Yup. The Post Office, the railways, the water system, for heavens' sake!
The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive things about privatisation, as part of the process of Being Sensible About The Economy (there is a much longer alternative version of this comment!).
The US -- the world temple of capitalism -- seems to be oddly principled (viewed from outside) about keeping certain things such as the postal service, or USGS, as part of the service to the public realm.
The one service probably immune from privatisation is the Health Service. It's only the most frothing-at-the-mouth right-wingers, the provocateurs just one step away from a rabies injection, who'd even admit out loud to a desire to do that. A politician talking about privatising the NHS would I think be pretty much equivalent to a US libertarian politician talking about privatising the armed forces.
(there's a longer version of that comment, as well...)
The Post Office (shops, services, government forms, etc.) is still fully government-owned. It's the Royal Mail (delivery) that was privatised. They used to be the same company but split in two before Royal Mail was privatised.
Thank you! – yes, it's a private company, fully owned by the Government. I think I sort-of knew that, but it hadn't properly registered; I may indeed have been confusing it with Royal Mail.
It means that the PO is quite closely analogous to the Ordnance Survey, in organisational terms. It's maybe describable as a quasi-privatisation, in that the company is run on a fully commercial basis, with correspondingly narrow goals in principle, but with the profits (or, in the case of the PO, the losses) going to the Exchequer, and the relevant minister (presumably) having some say about the appointment of board members.
It's organisationally tidy, I suppose, and manages to fit in with the long-standing 'private=efficient' doctrine. It still feels vaguely off, to me; not quite cricket.
The article points out that the PAF is kept up to date by virtue of thousands of postmen and postwomen physically visiting the rows in the database on a daily basis, as part of normal business, and logging updates. That level of routine maintenance is what any non-PostOffice PAF alternative would have to also do.
Amazon, and probably Google Maps, are two of the very small number of organisations which _might_ have the resources to build this postcode->GPS mapping, as a sideline to their current business.
They probably do license the PAF, of course, but they illustrate the sort of scale required to assemble that data independently.
I was a postie for a short while. A particular row of houses had no number 63, 61 and 65 were next door to each other. I always wondered if I posted something to 63 would it land in my sorting rack? Sadly I never tried, but I am fairly sure it would have. I often observed manual intervention to resolve addresses, from years of collective postie knowledge.
I remember asking a USGS person about this. They remarked that the other difference was that, compared with the OS, the USGS data was a bit rubbish (I may be paraphrasing).
The USGS is funded by some shard of the US federal budget, and does commendably good stuff with the budget it gets; it's there for both high-minded and commerce-supporting reasons. The OS is now (in a sequence of reorganisations from 1990 to 2015) a private company with a government-owned golden share, and is expected to be revenue-positive. The fact that it has more money per square metre of country, means that it's able to be _very_ thorough, mapping down to the level of individual bits of street furniture.
Sidenote: the context I was hearing this included a talk by someone from OS describing using reasoning software to do consistency checking of their GIS: for example, if you find a river bank in the middle of a field, something has been mislabelled. I thought that was cute.
When you buy a data product from OS, you're buying some subset of the layers of the database.
As the other reply pointed out, some of these layers are available for free, and in the last few years there's been some review/churn/debate in the data subsets made available that way (I see there are more details on the Wikipedia page). One can form a variety of opinions on whether those subsets are as big as they could or should be, but there does seem to be a substantial point that the level of the detail in the master map is there because it's profitable for the company (and thus income-generating for the government) to develop it from surveys, and it wouldn't exist otherwise.
I think the Met Office is organised in a similar way.
There are a number of questions of principle and practice here, but the OS seems to me to be claimable as an example (rare, in my opinion) of a privatisation which has produced net positive outcomes.
The tories, as a matter of religious faith, see privatised => efficient, whilst being unclear on the difference between 'efficient at creating shareholder value' and 'efficient at serving the public good'. The political mood music, over the last few decades, has meant that the Labour party has repeatedly found itself obliged to say positive things about privatisation, as part of the process of Being Sensible About The Economy (there is a much longer alternative version of this comment!).
The US -- the world temple of capitalism -- seems to be oddly principled (viewed from outside) about keeping certain things such as the postal service, or USGS, as part of the service to the public realm.
The one service probably immune from privatisation is the Health Service. It's only the most frothing-at-the-mouth right-wingers, the provocateurs just one step away from a rabies injection, who'd even admit out loud to a desire to do that. A politician talking about privatising the NHS would I think be pretty much equivalent to a US libertarian politician talking about privatising the armed forces.
(there's a longer version of that comment, as well...)