Dear Robert

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 - INFORMATION REQUEST

Thank you for your request in which you ask for all UPRNs linked to addresses which are classified as either "historic" or "parent" to be provided to you.

Your request was received on 14 July 2020 and I am dealing with it under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and will get a response to your request within 20 working days.

Kind regards,

Sara Gittens
Support Specialist (FOI Lead)

--------------- Original Message ---------------

Good afternoon,

This looks like a request for your team ?

Regards,
Vitali

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Dear Robert,

Thank you for your email of 14 July 2020, requesting information from Geoplace in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000, as set out in the extract below:

“Please could you supply me with a list of all UPRNs that are classified as 'historic', and a separate list of all those classified as a 'parent', as per the descriptions given on page 3 of https://www.geoplace.co.uk/downloads/The... . I do not want any other information about these UPRNs, just a list of the UPRN numbers that have each of those statuses.”

I confirm that the information that you have requested is held by the Ordnance Survey, however, we are unable to comply with your request and provide a copy of the information as we consider the information to be exempt from disclosure under section 21 of the FOIA.

We consider this exemption applies because the requested information is accessible in Ordnance Survey's commercial products (AddressBase). Whilst there may be a cost to obtain some of the requested information, section 21 (2) (a) of the Freedom of Information Act advises that information may be considered reasonably accessible to the applicant even though it is accessible only on payment.

The Ordnance Survey would consider this to be commercial information (exempt under s43(2) Commercial Interests of the FOIA) which does not meet their Open Identifiers policy, which is available here for you to view here - https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busines....

Within the Open Identifiers policy there is a section headed: "Are there any other conditions on how TOIDs, UPRNs, and USRNs are obtained and matched to an applicable end user’s dataset, in order for the policy to apply?" If you click on the link to 'OS Open ID Green List' (please see attached) and view the tables for AddressBase, these provide details of the fields which the URPNs can be searched against, you will note that historical/parent are not listed in the fields.

This is an absolute exemption and therefore not subject to the public interest test.

Internal Review
Your enquiry has been processed according to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000. If you are unhappy with our response, you may request an internal review with our Internal Review Officer by contacting them, within 40 working days of receipt of our final response to your FOI request, as follows:

Internal Review Officer
E-mail:[Geoplace LLP request email]

Please include the reference number above. You may request an internal review where you believe Geoplace has:

• Failed to respond to your request within the time limits (normally 20 working days)
• Failed to tell you whether or not we hold the information
• Failed to provide the information you have requested
• Failed to explain the reasons for refusing a request
• Failed to correctly apply an exemption or exception

The Internal Review Officer will not have been involved in the original decision. They will conduct an independent internal review and will inform you of the outcome of the review normally within 20 working days, but exceptionally within 40 working days, in line with the Information Commissioner’s guidance.
The Internal Review Officer will either: uphold the original decision, provide an additional explanation of the exemption/s applied or release further information, if it is considered appropriate to do so.

Appeal to Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)
If, following the outcome of the internal review you remain unhappy with our response, you may raise an appeal, within three months of receiving our response, with the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Further information can be found on the ICO website (ico.org.uk) or you may wish to call the ICO helpline on 0303 123 1113.

Thank you for your enquiry.

Kind regards,

Sara Gittens
Support Specialist (FOI Lead)

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Dear Robert,

We apologise for the delay in acknowledging your email of 31 July but your email was sent to an email address that is not regularly monitored. However, we now confirm that we have received your request for an internal review to be carried out with regards to your Freedom of Information request relating to obtaining a list of historic and parent UPRNs. This will now be passed onto the Internal Review Officer. You should receive a reply from the Internal Review Officer within 40 working days from the date of your e-mail (31 July).

If you need to correspond with us further on this matter in the meantime, please do quote case number 00678214 and send your e-mail to [Geoplace LLP request email] where it will be picked up immediately within our working hours.

Kind regards,

Sara Gittens
Support Specialist (FOI Lead)

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Dear Mr Whittaker,

Thank you for your email of the 31st July 2020 requesting an internal review of our response (dated 31st July 2020) to your FOIA request of the 14th July 2020 requesting:

“Please could you supply me with a list of all UPRNs that are classified as 'historic', and a separate list of all those classified as a 'parent', as per the descriptions given on page 3 of https://www.geoplace.co.uk/downloads/The... . I do not want any other information about these UPRNs, just a list of the UPRN numbers that have each of those statuses.”

