ORDNANCE SURVEY (OS) is trundling along nicely, fulfilling its cartographic duties, covering its costs and making a profit for the Government, which owns it. But that could change completely on November 21 if agreement is reached on new European legislation.

As things stand, OS funds its existence by charging people for the right to use the information it creates. Its data underpins commercial enterprises from computer games to satellite navigation systems as well as public services such as emergency planning. However, European proposals contained in the Inspire initiative — designed to join up information about weather, land and water across Europe to assist effective decision-making — would mean that all of its data would have to be made available free, says Vanessa Lawrence, OS’s director-general and chief executive.

“We cost £100 million a year to run,” she says. “We don’t make massive profits but we make enough to cover our costs, pay the Government a 5.5 per cent dividend and to invest in what our customers want. If we move to free data then it would be taxpayers’ money which is used to pay for our work, and I believe that our taxes should not be used for things that can be sustained in other ways. I feel strongly that we should be able to continue the job we do in the way we do it.”

Lawrence describes herself as the custodian of OS, supports the Inspire initiative’s aims and says that she’d be happy to give away some information; she just doesn’t want to give everything away.

The idea of freeing up public information isn’t new — it’s linked to a dispute with a public-private project called the National Land and Property Gazetteer — but if it happens, Lawrence argues, it will make a huge difference to the way OS runs. “My concern is that if Inspire goes through, it will lead to a degradation of data quality and coverage while funding is sorted out.”

It is the quality and detail of that OS data that makes it valuable both commercially and to the public sector. Its surveyors map every feature on the landscape — every building, every postbox — down to the nearest centimetre.

This makes it possible for maps to show the crenellated footprint created by the buttresses of the Palace of Westminster and the exact location of the statues in Parliament Square. The way that the data is handled also allows emergency services to overlay OS information with their own extras. For example, a fire brigade has incorporated satellite navigation, building blueprints and fire hydrant locations to create a resource that firefighters can access from their vehicles on their way to incidents.

Any loss of data quality could affect public services as well as commercial partners. Research indicates that OS geographic information underpins some £100 billion of GDP per year.

But despite her reservations, Lawrence is going on as if everything will work out; she has many alternative models in place for consideration by ministers in the event of the legislation going through and for now she’s concentrating on future uses for OS data.

“Place and location is becoming very important to businesses and government. It can be a way of differentiating and improving your service. When people are able to understand their geography, small interventions can make a disproportionate amount of difference.”

She cites the example of a primary care trust that used geographic information to find and remedy hidden gaps in service provision. “When you start to realise the kind of difference that you can make by using this data it’s exciting.”

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk

www.inspire.jrc.it

FACTFILE: VANESSA LAWRENCE

Born: July 14, 1962, in Buckinghamshire

Career: Completed an MSc in remote sensing at the University of Dundee in 1984; worked in science publishing until 1996, when she joined the software company Autodesk and rose to become a global manager in the GIS division; appointed director general and chief executive of Ordnance Survey in 2000; also holds a number of honorary positions.

What she says: “Everyone knows us from our fabulous paper maps but they are only 9 per cent of what we do.”

Little-known fact: Sank a Land Rover in a crocodile-infested river in northern Australia after an official gave her the wrong tide timetable. “It was a big issue. I had many leech bites.”

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