In an amazing feat of Not Getting It, a young man from Experian QAS has been phoning round all the former users of EarnestMarples.com trying to get us to buy their post-code lookup file to better serve our customers.

The conversation went on for at least 20 minutes after I had made clear that (a) TheStraightChoice.org didn’t have any money, (b) we are morally against this Postcode information being private (the whole justification of the EarnestMarples site), (c) even if we did want to buy it we’d get it direct from the Royal Mail, and (d) we’re now using the freely available google geocoding API (which he hadn’t heard about).

Add to that, this postcode data is supposed to be made free this year, in spite of high level difficulties.

So what was so good about their product, which was fully derived from the Postcode Address File?

Well, the PAF is apparently not in a very good format, and they have to spend 42 man hours per month to fix up for every release, and they add corrections (including changing I’s to 1’s and vice versa), and improve on its area naming, and shrink the file size down by a factor of 5 to make it more useful to commercial organizations.

My goodness, this is a damning indictment of the PAF, whose management has a budget of £18million, with numerous board executives and staff and Postcomm reviews, and so forth.

Indeed it is, I was told. And QAS, which is backed by very prestigious and successful Experian company (with really stupid salesmen, or they wouldn’t have called me), fix it up so well that the Royal Mail buys our postcode lookup product for use in their call centres.

This is known as a customer endorsement. And what better customer to endorse your added-value than the one who sold you the data in the first place! (Shame this one is not included in their page of customer case studies.)

I’m sure what he claims is not strictly true, because what Royal Mail will have done is outsourced all their call centre needs to an Indian company, who will have bought in the QAS Experian product as part of their commercial package — rather than actually taking advantage of the special-case efficiencies due to this particular customer.

But as all our great managing class knows, outsourcing is always better in the larger term, no matter how many specific and provable inefficiencies it raises. It’s a matter of faith. And this article of faith feeds back to the sales pitch by the assumption that if the Royal Mail is buying back its own data, then that proves it is better, rather than just being one more example of a long series of deranged economic structures that make money for the wrong people.

If the PAF was made public, this kind of nonsense wouldn’t happen, because people would say: don’t sell me the corrections, why don’t you put them back into the dataset? I mean, Wikipedia has a lot of very useful data in it, and nobody sells improved copies of it around the place. People understand. But with private corporate data, it can happen, even though the management of Postcomm document explains:

7.39. PAF accuracy is important to PAF customers, and broadly speaking the more accurate PAF is the better. Under the Act, Royal Mail is required to maintain PAF so that it is capable of being used to encourage good addressing. Therefore, Royal Mail should work with the advisory board towards an appropriate measurement system, targets, performance measurement, reporting, and formal arrangements with data suppliers.

But as long as there are enough fools to buy this old rope to fund at least one salesman to waste his pitiful life phoning round all possible users, this business will continue.

Now excuse me, I have a company to set up for selling people train timetables.

But first a letter to the PAF board:

Dear Sir,

I have just had a call from a representative of QAS explaining that their PAF derived product is superior to the data obtainable directly from Royal Mail because theirs contains corrections and other formatting improvements.

This concerns me, as I would have assumed that the best data should be available from source, and that the resellers should be returning any errors they find back to the primary database, rather than casting assertions about the accuracy in order to drum up business.

Also, according to the “management of PAF Final report April 2007″ available at the Postcomm website,

7.31. Royal Mail should publish:
* its process for measuring PAF quality;
* PAF accuracy target;
* actual performance; and
* analysis of exceptions or failures against target and steps to be taken to ensure targets are met.

In order to clarify the situation about the accuracy for when I in future receive such calls from salesmen, can you please point me to where the above information is published?

Thank you

Ho hum. Email spammed again by the extremely well-funded Power2010 circus:

Dear Julian,

We’ve reached a major milestone. More than 25,000 votes have now been cast in our contest to choose the five reforms that will make up the POWER2010 Pledge.

Nick Riley, the person who last week cast the 25,000th vote, voted for a “None of the above” option on ballot papers. When Guy, our campaign blogger, asked Nick why he supported this idea, he said it’s the only way for him to register his “total dissatisfaction”.