In my capacity as the Internal FOIA Review Officer at GeoPlace, I have reviewed the communications between us and sought further legal advice from a member of our legal team that was not involved in our response of the 14th July. In carrying out this review, we have also consulted with Ordnance Survey, and the Geospatial Commission.

Our original response withheld the requested information, on the basis of both s. 21 (information reasonably accessible by other means) and s. 43(2) (commercial interests). I comment below on each of these two exemptions.

1. Section 21 – information reasonably accessible by other means

First, I note that our original response stated that we “confirm that the information that you have requested is held by the Ordnance Survey”. Whilst this is true, I just wish to clarify that the information is also held by GeoPlace.

I have considered two potential bases on which the requested information could fall within the section 21 exemption, as follows.

a) Section 21(1) states that “Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant otherwise than under section 1 is exempt information”. Section 21(2)(b) provides that “information is to be taken to be reasonably accessible to the applicant if it is information which … any other person is obliged by or under any enactment to communicate …. to members of the public on request, whether free of charge or on payment”.

On this point, I note that the requested information would appear to be included in the definition of “document” in section 2 of the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 (the PSI Regulations). My understanding is that Ordnance Survey is subject to the PSI Regulations and, under regulation 7(1) of those Regulations, Ordnance Survey is obliged to make such information available on request, in accordance with regulations 11 to 16. Provision of such access would presumably be made via supply of AddressBase Premium under Ordnance Survey’s standard licensing framework, which is in place to ensure compliance with competition law and also the provisions of the PSI Regulations (e.g. to ensure that the data is made available under non-discriminatory terms).

ICO Guidance on this exemption states that “In order for section 21 to apply the applicant should be as free to use the information provided under any alternative access regime as they would be had it been disclosed under FOIA. This will include any conditions attached to further use that would apply when information is disclosed under FOIA, such as copyright restrictions”. Whilst access under the PSI Regulations would be subject to Ordnance Survey’s licence terms, I would observe that those licence terms would grant you, as the applicant, greater rights of use than you would receive were the information to be disclosed under the FOIA as, in the latter case, you would be subject to copyright and database right restrictions which would be more restrictive than the licence terms. As an aside, I note that your email requesting an internal review states that a “reason in favour of releasing the information would be that those making use of the OS Open UPRN dataset to look up the location of UPRNs would be able to detect any historic or building shell properties in the datasets they were processing”, which implies that you would be intending to make the requested data openly available; please note that this would not be permissible were we to make the data available under the FOIA, as the information would only be released subject to copyright and database right restrictions.

In relation to the fees that would be payable were you to seek access to the information via this route, as you know, section 21(2)(b) states that “information may be reasonably accessible to the applicant even though it is accessible only on payment”. The ICO’s guidance on this provides that there are “two main areas where information will be considered reasonably accessible even though payment is required – information that is available by means of other legislation which also permits a charge to be made, and…“ In this instance, note that the PSI Regulations permit charging to be made for access to data (regulation 15(1)) and, although ordinarily such fees are to be based on marginal cost, Ordnance Survey falls under the exception to marginal cost pricing under regulation 15(3)(a) and (b) of the PSI Regulations.

In order to access the information via this route, I’d recommend that you contact Ordnance Survey’s Pricing and Licensing team in the first instance, using this link https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/contact....

In conclusion on this point, I believe that the requested information is within the scope of section 21(2)(b), and therefore is exempt information under section 21(1). I believe that this outcome is supported by the principle that the FOIA should not circumvent other access regimes.

b) Secondly, if one ignores the specific example of information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant, as set out in section 21(2)(b), and considers the wording of section 21(1) itself, then the question is simply whether the requested information is reasonably accessible to you, as the applicant. As noted in our original response, “the requested information is accessible in Ordnance Survey's commercial products (AddressBase).” Our original response also noted that section 21(2)(a) makes it clear that information may be considered reasonably accessible to the applicant even though it is accessible only on payment; I have expanded on this point in a) above.

To clarify our original response, the information you have requested is contained in Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase Premium product, which is available to be licensed under Ordnance Survey’s standard commercial licensing framework. As noted above, Ordnance Survey is permitted, under the PSI Regulations, to charge for access to such data, and sets its pricing so as to comply with competition law and the PSI Regulations.

Your email requesting an internal review states as follows: “I understand that the cost of a licence for AddressBase would be quite significant. I do not believe it would be reasonable for me to pay this price when all I want is a negligible sub-set of the total information contained in AddressBase. The prohibitive and unreasonable cost relative to the information I am seeking means that it cannot be said to be "reasonably accessible" to me via this route. Therefore the exemption in s21(2)(a) is not engaged. If you wish to maintain your reliance on this exemption, please provide the current cost of an individual licence for AddressBase, the approximate number of UPRNs in each list I have requested, an estimate of the proportion of the total AddressBase data that the information I have requested represents, and details of how you conclude that the cost would be reasonable for me.”

