OS OpenData Economic Value Study Released Under FOI

Post: 30 August 2013

So there’s this:

Assessing the Value of Ordnance Survey OpenData to the Economy of Great Britain: Full Interim Report

I received the above report yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information request that I made to Ordnance Survey last month.

The report is an economic value study of Ordnance Survey’s OS OpenData suite of free geographic data products, prepared in November 2012 by ConsultingWhere and ACIL Tasman.

Ordnance Survey published their own synopsis of the interim report in June, following an earlier FOI request. (Although the report is “interim”, plans to deliver a final version have been shelved. More on that below.)

New and Missing Information

There are a substantial number of redactions in the released copy of the full report. You can read the FOI correspondence if you’re interested in the detail of which exemptions Ordnance Survey have applied. In a nutshell: names of individuals who are not civil servants have been blacked out (as personal information), case studies including the names of participating organisations have been blacked out (as information provided in confidence), and the internal breakdown of the amount Ordnance Survey receives under the OS OpenData contract has been blacked out (as commercially sensitive).

There are very few unredacted figures in the report that were not previously disclosed in the synopsis. The main exception seems to be the revenue estimate of £ 5.3 million per annum used as the basis of the “counterfactual” case, i.e. the income anticipated for Ordnance Survey if the OS OpenData products were fee-generating rather than free. The footnote giving the source of this estimate is, however, redacted. (See section 6.2 on page 27.)

I regret that Ordnance Survey have declined to release the breakdown of the £ 20 million per annum they receive under the “CLG contract” as compensation for losses of revenue consequent upon the decision to make the OS OpenData products free at the point of delivery. It is difficult to see how Ordnance Survey’s commercial position would be harmed by releasing the figures, and withholding them has the effect of shielding the arrangements from scrutiny. The report makes no comment on the validity of the breakdown, and indeed says rather pointedly:

we should note that the CLG contract is taken as a matter of fact. We are not in a position to comment on the level of the funding, nor the split of revenues between public and private sectors.

No Final Report

The original plan was to follow up this interim report with a final report:

For the final report, it was envisaged that the findings would be summarised to be accessible to a wider audience and the interim conclusions updated through a process of wider consultation.

However Ordnance Survey’s synopsis says:

The planned Final Report – this was intended to be a summary of the findings that would be drafted so as to be accessible to a wider audience and to enable the further updating of conclusions through wider consultation. This stage has been superseded by this Synopsis of the Interim Report.

There is a bit of a discrepancy here. Was the final report always going to be simply a summary of the findings, to “enable” wider consultation, or was the original intention to consult more widely and include updated conclusions in the final report itself? There must have been more to the plan for a final report than simply a releasable summary; else Ordnance Survey’s synopsis would have been called the final report.

The charitable explanation is that Ordnance Survey and/or BIS saw no need for a further report because the findings in the interim report were sufficient to justify OS OpenData as an ongoing economic proposition. The report’s topline conclusion is that OS OpenData will generate net growth in GDP of between £ 13.0 million and £ 28.5 million per annum by 2016 – and this estimate is “almost certainly understated” (page 1).

Why then did Ordnance Survey and BIS sit on the report for a year and a half, publishing the synopsis only after I submitted my first FOI request? Based on these findings, OS OpenData is a clear-cut success story – why is Government not holding it up as a model for future releases of economically useful public data?

We can at least speculate. Is the report too robust in its argument for open data? Perhaps the success of OS OpenData presents the “threat of a good example”? If the study’s methodology gained general acceptance it would be difficult for Government to explain why it has not pressed ahead more aggressively with release of other core reference data.

The current Government’s transparency policy has focused mainly on release of spending and performance data. Their target audience is ~~mostly imaginary~~ “armchair auditors” who want to ~~bash public services~~ improve public services and hold public authorities to account. The OS OpenData products, on the other hand, are datasets that people actually want to use. And of course (as the report makes clear but the synopsis version does not) the underpinning economic rationale for OS OpenData and UK open data policy more generally was developed by the previous Labour administration. In contrast this Government has shown little understanding of open data’s wider economic potential; its only big idea has been to open a crèche for start-ups. Most of the economic growth the report attributes to OS OpenData is from business efficiencies, not innovation or “app dev”, so the findings are not exactly on-message.

The Economics of Open Data

Despite all the redactions (including a full ten pages of case study material) the report provides a substantially more balanced perspective on the arguments for OS OpenData than does the synopsis. Most of the value is in the discussion of the study methodology and different approaches to modelling the impacts of open data. The numbers themselves I take with a grain of salt, on the “garbage in garbage out” principle; whatever the merits of the model, there’s only so much you can do with download statistics and anecdotal information from interviews. (The assumptions behind the download analysis are particularly loopy.)

The report itself is far more readable than Ordnance Survey’s synopsis, but the most stark difference is in the tone. That topline GDP estimate is buried halfway through the synopsis rather than highlighted in the executive summary. The report’s recommendations are presented verbatim in the synopsis – but there is no indication from Ordnance Survey or BIS whether they have taken any actions on the recommendations.

The report includes (as Appendix B) a copy of the peer review from economic consultants Prabhat Vaze and Patricia Seex secured to ensure the validity of the report’s approach. The synopsis, on the other hand, ignores the contents of that review as well as the report’s explanation of how the points from the review were incorporated into the methodology. It concludes instead with a two-page letter from BIS’s Chief Analyst that rubbishes the report’s findings based on inherent difficulties in information-gathering that must surely have been obvious when the research was commissioned. It is difficult to escape the impression that BIS finds the success of OS OpenData altogether rather awkward.

Does OS OpenData Have a Future?

Despite what seem to be attempts to downplay the findings, this economic value study should make it difficult for BIS to withdraw support for the OS OpenData initiative. However it does highlight a couple of dependencies of which re-users should be aware.

The first is the “CLG contract”, i.e. the £ 20 million per annum that Ordnance Survey receives from Government in compensation for loss of revenue and to fund delivery of the initiative. The terms of that contract are not public, so it is difficult to judge how reliable a basis it provides for continuation of the OS OpenData initiative.

The second dependency is the royalties payable to Royal Mail for use of data embedded in OS OpenData products. Those royalties are provided for in the CLG contract (page 29 in the report), and we may hope Royal Mail remains satisfied with the arrangement. However Royal Mail is headed for privatisation and could take a different position in future, particularly if it decides to develop data products that compete with Ordnance Survey’s.

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