Public Information

There was an interesting article in yesterdays Grauniad about publicly owned organisations charging for data.

As someone who works for one of these theiving public sector trading funds (HM Land Registry) I would argue that the article doesn't quite paint the picture accurately.

My employer (to my knowledge) receives no tax payers money. The article quite accurately pointed out that these state owned companies were trading funds but they didn't point out that a trading fund receives all of its money through the fees it charges (The clue is in the name 'Trading Fund' i.e. you get funds via trading). HM Land Registry does make a profit, most of which is returned to the treasury where it can pay for services used by the very tax payers that are supposedly being ripped off.

I particularly liked the comment that

'The civil service is too inflexible to cope with the speed of change in the commercial sector.'

As someone who is both a civil servant and a software developer I would like to argue that this is utter crap! The Land Registry alone has several major projects in the pipeline. The most notable being the e-conveyancing project which hopes to bring some efficiency and transparency to the unregulated private sector business of property transactions.
In fact I would argue that one of the main reasons why the civil service tends to get a bad reputation is because of the piss poor computer systems that have been delivered by the wonderfully dynamic commercial sector.

The article spends most of its time making a scathing attack on the ordnance survey. Clearly whoever wrote it has never used the Getamap function on the OS website that provides you with a FREE map of an area of your choice. Naturally the maps are restricted to a larger scale as otherwise this service could be abused by commercial competitors.
The Land Registry also publishes free information about house prices but again this information is restricted in detail to larger areas rather than specific locations.

Don't get me wrong I don't want to get into a (somewhat biased) rant about public sector vs. private sector. I just wish people would get rid of these out-of-date assumptions that everything publicly owned is inefficient, run by paper-pushers and a waste of tax payers money.

And I too would like to see more free information being made available, the tidal times suggestion is a good example of this. However anyone living in my area (South Devon) that fancies going for a climb on a cliff tends to watch the weather forcast on the local news the night before. It tells you the times of the high and low tide .