The Editor
The Daily Telegraph
111 Buckingham Palace Road
LONDON
SW1W 0DT

Sir

Our right to know

Your point that public bodies should be legally obliged to place all physical or electronic information they generate in the public domain (editorial Friday 25th May) is well made. However, this objective cannot be achieved while many government departments, agencies and trading funds are charged with gaining revenue from such information either by directly trading it for revenue or by generating income from value added services based upon it.

That such a policy is detrimental to the economy as a whole can readily be seen from the example of meteorological, climatological and oceanographic data. In the USA where these data are freely available in a timely fashion for the marginal cost of distribution, the value-adding private sector in these fields is more than ten times larger in terms of turn-over, numbers employed and tax revenues generated than is the case in the EU, a market of similar size.

Dr Richard Pettifer FRMetS CMet CEnv
General Secretary