Manipulated Mapping

Will you confirm or deny under the Act when a member of the public draws the Surveys attention to its paper maps that have been manipulated by one of its licensees to make it appear to be Ordnance Survey mapping which does not accurately reflect the originals in breach of its license.  Does the Survey have duty to investigate to confirm what is being alleged?

I acknowledge your letter dated 5^th May 2011. As we have advised to you in our previous correspondence (dated 28^th March 2011, ref: FOI11141), the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000 is to make provision for the disclosure of information held by public authorities. It is the obligation of Ordnance Survey to confirm whether information is held in a recorded format, and if so to provide the requester with the information, not to confirm or deny questions of the above nature. 

However, we can advise you that we are not under a duty to investigate every potential breach of our licences.  The alleged breach you refer to relates to incidents which took place some years ago, and we do not consider that there is anything to be gained from us carrying out an investigation of any kind into these incidents.  Therefore we will not be investigating this matter.

We have spent a considerable amount of time responding to your correspondence on this issue, over several years, and are not prepared to allocate any further resources to it.     

We will not be providing you with any further response in relation to this request – FOI11162 - as it does not constitute a valid Freedom of Information (FOI) request.  This is because you are not requesting recorded information from Ordnance Survey, but are asking us to provide a comment.

Any further FOI requests from you in relation to the mapping of your property or damage to your boundary wall will be considered against the criteria for repeated or vexatious requests under Section 14 of the FOIA.   We note this correspondence is the fourth FOI request Ordnance Survey has received from you in relation to this issue, and that our Customer Service Centre has dealt with many requests from you in relation to this issue dating back to 2006.   If future requests are consider repeated or vexatious, Ordnance Survey will issue you with a refusal notice as per Section 17 (5) of the FOIA in response. 

If you are unhappy with our response, you may raise an appeal to our Appeals Officer at:

FOI Appeals Officer
Customer Service Centre
Ordnance Survey
Adanac Drive
SOUTHAMPTON
SO16 0AS

Please include the reference number below. The Appeals Officer will ensure that the process has been followed correctly, questioning any decisions taken regarding the original response and recommending disclosure of additional information if appropriate.

Thank you for your enquiry.

Reference number: FOI11162/May 2011