Allister defends NI's Ordinance Survey
13 June 2006
This Directive will directly affect the future of the Ordinance Survey Office in Northern Ireland, which is at the forefront of developments and skills in this sector.
With INSPIRE having reached the Second Reading stage, a key issue has arisen as to whether all data acquired, developed and held by Ordinance Survey Offices should be available to all potential users at no cost right across Europe. Ordinance Survey depends significantly on being able to derive an income from trading its services and data, which income is then used to fund future developments in pushing out the boundaries of expertise and data collection.
The Council of Ministers has agreed a Common Position on the INSPIRE Directive which largely protects the rights and future of the UK's Ordinance Survey, but the Environment Committee of the European Parliament is seeking to persuade the Parliament to amend the Position so that effectively the intellectual property rights of Ordinance Survey are negatived and all spatial data compelled to be freely shared across Europe. Such would fundamentally attack the financial viability of our Ordinance Survey Office in Northern Ireland and is, therefore, being strenuously opposed by Jim Allister in the Parliament.
In preparation for this debate, Mr Allister recently visited Ordinance Survey in Belfast, met with it's Director Stan Brown, and saw at first hand the valuable work being done.
In the course of his remarks in the debate in Strasbourg, Jim Allister said:-
"This report is an illustration of the easy demand politics in which this Parliament so readily indulges, with little regard to real business and financial restraints.
Ordinance Survey in the UK is highly developed and sophisticated. We, in Northern Ireland, with our own service, share in this world-leading status. It has been built up by investment in the most technologically developed equipment available and in nurturing a skill base over many years. As a result, valuable intellectual property rights have resulted and attached to an innovative spatial data collection.
The Common Position of the Council on the INSPIRE Directive largely recognises and protects these realities, but the Environment Committee of this House wants to smash and grab what has been expensively built up over decades and make it available to all at no cost. I am not opposed to sharing data across Europe, but where it has cost so much to acquire, it must come with a price attached. Information exchange of this nature must be on the basis of trade, not hand-out. The fact that this data has a monetary worth is the key to future progress and development.
Thus, I back the Common Position and I will oppose the Committee's amendments which threaten the sustainable financing of high quality spatial data in the UK, presently worth 100 million pounds of GDP per annum."
