more important is finding the right structure and then driving toward that, because if the structure's right then everything can be made to happen around it. (Getting OS to release data under the OGL didn't require legislation, even though it meant a loss of revenue.) Again, the message to push to Labour is that this is the Path To Growth which will also encourage home-grown businesses.
The funding suggestion of a small rise in LR fees has been suggested many times (I think Bob Barr was a champion of this idea). Clearly, the Tories simply don't have any interest in this topic at all, as evidenced by the GC "not having got around" to looking at the PAF in 13 years. Another possibility is that there's a charge per house registered. Apparently Labour wants to build 1.5m homes in its first five years, so £60 per house (300k houses annually, £18m annual revenue to run PAF) covers it.
This stuff is all doable, and desirable. It just requires a bit of adjustment and movement, and the trouble is this government long ago ran out of ideas for how to adjust and move things.
Finally: "I recommend reading PAF-hero Owen Boswarva’s detailed explanation for all the grizzly details." Bear with me - I think the word you want is "grisly".
Joining this late, but I very much agree that the PAF data should be opened up. Last I heard, the PAF file itself is compiled by a 3rd party company (AFD based on the Isle of Man) which presumably has a cost attached to it in addition to the costs on Royal Mail's side. I don't see any problem with continuing to pay AFD or one of their competitors to do the compilation, as long as it's not bloody Experian, may they rot in a rainy hell of Monday mornings.
On the income side, I read here that the profit in 2005/6 was <£2m on revenues of £18m, but I would be very surprised if both those figures haven't increased hugely since then, not least because I've seen the bill to my organisation for our very modest number of lookups per year which is enough for us to consider not bothering with any address validation at all. I'm terrified to think what large online retailers pay each year for address lookups in their signup workflows: it must easily cover the cost of each address update in the PAF being typed in on a solid gold keyboard by a Nobel laureate or Pulitzer prize winner and checked twice.
If the PAF data was liberated, my organisation might still pay a 3rd party to provide the software to do the lookup (currently we get this as a web service, but in the past it was local software hitting a local PAF file) but I would expect most of the per-transaction cost to go away, assuming the 3rd party passed on the saving. If they didn't pass it on, it would make it even more likely that open-source software would be produced to work with the (free) PAF file at a lower overall cost than the web service.
Related, in a way: the National Gallery (like other museums) operates a system where it "licenses" images of objects in its collection. But it turns out that doing that is actually lossmaking because having people "selling" images, dealing with licences etc isn't efficient.
(As it happens, a Appeal court judgment in November means that there's no copyright enforceable on those images, so they can't be "licensed" any longer.)
Terrific thread (from before the Appeal court decision) here: https://twitter.com/arthistorynews/status/1661310297179553792
Really interesting article, and after years of reading you campaign I hope we get closer to hints that Westminster would consider this a real and pressing possibility.
The current structure of how land is registered, surveyed and addressed has changed substantially compared to even 10yrs ago when HMLR/OS used to work much closer together. Now each work as almost two completely different entities aside from particular projects. This has certain advantages as OS do a unique job but the way fees work between each other is beyond bonkers. OS Ltd really does interact with more centralised departments like a private company, almost for profit.
If a state owned free PAF service did happen it would have to be integrated into either one of these departments imo and be actually free - more than likely from the OS side as LR couldn’t handle it.
Just my two pence as someone involved in the registration side.
That’s super interesting - any idea why they don’t work as closely together anymore?
I know LR had a dedicated team of surveyors for new developments, boundary queries etc before that got mothballed around 20 years ago - anything specifically property registration related or disputed boundaries that sort of thing.
Since then LR uses OS like any other business, as a private company. But, that means LR have to fork out the fees every time they need a survey request - it’s maddening.
Totally agree that public data should be open. I have had reasonably good results with the Code-Point Open dataset from Ordnance Survey, although this pinpoints a kind of centroid of the postcode rather than the multiple delivery addresses it contains. Good enough for some applications.
There is another halfway house option. The historic PAF can be released for free under OGL, but realtime / rapid updates are chargeable. Under this model, anyone who *needs* the most accurate and up-to-date data can pay for it. Anyone else can get data which is X months old.
(This isn't one I personally advocate for - but I saw it being mentioned as a possible model when I was somewhat adjacent to the problem.)
I think there is scope for an innovation license that lasts (say) 6 months for registered UK businesses and is very cheap, that can be extended to a 5 year business license etc
Looking at the PAF website, it has very confusing licensing.
If we buy a copy of the database, do we still need to pay monthly/yearly to use it even if we do not update it?
I would be happy with the government just forcing the Royal Mail to make this MUCH cheaper.
It would not be a barrier to free apps *developing* on it which is the key problem. Once the app exists it's up to the developer to maintain it, which includes all kinds of other overhead like DNS, hosting, etc.