In response to the above points, the cost of a single seat licence of AddressBase Premium for all of GB, direct from Ordnance Survey, is £15,625.00 (this is a discount against the price for unlimited terminals of £125,000), although it is possible that you could obtain a cheaper price from one of Ordnance Survey’s licensed distributors (to find a distributor, please see Ordnance Survey’s Find a business partner page https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busines...). Please note that this would provide you with “internal business use” rights for all of the data within AddressBase Premium, which includes the information you have requested. If you wish to exploit the data by making the UPRNs available to customers, this would cost one pence per record per sale per annum. Please note that there is no price that would permit you to make the records available to all on “open terms”, as this is not permitted under any of Ordnance Survey’s licence terms for its premium data.

In terms of the approximate number of UPRNs in each list you have requested, there are approximately 2 million historic UPRNs, and approximately 800,000 parent UPRNs. The UPRNs that you have requested comprise c. 7% of all records in AddressBase Premium. Note that Ordnance Survey does have an alternative pricing methodology for address records, of 1 pence per record; this alternative methodology does not include a discount for sub-corporate use, as this price is considered to reflect the value of a set of bespoke address records. If the number of records you were seeking was smaller, this methodology would lead to a lower price; however, for the number of records that you have requested, the penny per address record methodology leads to a price that is higher than £15,625. In terms of whether this price is reasonable, clearly it is Ordnance Survey’s (and GeoPlace’s) position that it is, and we would point out that we and Ordnance Survey see considerable value in these records. Indeed, the value of the historic UPRNs is such that they only appear in our AddressBase Premium product rather than the entry level product, AddressBase Core. If you only wanted to access the parent UPRNs, these are available in AddressBase Core – note that a single seat licence of AddressBase Core would cost £3,681.25 direct from Ordnance Survey. We certainly do not agree with your assessment that the information you have requested is a “negligible sub-set” of the total information.

Having reviewed the wording of section 21 and the ICO’s Guidance on this exemption, I consider that I need to be satisfied that the information you have requested is reasonably accessible. I understand from Ordnance Survey that its pricing is set by its Pricing and Trading Group, acting under delegated authority from its Board, and in accordance with its pricing policy, which takes into account a number of factors, including the need to comply with the PSI Regulations and competition law. As such, I am satisfied that the information you have requested is reasonably accessible, notwithstanding that you may consider the price to be expensive. (I provide further information on the pricing below, in section 2.)

The section 21 exemption is an absolute exemption, and so there is no need to undertake a public interest test. Lastly, having concluded that s. 21 does apply in this instance, I note that it is unnecessary to rely on any other exemption; indeed, in certain circumstances, it can be illogical to rely on another exemption. Having said that, I have still reviewed the use of the s.43(2) exemption, as (a) it may be relevant if s.21 were held to have not been validly invoked, and (b) hopefully it will provide you with further useful background in relation to the subject matter of your request.

2. Section 43(2) – prejudice to commercial interests

Firstly, you are of course correct that the s.43(2) (commercial interests) exemption is a qualified exemption, and so requires a public interest test to be carried out. Apologies that our original response did not contain any details of the public interest test.

I have looked again at the question of whether the release of the requested information would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of Ordnance Survey and also of GeoPlace. As you would expect, we have also consulted Ordnance Survey, and also the Geospatial Commission, in relation to this exemption.

By way of background, Ordnance Survey is a wholly owned Government company, whose objectives include “to operate on a commercial, self-financing basis”, and “to generate profitable revenue” (see Ordnance Survey’s Shareholder Framework Document here – https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documen...).

As further background, you may be aware that as part of the project known as Open MasterMap, Ordnance Survey recently made available a range of its data under open or permissive terms; further information can be found here https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busines.... The delivery of Open MasterMap is one of Ordnance Survey’s obligations under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), which was entered into by Ordnance Survey and the Geospatial Commission, as of 1 April 2020. A great deal of analysis and consultation, by both Ordnance Survey and the Geospatial Commission, went into determining which data should be made available as part of this project. At the same time as making this data available on open or permissive terms, the PSGA also requires Ordnance Survey to continue to make its premium data available under its standard commercial licensing model.