“An abstention doesn’t seem to register with the political classes who seem quite satisfied when they have achieved, say, 30% of the vote on a 45% turnout! They then attribute the low turnout to apathy instead of the true cause, which is disgust!”

You’ve already voted, so I know that, like Nick, you want to change politics. Click here to vote for more ways that we can fix it.

25,000 votes is a major milestone, but we haven’t finished.

You can vote for as many issues as you like – and the more votes we receive, the more legitimacy we will have in the eyes of the political class when we take the POWER2010 Pledge to them before the general election.

So, for the sake of our democracy, please vote again:
http://www.power2010.org.uk/ourdemocracy

Thank you, and best wishes,

Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010

What they’ve done is to take ideas for reforming the political system from thousands of people who don’t know how the current political system actually works, and then added up their votes on those ideas to provide a final list of reforms.

The reforms on the surface are pretty reasonable (for a set of reforms voted on by people who don’t know how the political system actually works), but they don’t get to the heart of the problem.

For example, Number 6 on the list is for a fully elected Second Chamber, which would be quite nice to have if you’re not concerned that it may be as bad as the fully elected First Chamber.

In this country people have got used to leaving all of politics entirely up to the parties to sort out, so it doesn’t exactly matter what the system is (proportional representation, appointed bodies, elected, income capped, whatever), because the parties will own it completely.

That’s where the trouble lies.

Until there is a mass understanding of how parties work, and a greater move for normal people to join their membership and influence their decision-making processes in order to determin the choices we have, nothing is going to change.

So it would have been nice if these emails went out with requests for people to upload leaflets they are receiving to thestraightchoice.org so we could all start to find out what is going on, because reform without understanding is just a shot in the dark

On the left is a page from the leaflet of Libdem Sandra Gidley of Romsey defending a wafer thin majority over the Tories. On the right is fellow MP Martin Tod attempting to inherit Winchester, the former seat of an embarrassing sex scandal

I’ve no issue with recycling leaflet templates in neighbouring constituencies. What is strange is the So-Duko numbers quiz that is of no infotainment value.

Why can’t we have an interesting cross-word with a political theme about your latest party policies?

Meanwhile, up in Edinburgh South Conservative candidate Neil Hudson is kind enough to include the solution to his so-duko in case you get stuck!

Minutes from an Executive Team meeting of the £25million/year Electoral Commission disclosed by Freedom of Information request (link) show that, when offered a range of five options for monitoring compliance with laws concerning political election leaflets, the board chose to pursue Option 3 known as “Enhanced desk-based research”, over Option 4 which involved any form of partnership with The Straight Choice website.

Chief Executive Peter Wardle was skeptical about the added value of a project where citizens scanned political leaflets live onto the internet to its compliance objectives, and was not sure that the benefits outweighed the risks.

Enhanced desk-based research involves hiring a maximum of four agency staff in April and allocating them to marginal high risk constituencies at the budgeted cost of £12,182 in addition to normal staff sitting at their desks and reading random political twitter feeds and other sites on the internet.

Julian Todd of The Straight Choice said, “These sniveling cheapskates in the Electoral Commission will probably spend part of their day at their desks scanning through our website for material they should have helped us collect in the first place.”

Obscure records show that the Electoral Commission has in the past stumped up £125,586 in a grant to encourage adults with learning disabilities to vote (link).

Although numerous laws apply to what can and cannot appear on political leaflets, the Electoral Commission’s statutory duty to monitor compliance only applies to referendum materials (link), while other bodies — such as the police — have the responsibility for the investigation and prosecution of allegations relating to election materials.

Notwithstanding this setback, The Straight Choice website will carry on with direct donations from Julian Todd and other volunteers who are able to see the point.

Julian hereby challenges Peter Wardle on his £120k salary plus pensions allowance, or anyone else from the gong-encrusted board of commissioners and deputy commissioners to match his substantial £3k cash donation so far, if they know what’s good for democracy.

Having done an awful lot of desk-work this morning, Julian can disclose that Wardle’s standard biography included in brochures for various shindigs attended (link), which contains the sentence “He has also worked on the first major outsourcing of government IT services” is probably referring to his time at the Inland Revenue in the 1990s(link) during the first in a long line of obscenely catastrophic IT outsourcing projects to the “world class player” formally known as EDS (link). No wonder he leaves that crucial detail out of his CV.

