This is the back story to one of yesterday’s budget announcements – £40 million a year for two years to give UK small businesses access to Ordnance Survey data. If you are interested in that you will find it gripping. But even if you are not, it’s well worth reading as a perceptive – if necessarily speculative – account of how policy gets made.
There are people lobbying for change – some outside government, some within. What they want done has a cost, but more importantly entails changing the way that the problem is thought about, not just in the bit of government which owns the policy, but in the Treasury, which is going to have to pay for it. A decision is made, but not one which is as clear cut or all embracing as the advocates would have liked. They have won, in a sense, but what they have won isn’t really what they wanted.
It’s also a good example of why policy making is hard. What seems at first to be a simple issue about releasing data quickly expands into wider questions of industrial and social strategy – is it a good idea to subsidise mapping data, even if the first order beneficiaries are large non-UK multinationals whose reputation for paying taxes is not the most positive? Is time limited pump-priming funding the right stimulus, or does it risk creating a surge of activity which then dies away? And, of course, this is a policy with no service design in sight.