@V Yates: because making that data free to use by entrepreneurs is likely to improve both the national economic situation and quality of life by encouraging innovation. What kind of innovation? The kind of innovation that give Google and Yahoo such massive market share, except that this time the companies might be British ones. The kind of innovation that leads to accessible tools for charting social problems and proposing solutions to them, like everyblock.com and openplans.org
You know, it might be possible to use the data to create tools that would make the housing market so much more efficient that you’d save way more than £6.61 next time you move. Or perhaps in the future you’d buy a property that’s worth more than £6.61 more to you (because of the environmental surroundings, for instance, as revealed by pollution maps or crime maps). You might find that with the data, someone creates a tool that you use daily or weekly, and that saves you minutes of grief each time compared with the tools you were using previously. That’s got to be worth £6.61 over the course of, say, a year (and I doubt you move house more than once a year).
All these options sound to me like they’re worth spending an extra %0.004 of the cost of my next (first!) house on upfront.