Monitoring of the procurements of the Electoral Commission should be undertaken for signs of the common Business Management graduate intuition of how to manage IT work in the public sector.

Still, it could be worse.

A lot, lot worse.

They could have spent the last 5 years trying to give us electronic voting.

Can you spot what’s funny about this leaflet?

That’s right, it’s paid for out of MPs’ expenses, as you can see from the obvious fine-print.

Therefore this is not an election leaflet, even though it contains lots of photos of the candidate incumbent MP cutting ribbons, kissing babies, and generally doing the sorts of things that working politicians need to do in order to get elected in these unenlightened days.

This is what a real election leaflet looks like:

Can you spot the qualitative difference? No? That’s because, unlike the self-appointed committee of MPs who oversee the rules, you are not an expert. The difference is that one goes on about how great the party is, while the other is published by and for the interests of the candidate sitting MP who is up for re-election.

The mandate for devising this Communications Allowance “to assist in the work of communicating with the public on parliamentary business” was given to the Members Estimate Committee by a vote on 1 November 2006.

Now, the Committee could have checked out the sterling work being done by the volunteer websites TheyWorkForYou.com, PublicWhip (my one), and WriteToThem when considering how to facilitate effective communication between Parliament and the public, but instead they simply granted a new £6.46million annual allowance (£10,000 per MP on top of the £7,000 postage allowance) — with predictable results.

The Communications Allowance was formally established by a vote on 28 March 2007.

One month later the three Plaid Cymru MPs had used their allowances to place full page ads in the local press outside their constituencies in which their party logos were “not proportionate and discreet” during the run-up to elections for the Welsh Assembly. After a forensic analysis of the rules that were not broken, the Committee on Standards and Privileges asked the three MPs to refund the value of their expenses claim.

That was it.

Other MPs who have been busted for breaching the woolly rules…

… include Malcolm Bruce MP who showed photos of himself with a fellow LibDem MSP during the Scottish Parliamentary elections (report here), Sadiq Khan MP who featured his Labour Party rose logo too big (report here), and David Tredinnick MP who printed 40,000 copies of a glossy 4-page leaflet featuring numerous photos of fellow local Conservative Party members standing for re-election ahead of the June 2009 elections, as well as a three year old photo of himself shaking hands with David Cameron (report here).

For his impropriety, Tredinnick was asked to repay £1,945, which was “half the cost of printing and distributing the newsletter”. In my opinion, proper democratic compensation would have been to donate £1,945 to the campaigns of each of the opposition candidates in his constituency for the up-coming General Election.

For the most recent news, I recommend checking out Mr Stephen Byers – Third Report of Session 2009-10 where the original complaint was thrown out by the Committee on a technicality (his endorsement of the mayor standing for re-election on the Labour ticket came outside the new 28-day-prior-to-the-election rule), but the Department of Resources found issues with other parts of the leaflet.

Mr Byers was not amused by the fact that the Commissioner had “widened his inquiry beyond those specific issues that had been complained of”, to which the Committee replied: “This is not the first time that a Member has challenged a Commissioner’s interpretation of his remit.”

The lesson is that the politicians are going to sail as close to the wind as they can on this one. There will be problems wherever you look. This allowance is too new to have been through a General Election cycle, so we are entering new territory.

The Department of Resources receives the expenses claims for printing these so-called communications leaflets, and will they give free advice to any MP who wants to know if they are considering printing something dodgy.

So why the heck don’t they also take the opportunity to demand an actual copy of every single leaflet they are funding with public money so we can have them all put up on-line to see?

In the meantime, we — the public — will have to muddle along with only TheStraightChoice.org website, and occasionally we’ll grumble about how all the money is going to the pointless picture-fest of a website on the left, and not to the one on the right that contains actual political content of — you know — whipped votes and stuff.

Hi folks. Things are getting moving again. The postcode problem seems to have sorted itself out, and we now have a partner in the form of:

Democracy Club

Democracy Club is also a self-funded volunteer-run project. Go there. Sign up. And do what you’re told to do. There will be many exciting crowd-sourcing actions in the run-up to the election — beyond simply uploading leaflets. We’re not going to forget all those politicians’ pre-election promises again. This time it will be different.

