fe4d7be0_nance_Survey_official_response__The_Ordnance_Survey_replies___
[The Guardian says...] Imagine you had bought this newspaper for a friend. Imagine you asked them to tell you what’s in the TV listings - and they demanded cash before they would tell you. Outrageous? Certainly. Yet that is what a number of government agencies are doing with the data that we, as taxpayers, pay to have collected on our behalf. You have to pay to get a useful version of that data.
Ordnance Survey is financed through data licensing rather than direct funding from the taxpayer. Yes, we collected data before we became a Trading Fund which was paid for through direct taxation (although from the 1970s the organisation was set ever increasing cost recovery targets). However, since April 1999, we have relied entirely from receipts from the licensing of our data for our trading revenue. Out-of-date map data is no use for today’s business and government activities. Maintenance is a vital issue, yet it is one that the article completely overlooks. We make an average of 5,000 changes every working day to our large-scale map data of Great Britain, but the taxpayer does not pay anything for the maintenance of our products.
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