devlog

Recently i was doing some research on the re-use of Listed Buildings . buildings of historical interest which have legal protection - in East London. So, i thought, i’ll download the list of listed buildings in Tower Hamlets, and then i’ll… Then, i hit the brick wall that is public sector information policy, very hard.

To find my list of listed buildings, i visited the local council’s Planning and Building office in Bow. There, in an enormous faded file of old photocopies are the original lists. They inhabit a semi-public room which is solid box files along three walls; these are the local council’s planning permission archives. To access the case files for any of these planning decisions, one has to pay a charge of £10 per property and wait several days.

Planning permission application data submitted since 2000 is also available online, through the Tower Hamlets Planning Register website. I can look at lists of all applications street-by-street, or search by specific planning application number. As a software hacker, i want better query access to data; i want to see all Listed Building or Advertising Consent applications; to plot how long different decisions take to process in different areas; to see the case history of a particular building or all buildings in a postal or arbitrary area.

So i wrote My Planning Permission Application . It’s a simple spatial database that represents a snapshot of the planning permissions at Tower Hamlets taken early October 2004. I managed to geocode about 2/3 of the addresses mentioned. From this quick day’s worth of prototype, i’ve been able to make simple maps and ask interesting questions about planning permission. I am always looking for new questions to ask. I discovered that Hackney runs the same planning archive application on their website, but they expose much less interesting metadata; the only way to find out the status of a planning decision is to look at the human-readable-only PDF of a scanned photocopy.

To find out who owns a building in the UK and see the floor plans, one pays a bargain-like four pounds to the Land Registry. To find out more information about the company that owns a building, including directorships and accounts, one can pay around £17 for the full documentation set. None of this is in a structured, machine-readable form, and none of it comes on terms that allow re-use of that data.

But this will be resolved by the information licensing practises of modern government! To witness the Modern Government Initiative in progress, i can visit the National Land Information Service, where i learn that To access this service, you need to register with one of the three NLIS Licensed Channels in the marketplace. But not to worry, in any case as only conveyancing professionals such as solicitors and licenced conveyancers will able to subscribe to these services, but over time, as other land and property based services are launched, the user base will widen to include other market sectors and indeed the general public.

Indeed, the general public. The information that we need to make sense of the world is only available through a huge information licensing market created in response to the needs of governments, and not the needs of the public which they represent. Companies glom on to this market, which represents stable economic activity and extra funding to them, and help inflate its perceived economic valueand camouflage its inequity.

Meanwhile the Ordnance Survey is building-in repositories of local public sector and semi-public information to its MasterMap framework, and will be able to operate as a reseller in the info-licensing market. A system of national unique identifiers for properties, street infrastructure and metadata about the legal persons pertaining to them will be in place without ever having to be published or agreed on in one place.

I found this English
Heritage report on local authority handling of listed building planning
applications (pdf) enlightening, but overlong, on current local policy.