Meanwhile, our attempts at shaking down the some of our great national democracy-promoting institutions for a modicum of support and/or cash has drawn a blank.

Available resources appear to be reserved for more exciting projects than gathering actual data. For example, Power2010 has just published its list of ideas for reform that will be subject to a public vote between January and February.

You’re going to hear a lot about it as I suspect they have money to burn.

So, faced with the choice of either letting TheStraightChoice.org die due to a universal lack of vision by our moneyed elite institutions, here is a picture of me handing over a cheque for £3,000 of personal money to Richard Pope on the platform of Moorgate tube station.

In the event we need some more disk space for all the leaflets being uploaded as the election looms, I can always kick journalisted off my server where they have been living rent-free for the last couple of years, and have completely failed to piss-off a single journalist in all that time. What a waste. “If it’s not hurting, it’s not working,” as John Major used to say.

Oh, and one last point, now we’re back. There are a number of laws governing election leaflets. If you’re as curious as I am about what plans the Electoral Commission has for monitoring compliance with these laws, the answer should be available here by 21 January 2010.

Cheerio.

The United Kingdom has an extremely valuable social resource in the form of the Postcode Address File that could — if handled properly — make this country the world class leader in geo-referencing innovation.

I call it a social resource, because the postcodes are something which everybody who lives in a flat or house anywhere in the country knows by heart. It’s part of our national heritage, like the national parks or the M25.

The fact that computers — with the right data — can convert from this code to a reasonably accurate Latitute-Longitude global position has major implications for what people with big ideas and very little budget can achieve.

Historically, that’s where inventions in IT come from. TheStraightChoice.org, for example, wasn’t invented by one of the political parties, or a newspaper, or one of the well-funded think tanks, or by a university professor with a research grant.

It was made by a couple of guys who don’t have £4000 to throw at the Royal Mail to satisfy their bean counters.

If there was culture of actually giving out enabling institutional grants to projects such as TheStraightChoice.org, or PublicWhip, or PlanningAlerts.com, or OpenStreetMap (and quite a few others), then maybe we wouldn’t feel so hard done by when faced with these otherwise prohibitive charges.

We don’t need a fraction of the money that is routinely given out for public works of art. And these web-projects, free and open as they are, are undeniably part of the public good.

But there are no available grants whatsoever for these types of projects. So there is no money to spend on buying back essential information from quasi public institutions that have been subject to substantial tax-payer bail-outs. They don’t even consider licensing the data for non-commercial use.

In light of this, the good people of earnestmarples.com provided system for enabling free access to the postcode -> latitude/longitude location numbers essential for the smooth running of TheStraightChoice.org and other worthy unfunded projects.

But today they got their very own threatening letter from the lawyers to take it down, which means that all the other services which depend on it have also effectively been taken down.

I am personally not party to the Plan B at the moment. (Maybe there isn’t one.) If anyone out there has £3,850 spare to buy a legitimate copy of the Royal Mail Postcode Address File, please get in contact as we have no way of raising this from the operation of the not-for-profit site.

For email updates when we get things working again, please sign up to DemocracyClub.org.uk

The results are in for the Norwich North by-election. As you can see, I have illustrated it with a pie chart rather than a first-past-the-post-legitimizing bar chart.

There are four sets of hard numbers we can use to discuss this:

• The current July 2009 Parliamentary election poll
• The previous 2005 Parliamentary election poll
• The aggregate of June 2009 local election votes for wards in the constituency (link)
• The 26 June ICM telephone poll (link)

Here they are lined up in a nice handy-to-read table.

I have taken the ICM poll’s headline predictions from table 5 of their report and multiplied the percentages by the actual turnout.

The figures show a collapse in the Labour vote by a factor of more than three (with the LibDems declining as well) between 2005 and 2009. But Labour also has the greatest proportionate increase (ignoring UKIP) between its Local election performance the previous month and the by-election.

Turnout by the supporters of a party is one of the crucial factors in any election. Table 2 of the ICM poll report gives a really detailed breakdown of turn-out predictions. In the poll, 40% reported that they were certain to vote, and 4% reported that they were almost certain (score of 9 out of 10) to vote. The actual turnout was 45.9%.