The practical reality is that the data is not just a static asset one can "release" like a caged bird and be done with it. It is a job that someone must continuously do. All of the address data must be constantly updated, purged of errors , backed up, and made accessible.
I understand the argument that this is a public good. The problem is that the maintenance of the public good is not free and establishing a reciprocal system where its maintenance is supported by its use just makes sense.
What you're proposing, that the government subsidizes maintenance, squanders the demonstrable self-supporting revenue from businesses happy to pay for the API. With the money saved on maintenance the government could even offer grants to those who want to make free apps for the public good.
The underlying thinking here is “things government does should pay their way directly”. This is false. The NHS provides healthcare out of public taxation because everyone being healthy has a wider public benefit than just individual health. GPS costs $1bn for the US DOD annually; we all benefit from not getting lost and getting traffic updates. The cost of upkeep for the PAF is minuscule compared to almost anything else in government: £18m max (likely quite a bit less if you streamlined the processes by which postcodes and UPRNs are allocated) and the benefit sure to be bigger because it’s certain that some economic activity is forestalled by the cost of access.
What economic activity is forestalled? I don't think you're getting how this works (and again it's a very common model).
1. Developer uses resource to develop unimpeded for free
2. If the app is a success API calls are charged at a fraction of a cent
I would even go further and say that fraction would be a rate mandated by government.
Seems to me you're having an allergic reaction to a good idea because it 'smells like capitalism'.
If you put a price on something, you restrict demand. That's axiomatic; even if the price is fractions of a cent/penny, someone has to set up a system to record transactions and tot up the money owed, and a would-be user of the thing (in your case a developer) has to promise to pay, and if they don't you have to chase them, and if they let someone else use it without permission you have to get people to chase them and/or sue them, and on and on. Setting a price on digital goods that are collected by (what used to be, and should be the responsibility of) a government body only makes sense if you want to restrict their use, or there is a very small but niche market for them. Postcodes aren't like that: they have wide-ranging applications.
Contrast with: free to use. No recording transactions, no chasing people. But those who use the data can apply it to whatever they want without concerns that they'll hit some level at which they have to pay more (or the government will change prices, etc). That encourages economic activity, and a multiplier effect - just as one sees with GPS, which enables colossal amounts of commerce - certainly more than the $1bn it costs to run. The government (if it owned postcodes) could reap the benefit through taxes from the companies whose costs are reduced by not having to pay PAF fees and which can now expand their business by using applications with postcodes without worrying about IP problems.
Your idea (charge on app success - though you haven't defined "success": operating profit? Pre-tax profit? Post-tax profit?) is applicable to private companies operating APIs (Google with Maps, Apple with Maps, Twitter) but my (and I believe James's) opposition to PAF pricing isn't because it "smells like capitalism" [side note: please don't insult your interlocutors if you don't know everything about their political and economic views], but because it *restricts* capitalism. We should not be washing money around inside government, and a now-privatised organisation which used to be part of government should not own a digital product that has a status as a public good.
The OS made a lot of map data free to use back in 2010. The OS has not sunk into the sea. Linux exists, costing nothing, and so does Windows, costing something. Both models can exist, but you probably don't need me to tell you that Linux installs far outnumber Windows installs. There's a reason why.
Exactly this - address data is a fundamental digital building block in our lives, and should be free and unrestricted, funded as a public good, so that public and private sectors can take the data and build cool and useful things on top of it.
Perhaps this could be one for the Competition and Market Authority. Royal Mail holds a monopoly on this data so it should be forced to provide it for free, or hand it over to the state or somehow allow competitors into the space.
A third solution would be for the government to mandate that Royal Mail provide an API to get data as needed and charge for production, but not development API use.
For example if a developer made
an app that used address data to locate restaurants there would be no charge for the developer to access the API while building the app. On launch each API call generated by an end-user would be charged.
This takes away the high barrier to entry without removing the financial incentive for Royal Mail to produce a reliable service. Plus the developer only pays if they are successful. This is quite a common model.
That's still a barrier and would prevent free apps from using it. Just make it free and fund the cost of maintaining a database out of general taxation.
Why should the government pay money to do this when an open source solution exists already?
https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/support/
It's a new thing that people don't know, unlike their postcode which they do know, and doesn't include your address?
True that's a good point about the address as just checked and the lat-lon to plus code conversion is free but the address conversion stuff at scale needs google APIs or a mapping base. Which brings us back to the discussion about opening up OS data or getting Open street maps to have the address data open.
The big advantage of plus codes is that it's international, so would allow UK orgs to scale.
I also personally would prefer orgs to use something other than post codes, as it doesn't work for me living in a big block of flats, as one post code does not reflect the multiple entrances to the building and depending on the service, I need to be able to direct them to a specific entrance.