Steve Peters

ALT Q6. What are the main blockers for you or your organisation in using location data to achieve your objectives? Other (please specify) The main blocker is poor accessibility due to a combination of the cost of access and licensing for geospatial reference data that is created by the public sector. The UK differs from most other high-income countries in not making this data available as open data. This accessibility issue stems from the business model that the central government has mandated for the UK’s national mapping agencies, i.e. that they should generate direct revenue by selling data, rather than maximise economic and social impact by providing access to data. …

ALT Q2. Which changes or trends do you anticipate having the biggest impact on the use of location data in the next five years? 1) If local authorities are to genuinely fulfil their placemaking remit a genuinely democratic, privacy respecting, well maintained approach to location data will be needed. For example, UPRNs are very useful in matching households across different datasets to get a single view of a household. Despite UPRNs being Government standard, they are not currently employed in all central government and NHS datasets. Whilst UPRNs are open and it is possible to look up the longitude and latitude of each UPRN, we understand that licensing does not permitted inclusion of a UPRN alongside a physical address in an open dataset if the address and UPRN have both been obtained from Ordnance Survey licensed data. This makes it very hard to add UPRNs to open datasets. …

ALT 33. The Commissioner considers the VOA has adequately explained the interaction between the CRCA and the FOIA, and it is clear that the VOA cannot, under FOIA, disclose any information which would identify a person or enable identification of a person. 34. The Commissioner accepts that disclosing the withheld information, the property addresses in particular, would enable the identity of the persons to whom they relate to be deduced when combined with other information from publicly available sources, such as the electoral register and other online sources. He therefore does not accept the complainant’s position that the information does not relate to identifiable individuals.