One BBC reporter tried to explain the results by merely subtracted the two numbers, and writing:

Some 14,800 people who voted Labour in 2005 did not vote on Thursday. There was no Crewe and Nantwich-style flood of Labour voters to the Tories.

By actually reading the ICM poll I get a different story, because according to it 49% of Labour voters said they were certain to vote, 45% of Lib Dem voters were certain to vote, and only 37% of Conservative voters were certain to vote.

In other words, Labour voters were turning out in greater proportions than supporters of the other parties.

We need to look at its numbers for the 2005 voting statements, because the former MP Ian Gibson was especially popular. But here we find that 51% of those who voted Labour in the 2005 General election were certain to vote in 2009, and 51% of those who voted Conservative in 2005 were certain to vote.

Clearly there is some vote switching going on, so we look at tables 3 and 4. Table 3 has the raw figures, including a whopping 34% “Don’t know”s and “Refused”s, while table 4 scales these non-responses out of the numbers.

Of those who gave an answer to the pollsters (Table 4), 91% of those who voted Conservative in 2005 intended to vote Conservative in 2009, with 6% going to the Green party. But only 54% of those who voted Labour in 2005 intended to vote Labour in 2009, with 17% going to Conservatives, 11% to LibDem, and 14% going to Greens. Also of note: 21% of 2005 LibDem voters intended to defect to Green and 12% to UKIP.

So the story appears to show that half the Labour votes were fleeing to other parties, but those who remained with Labour were still going to turn out.

Or, another possibility, Ian Gibson’s personality attracted votes from supporters of all other parties, and the 2009 results simply reflected a return of these votes to the parties to whom they belonged.

That, and a whole load of the “Don’t know”s turned out for the Conservatives.

The ICM poll in table 3 (the one which includes the “Don’t knows”) also reports that 40% of the 18-25 group said they intended to vote Conservative (support of the over 65s was 34%), and 39% of the Unemployed intended to vote Conservative. Also, 37% of students were Lib Dems, and none were Green.

This, to me, sounds like bonkers, and I could be reading the tables incorrectly. Nevertheless, if the Conservative party knew they were going after — and capturing — the young or unemployed vote, then a Male, 34-65, B, Other like myself is going to be pretty unfamiliar with the thrust of their campaigns.

The Guardian printed in its byelection post-mortem:

The campaign started after the Conservatives declared that they might have to cut public spending in most government departments by 10% after the general election, and Labour attacked [the Conservative candidate] aggressively on this issue. One Labour leaflet suggested that the Tories could close up to 10% of schools in the country, and another said the Tories were “threatening to do away with free TV licences and bus passes for the elderly”.

…

Tory strategists believe that Brown was using the byelection to road-test a “Tory cuts” campaign and that the result shows that this approach does not work.

The threat to free TV licenses and bus passes for wrinkly grannies is here. I can’t find the 10% of schools will close leaflet.

I wish I knew precisely how the Labour party supposedly worked out that attacks on the Conservative party for alleged public spending cuts weren’t working. Knowing about the flows and sources of information is critical to the public understanding of the process, as well as explaining some of the systematic failures whereby reasoned public opinion does not get translated into public policy.

On the plus side: aside from all the other disagreeable content in this final Labour leaflet, I notice that it is the only leaflet that published the correct ICM poll results for the constituency on its front page, rather than some other bogus figures intended to mislead the public into voting tactically in the wrong direction.

Roll on the next by-election, which I believe will be Glasgow North East.

Here, the real story is not the expenses scandal which precipitated the resignation of the sitting MP Michael Martin, but the fact that for the last decade that he has held the office of the Speaker of the House, the people of Glasgow East have been officially denied any democratic representation.

I wonder if anyone there has noticed.

Well done to Chloe Smith for winning the Norwich North by-election, who will now be entering the House of Commons. Here’s a few of her best bits form the campaign:

To see how she lives up to these promises, you can follow her voting record on The Public Whip, and track what she says in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com.

All these graphs have been published by  parties contending the the Norwich North by-election (click for a bigger version):

That makes things clearer no?