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[The Guardian says...] The conflict between a trading fund’s traditional role and its new commercial activities is most intense in mapping. “Technology has left the licensing model far behind,” says Dugmore. Particular controversy surrounds the role of OS, founded to prepare the British army for a French invasion and now a household name that sees itself at the forefront of geographical information systems. OS has a monopoly on centuries’ worth of data thanks to taxpayer funding. Without that head start, it would be in the same position as any other startup today: facing the choice of creating a brand-new dataset, or finding someone who had collected it and licensing it from them.
The article again fails to consider the crucial issue of maintenance. The taxpayer did fund map-making in the past but the costs now lie in capturing, maintaining and distributing up-to-date data. We make an average of 5,000 changes every day to our largest-scale mapping of Britain. The history of cost recovery goes back over 60 years with the proportion of costs recovered steadily increasingly, particularly from the 1970s onwards — in 1946 it was 12.5 %; 1969 — 30%; 1980 — 40%; Therefore, the portion of useful information in our databases [since WWII, and so for almost all of what is currently used data] has been paid for by user fees is substantial.
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