A lovely, simple supply-side idea:

 

Britain should free up its data

WE NEED TO PRY PAT’S GRASP FROM THE PAF

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

Liz Truss was right: Britain is suffering from a growth and productivity problem, says James O’Malley. The trouble is, the most obvious things to do about it would be toxic for the Tory Party’s electoral chances – building more houses, cosying up to Europe, allowing more migrants, covering the countryside with wind farms. There is, however, one small intervention that would make the country a bit better and “nudge our sluggish economy in the right direction”: open up the Postcode Address File (PAF).  

AN INSANE SITUATION

This is a database of every postal address in the UK, and is owned and controlled by Royal Mail. Access to it is what allows the websites and apps you use to figure out your full address when you start typing or put in the postcode. The trouble is that this information is maddeningly difficult to get hold of. 

Imagine you’ve set up a small business that needs access to address data. To access the PAF you’ll have to pay the Royal Mail a “hefty” fee. A one-off copy of the database costs £360, but this isn’t useful as the dataset is always changing. Monthly updates cost £1,080. That’s just for the data. On top of that you pay £85 for every person who is going to use it. If you want to use the data on a website, you need at least £6,150 more. If you want to use it across an organisation, you can “look forward to paying” £18,400 every year. “The costs spiral from here.”

This is all “insane”. Dealing with our growth and productivity problems will depend on innovation, and opening up data to the public is an important part of this. “Open data makes it possible for anyone to build tools, services and businesses that can improve the way we work and live, without us having to wait for the government to do it for us.” Transit data is a “particularly striking example”. Transport for London and National Rail share their schedules and real-time data openly, and there has been an “explosion” of tools and apps built on it. That’s why Google Maps can tell you when your next train is due, for example, and why you can bypass the terrible National Rail website by using the much better RealTimeTrains app. 

We don’t know what will be possible once the PAF is “liberated”. But the Open Data Institute has called it the “critical missing dataset” in the UK. When Denmark opened up its equivalent data file in 2005 the financial benefit to cost ratio was 30 to one. And it’s probably the only thing standing in the way of an app that will alert  us to what colour bins we need to put out this week.