Odds and Ends #29: How Thorpe Park was held back by Britain's planning laws

Plus big names back the PAF liberation amendment, and a suspiciously familiar story in the Daily Mail.

Programming note: Huge apologies for not getting a new big essay out this week. Last weekend, I was struck down with a cold, which wiped me out for a few days. However, I’m cooking up something nerdy for Monday, and I’ll try and catch up with a second post next week too. In the meantime, here’s your usual Odds and Ends newsletter-within-a-newsletter.

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your weekly round-up of the most interesting links, videos and other #content I’ve consumed this week – as well as smaller takes and observations.

This week we look at a weirdly familiar story in the Daily Mail, enjoy a very funny documentary, and much more!

So let’s get started!

Tom Watson and Natalie Bennett back the Postcode Address File amendment

First, an exciting update on what I guess is now an actual campaign to liberate the Postcode Address File (PAF).

If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, start here.

Anyway, regular readers will remember that what for me started as a running joke on my Substack has somehow escalated all the way from meme, to an actual proposal in the House of Lords.

Last week LibDem Digital Economy spokesperson Lord Clement-Jones, working with my PAF-campaigning colleagues Peter Wells and Anna Powell-Smith, tabled an amendment to the on-going Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, that would legally oblige the government to publish free, open address data.

So now the Lords is going to get a chance to have its say and – hopefully – incorporate this amendment into the new law.

And brilliantly, after I posted about it, I was delighted to hear that a bunch of you had contacted the Lords, Baronesses, Viscounts and Countesses in your lives, asking them to vote in favour of the amendment. Some even responded and sounded pretty PAF-curious!

We also learned this week when the amendment might be debated. I’m told that the Bill’s amendments could be up for debate in the Chamber on a bunch of dates ranging from the 20th March until the 1st May. So pretty soon.

But perhaps the most exciting response though has been that the amendment now has two co-sponsors who have signed on alongside Lord Clement-Jones: Natalie Bennett, the former leader of the Green Party, and Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party.

I’m thrilled that both have jumped on board – it’s great to see that across the parties, politicians are recognising the potential of a free Postcode Address File for stimulating growth and innovation.

And I hope that it means that this time we can “GET PAF DONE” – especially for Tom, who was involved in the first big push to liberate the PAF back in the dog days of the last Labour government.

In fact, students of history may like to read this post Tom wrote about the PAF for the website LibDemVoice back in 2009 – as his words back then are even more relevant today:

There is an economic truth that had the postcode address file been made available for free re-use, the financial benefits for the country would be considerably more than the income Royal Mail make from licensing the file.

The rigidity of Royal Mail is not unique. Ordnance Survey almost go out of their way to prohibit innovation in digital mapping with their cumbersome licence regime.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Government and, more importantly the civil service, can show a much more enlightened view towards licensing non-personal data. Set data free and clever people can do unimaginably good things with it. The recent showusabetterway.com competition to design public services using non-personal data showed an array of ideas for new services that ran into the hundreds.

I like to think that the liberation of public information in re-usable formats using open standards is an agenda shared between progressives in both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. At the heart of the debate is a profound belief that citizens should have a greater say over the public services they use.

Today, all the good house hunting sites on the web give you not only a good description of the house but a mash up it’s location on a map with the ofsted report to nearby schools.

This kind of thinking can apply to many more government services. And it doesn’t have to be the responsibility of government to make all the sites. Free up data and entrepreneurs will use it in socially useful ways.

This is one area where the political parties can work together to break the cultural inertia to web innovation that exists in too many parts of the public sector. I’d welcome your ideas about how we can do that.

Preach!

And remember – if you know someone in the Lords, now is a great time to give them a call, check in, and perhaps drop a mention of a little amendment they might like to vote for.

What’s Happening Now: It’s crime time

It's crime time

On this week’s edition of What’s Happening Now, the podcast I do with my comedian friend Sam Hampson, we’re talking crime. Subscribe and have a listen to hear my grand un-evidenced theory of why crime feels like a more salient issue now (even if it only ties with housing in polls), and to hear Sam’s genuinely terrifying story about the time he was technically held hostage.

Plus Sam speaks to journalist Tir Dhondy about her really excellent BBC Three documentary, Hunting the Rolex Rippers – in which she spends time with the kids who are stealing luxury watches and, as she eventually learns, carrying some terrifying weapons.

The Difficult Creation of Thorpe Park (spoiler: It was planning laws of course)