fe4d7be0_nance_Survey_official_response__The_Ordnance_Survey_replies___
[The Guardian says...] A local authority such as Swindon has to pay OS 38,000 a year to use its addresses and geographical data. It also has to pay the Royal Mail 3,000 for every website that includes the facility for people to look up their postcodes. Yet it was local authorities, which have a statutory duty to collect street addresses, that collected much of this data. Kristin Woodland, who chairs the local authorities’ street gazetteer group, says: “The taxpayer pays for us to create the data, then has to pay us to use the data.”
The agreement through which local authorities pay for mapping services is the responsibility of Local Government Information House, acting on behalf of local government. Local government has no statutory duty to “collect street addresses”. Some local authorities are the street naming and numbering authority ie they allocate names and numbers but that is not the same thing. Local government clearly has a role in the address naming process but an expression like “10 High Street” is of no use to emergency services or postal deliveries without knowing its location. There are different elements involved in the notion of an address such as the Royal Mail postcode and the grid reference. Ordnance Survey adds immense value by referencing the address to a specific location on a nationally consistent basis. As we are not tax-funded, we pay for the investment in our address data entirely through receipts from licensing.
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