When the Cabinet Office announced back in November, as one of the Open Data measures in the Autumn Statement, that
from 1 March 2012 Land Registry will make available “Price Paid information” showing all residential property sales in England and Wales at address level
what do you suppose it meant by that?
It seemed simple enough. By law all residential property sales are lodged with Land Registry. Land Registry maintains a Price Paid information dataset with the full address, date of transfer, property type, whether the property is new and whether it is freehold or leasehold.
The full dataset contains records of more than 15 million house transfers, going back to 1 January 1995.
At the moment licensing costs for the full Price Paid dataset effectively put it beyond the means of non-profit organisations, SMEs, app developers and members of the public.
Based on Land Registry’s charging policy you need pretty deep pockets to license the full dataset or even the most recent few years of data. The licensing fee for Price Paid data from 2005 to present, for example, is more than £50,000 plus an annual subscription to maintain re-use rights. The full dataset is mainly used only by large firms ancillary to the property and conveyancing sectors.
However Price Paid information is potentially very useful for any number of other applications, both commercial and non-commercial.
When the Government said in the Autumn Statement that it would “make available for free a range of core reference datasets … to support the development of high-value data businesses” the Price Paid information seemed like an excellent choice.
Which brings us to March 2012
Based on the Autumn Statement announcement Land Registry was expected to release the Price Paid information yesterday, as open data under the Open Government Licence.
That deadline has slipped, and the latest word on the open data grapevine is that the Price Paid information for residential property sales in January 2012 will now be released at the end of this month.
You will then be able to download that data from the Land Registry website, to use as you like.
But that’s all: one month of data. The following month the data for February 2012 will be available, and so forth.
Monthly updates will be open data – but the bulk of the Price Paid dataset will remain closed, still available only on commercial terms to Land Registry’s big business customers.
If you’re a researcher who wants to use the historic data for socio-economic analysis, or a small developer with a cool idea for a new app, you’re out of luck. Come back in a couple of years, when the monthly updates have built up into a sufficiently large body of open data to be useful.
What’s happened here is called “descoping”
Descoping is the practice of abandoning or weakening the objectives of a project, usually to save money. In a normal business context, when that project is work on behalf of a client, the client can minimise the potential for descoping by compelling performance to an agreed specification.
When it comes to open data releases, descoping is usually a sign that the public body involved isn’t really committed to opening up their data.
My guess is the chain of events went something like this. The Cabinet Office was keen to launch the Public Data Group with a package of new open data. The Price Paid information fit the criteria because it’s a reference dataset and likely to be popular with open data developers and SMEs once the cost barrier is removed.
Land Registry derives most of its income from registrations and copies of land records, so could afford to offer the Price Paid information as open data – if only to show willingness. (Many of the other datasets held by Land Registry contain personal data and are therefore not eligible for open data release.)
But the Cabinet Office only cares about the big picture. Once the Autumn Statement announcement was agreed it left Land Registry to handle the practicalities of delivering the data. Land Registry decided that by taking a narrow interpretation of the announcement it could get away with releasing updates only, and safeguard some of its revenue.
Or could this just be a misunderstanding?
Perhaps the Cabinet Office only ever expected Land Registry to release the monthly updates, and the Autumn Statement was just short on detail.
We can test that by looking at the Public Data Group business case prepared by the Cabinet Office to support the open data package announced in the Autumn Statement. The business case was released recently in response to a Freedom of Information request from Harry Metcalfe via the WhatDoTheyKnow? website.
In the business case Land Registry figures estimate an annual loss of revenue of £600,000 from open data release of the Price Paid information. We are told that Land Registry has 37 existing subscribers for this data, and additionally receives about ten ad hoc requests per month for specific subsets of the data.
Combine that with the figures in Land Registry’s charging policy for the Price Paid information (annual subscription £2,200 + VAT and £0.008775 + VAT per address update supplied), along with Land Registry’s statistics on the number of houses sold each year in England and Wales.
It’s clear that, even as a ballpark estimate, a £600,000 annual loss of revenue is plausible only if it includes Land Registry’s income from licensing of the historic “archived” data.
There go the economic benefits
The PDG business case as a whole has a major weakness: its benefit analysis is based mainly on a generic application of the economic arguments for open data.
If the Cabinet Office had made some attempt to attach benefits to each of the specific datasets in the Autumn Statement package, with reference to their actual characteristics and potential uses, that would have discouraged any descoping of the release.
In respect of the Price Paid information, the business case counts the benefit of savings to existing licensees of the data (based on the full loss of revenue estimated by Land Registry). The business case also notes that “this move will enable more SMEs to establish added value services and products based on the core reference data to some of the key public information organisations in the UK”.
Now that the release has been descoped, that analysis no longer holds. If Land Registry has successfully protected most of its licensing revenue, that will correspondingly reduce the input cost savings to existing licensees. And if most of the dataset remains closed, there is much less scope for innovation by SMEs. Existing big business licensees will retain their market advantages.
So are the monthly updates good for anything?
Open data release of monthly updates to the Price Paid information is better than nothing, of course. As suggested above this data will become more useful as the months go by and it builds up into a larger body of open data.
Developers may find innovative uses that only require data for new residential property transactions. I can’t think of that many myself, but innovations are by definition non-obvious.
The most immediate application for this data is direct marketing. Prior to this release, the terms under which the Price Paid dataset was available from Land Registry precluded use of the data for direct marketing purposes.
As the monthly data is available under the Open Government Licence, that direct marketing restriction cannot apply.
As a near-term effect of this open data release, new homeowners can look forward to targetted advertising from small and medium sized businesses that could not previously afford the Price Paid data.
In fact, I understand that (in the interests of fairness no doubt) Land Registry plans to remove the direct marketing restriction from licensing terms for its commercial customers. They will now also be able to use the closed historical Price Paid data for direct marketing purposes.
Result!
Seriously though.
Land Registry’s Price Paid information is a core national reference dataset that documents residential property transactions in England and Wales at address level over a period of more than 15 years.
The monthly updates are only an incremental addition to that body of data and, by themselves, have nowhere near the same potential for economic use as open data.
This release is a damp squib for the Cabinet Office’s open data agenda, and just one more disappointing example of the gap between rhetoric and follow-through in the Government’s approach to innovation and support for SMEs.
If the Cabinet Office is serious about unlocking public sector data (and the jury is still out on that) it needs to do a lot better.