In relation to UPRNs specifically, you are aware that Ordnance Survey has published a list of all UPRNs with their x,y coordinates, https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busines.... In addition, Ordnance Survey published its new Open ID policy to enable and encourage the use of Ordnance Survey’s identifiers (the TOID, the UPRN and the USRN) to join datasets and combine the value of Ordnance Survey data with the user’s own data.

In determining section 2 of its new Open ID policy (section 2 relating to the use of OS premium data), Ordnance Survey needed to be careful to strike the right balance between making data available to fulfil the objectives of Open MasterMap, whilst at the same time preserving the value of its premium data, including AddressBase Premium. In consequence, you will see that section 2 of the Open ID policy is only available to public sector customers, and to customers who have a licence for internal business use; it is not available to others, for example, those who license Ordnance Survey data for trial and evaluation purposes.

For the purposes of your request, another key limitation in section 2 of the Open ID policy is that the UPRN (and other identifiers) can only be matched to an end user’s database using an attribute from the OS Open ID Green List. For example, the Green List would permit the matching of a user’s address with the corresponding address in AddressBase Premium to enable the user to link its address to the relevant UPRN and x,y coordinate from AddressBase Premium. In contrast, the Green List would not permit the linking of parent and/or historic attributes from AddressBase with a user’s list of (open) UPRNs, as parent/historic attribution are not on the Green List. This preserves the value in AddressBase Premium and other OS premium data. In other words, the reason for the Green List existing is precisely to avoid providing a mechanism by which somebody could create an address string comprising, for example, address, x,y coordinate, UPRN, and historic/parent attribution, which they could license on the terms of the Open Government Licence; if this were permitted, it would give away the value of premium attribution (including historic or parent properties) associated with UPRNs/addresses.

OS considers, and I agree, that the disclosure of the requested information would be likely to prejudice Ordnance Survey’s commercial interests for the reasons set out above. I also consider that such disclosure would prejudice GeoPlace’s commercial interests, as GeoPlace’s revenue depends in part on the revenue received by Ordnance Survey for the licensing of AddressBase Premium and AddressBase Core. The loss of this commercial revenue would also increase the cost of the PSGA to the Geospatial Commission.

Even though any disclosed information would only be provided subject to copyright and database right, and so could only be used for limited purposes, and could not, for example, legitimately be made available to others, GeoPlace would need to make the same information available to others who request it under the FOIA. It is my view, and that of Ordnance Survey, that this would lead to a significant risk of copyright and/or database right infringement; in addition to a loss of commercial revenue, there would be a significant cost in both monitoring the use of the data and enforcing the intellectual property rights of GeoPlace, Ordnance Survey and the Crown.

Public interest test

Section 43(2) is a qualified exemption, and therefore GeoPlace is required to carry out a public interest test.

First, I note that s43(2) is a prejudice based exemption, and there is a public interest inherent in avoiding the harm specified. On the other hand, GeoPlace recognises there is always a general public interest in transparency.

It is my view that there would be significantly more than a 50% chance of the disclosure causing prejudice to the commercial interests of Ordnance Survey and GeoPlace, for the reasons set out above. In terms of the severity of the impact, I believe that the release of the requested information would have a significant adverse effect on Ordnance Survey’s (and GeoPlace’s) commercial revenue, and Ordnance Survey’s ability to protect and license Crown copyright and database right.

In terms of public interest in the requested data, I note that the information can already be accessed by those with an interest in this specific data, under Ordnance Survey’s commercial terms. As part of the Open MasterMap project, the Geospatial Commission, working with Ordnance Survey, GeoPlace, and others in the market, determined which data should be released on open or more permissive terms, to maximise the benefit of the project, and this data did not include historic/parent UPRNs.

Your email below states that “A reason in favour of releasing the information would be that those making use of the OS Open UPRN dataset to look up the location of UPRNs would be able to detect any historic or building shell properties in the datasets they were processing. These would be indicators of errors or out-of-date records in the upstream data, which would likely need correcting. This in turn would increase the accuracy of third-party UPRN usage, promoting confidence in UPRNs as universal identifiers.” However, as explained above, even if the information were to be disclosed under the FOIA, it would be subject to copyright and database right restrictions, and could not be shared with third parties in the way you appear to envisage.

On balance, I believe that the public interest is in favour of maintaining the exemption in this case.

Appeal to Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)

If you remain unhappy with our response, you may raise an appeal, within three months of receiving our response, with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Further information can be found on the ICO website (ico.org.uk) or you may wish to call the ICO helpline on 0303 123 1113.

Yours sincerely

Steve Brandwood

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