Welcome news from the blog of Lynne Featherstone (who, apart from being a LibDem MP, is also chair of the party’s Technology Advisory Board):
We need postcodes to be owned by the public – not sold to the public. Postcodes are the basic pre-requisite for allowing services to be developed that support democratic accountability.
It’s an important issue because the Royal Mail’s decision to take a hard line in enforcing its legal rights means a range of useful public services – including ones to help unemployed people find jobs and to help residents hear about planning applications near them – have been shut down. It’s a topic Labour MP Tom Watson blogged about on this site last month:
The recent decision by Royal Mail to close down the Ernestmarples.com web site shows us how our public institutions are woefully unprepared to seize the new opportunities created by the internet.
Lynne’s views are concurred with by John Thurso, the party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovations and Skills, making this a welcome development of party policy in this area.
Overall the shape of the party’s general election manifesto in terms of issues raised by the internet and digital developments is still very much up in the air. News such as this, and scepticism in the party towards Peter Mandelson’s proposals to cut off people’s internet connections without proper process and with the assumption of guilt by default, are positive.
However, other noises are less positive – such as the summary of policy on the main party website, which is heavy on cracking down on illegal file sharing and silent on issues such as encouraging the music industry to be more imaginative in its business models and to learn from the successes of others in meeting the challenges of the digital age. Lots of stick and no carrot.
One problem is that the party doesn’t have one person in overall charge (whether formally or informally) of policy in this area. It is in effect split up between Lynne Featherstone, John Thurso and Don Foster at the Parliamentary level and at the FPC and Manifesto Group level there is a distinct shortage of people with particular interest or expertise in these areas. There are plenty of people who listen politely and intelligently, but very few who are actually pushing the party to adopt a modern set of policies in this area.
This news is then a very welcome step in the right direction – but should be followed by several more.
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10 Comments
<cite?There are plenty of people who listen politely and intelligently, but very few who are actually pushing the party to adopt a modern set of policies in this area.
Ever thought about standing for the FPC Mark…? The more people with such views that make it onto that committee the better – you’d have my vote 🙂
oops apologies for idiotic html tagging…
This issue is only tangentially related to the filesharing/broadband access controversy and conflating them is, sadly, nothing more than an attempt to gain spurious respectability for this highly dubious bit of lobbying.
This campaign might seem appealing to the cool kids who enjoy playing with data mash-ups, but the real question is actually simple: the Royal Mail puts in a lot of work to compile and maintain the postcode database – should it be expected to do so for free or should it be allowed to do what the rest of the world is able to do and charge for its efforts?
Put me down as an opponent of this call, however it’s dressed up.
The question is, how does one get to influence party policy in this regard? I’ve put myself down on the party’s manifesto site as being interested in these issues, but nobody’s ever tried to discuss them with me as a result of that.
Andy: you’re right that the data doesn’t come for free and it needs to be paid for. However, in this case I think it is a service that is best delivered free at the point of use. That’s both for principled reasons (it’s our data about ourselves) and pragmatic (the investment of public funds required to pay for this would be more than covered by the economic and social benefits it triggers). The Guardian had a good piece recently how even on narrow profit and loss criteria, freeing up postcode data would be a net financial gain for government finances.
Mark’s right that Andy’s right that the Royal Mail should be entitled not to have their data and work “stolen” – but also that the country is full of public services that we fund in some way so that their work is available free (the NHS springs to mind…) so we ought to be able to find some way to fund this work so that it can be made freely available.
In the meantime, I’m using the iPhone app associated with http://www.freethepostcode.org/ which is an open-source user-driven effort to gather the data without having to trouble the Royal Mail at all.
This whole area sounds like a great topic for a motion to spring conference, by the way, which would directly address the good points in Mark’s last paragraph.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that the Royal Mail Group shouldn’t have to be profit-driven – I personally believe it falls in a class of organisations like theatres and football clubs and hospitals that should not make a loss, but have no call to be making a profit. A wholesale reform of RMG’s sources of funding and the expectations surrounding the way it operates could solve this problem at a stroke.
But while it exists in the form it exists there is no case for the Royal Mail being strong-armed into giving the data for free, any more than there is a case for Tesco being compelled to give free food to homeless shelters in winter. One can see why it would be nice if it happened, but a case for forcing it cannot be made.
And, while publicly arguing with Mark is a rare, strange and rather frightening position to find myself in, I have to take issue with most of his underlying assumptions.
Postcode data is not our data about ourselves, any more than the name of the street we live in is – it’s simply a method of classifying the location of buildings and we leave it behind when we change job or move house. It doesn’t compare with, say, our unique DNA fingerprint – or even our regular fingerprint.
It is already free at the point of use, no-one charges us to use it on a letter. If I want to build a business based on it, then it’s a raw material I need to budget for the use of – just as I would have to budget to buy beans if I wanted to bake and sell them. But it’s a service that any of us can use on a day-to-day basis without charge.
And talking about wholesale economic and social benefits conflates the wider argument about funding with the specific argument here – which is how a few websites that most of the population will never know exist are whining because they’re being told to obey the law.
By all means build a case for general reform of the entire funding mechanism of RMG that includes the benefits of postcodes being as free to commercial operators as GPS data. But don’t try to pretend that a handful of trendy and – if we’re honest – rather self-righteous websites are being prevented from triggering a social and economic golden age because of a nasty bullying public service.
Because it just ain’t true.
Well, let’s hope this comes along with robust policies to secure the future of postal services, then.
Royal Mail is in a bind because it is expected to operate as a business, with due regard to its bottom line, while simultaneously acting under the constraints of being a public enterprise. If the party advocates limiting its business activities, such as selling postcode data, then let’s hope the party also has plans for robust funding to support the social side of its business.
While do I have sympathy for the point you are making, Mark, I have to ask myself: what is more important to me? The largely undefined ‘useful public services’ you mention, or a very concretely useful affordable postal service that I can rely on and a local post office with services I can access?
The social capital for communities from keeping post offices open seems to be something my local party is, rightly in my view, rather keen on if its Focus leaflets are anything to go by.
And, rightly or wrongly, selling postcode data funds postal services. Take away that revenue and it will either have to come from somewhere else or we will have to consider the notion that postal services should be entirely the preserve of the free market.
While that will undoubtedly have its advocates, I’m not sure that’s party policy, or that I would support it if it was.
When I moved in to my current flat I was the first occupant of the building and had huge issues getting post delivered. What I was told by the council officer who deals with road naming and numbering was:
a – that councils allocate postcodes to buildings as soon as they are given planning permission, although Royal Mail can later change this postcode if they wish.
b – councils have to inform Royal Mail when people move in to a new property and until they do this Royal Mail won’t deliver to the property, even if the address is already in the council’s database. However, rather than a blanket “this building is now occupied” to Royal Mail, the council has to inform them when each individual flat is occupied which is considerably more time consuming.
If this is really the case, and not some council officer getting confused, (although she was the officer who dealt with it and the council’s planning website certainly does contain postcodes for yet to be completed buildings), then surely the information is public information in the first place.
It’s on Wikileaks.
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,841,177_post_codes_together_with_precise_geographic_coordinates_and_other_information,_8_Jul_2009
Matt