If you’re going to petition, then petition that they convert to IPv6.

Most of these addresses are not visible from the public Internet, and would appear untenanted to an average sturdy English yeoman.  They are visible from dozens of Internet-connected private sites, though.  If we gave up these addresses, the business would realize no profit, and incur significant loss.

… we’re talking about a government department here.

Also I’m surprised Apple doesn’t have a double set like HP because they’ve been constantly experimenting/failing with internet services like that apple village thing.

Turns out, 80% of the block is used, thought out UK gov, some FoI replies: 
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/internet_protocol_ipv4_address_a
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/internet_protocol_ipv4_address_a_2

Things such as the GCSX and GSI exist there… every gov computer across the country. The cost would be lost changing everything (even if feasible) .

Also, not something that could be sold anyway. If it’s not used, must be returned to 
RIPE. Cannot be sold. 

Apart from the easily-kicked target of the british govt. there are loads of companies that are also sitting on /8′s. Ford Motors, Eli Lilly (who?), the long-defunct DEC (sold to HP so they have two lots of /8. Hell: even Apple have a slice of the pie.
And if you can tell me how I can force these companies to tell me what they are doing with these addresses I will do it.If isn’t just that the British govt is an easy target, it is because they have to respond.

The Torys are hardly more conservative than “New” Labour was.
Of course, by current US standards Margaret Thatcher was a communist, and Attila the Hun was a pinko-softie-hippy-liberal.

Tunneling through Hurricane Electric, you can do a manual setup, but most people don’t want to deal with manual setups. (The idea of helping my mother to do an IPv6 setup on her home nework… just no.)

If it’s as simple as your ISP handing you a /64 and you run with that /64 at your house, it’s fairly easy, assuming your router/modem knows how to automatically get that info from the ISP. If it looks like most ISPs will actually hand a /48, /56 or /60, now your router needs to auto configure for multiple subnets (something I personally like).

Add on a sensible default IP filter, because most people have got used to NAT in front of their home devices and don’t run a local firewall on their machines, or have sharing for a bunch of services turned on.

So while my phone might do IPv6 just fine, there’s still a little ways to go for things integration between wireless APs, cable and DSL modems to make it braindead enough for joe average consumer. I need to be able to plug a Linksys or Airport Extreme into the modem, and have IPv6 seamlessly spread into my home with minimal configuration, perhaps choosing a ‘public’ and a ‘private’ local network, for example, so my friends can use the local WiFi while not being on my personal server network. I’d also be curious to see if, say, my TV or my Receiver have a functional IPv6 stack.

*Yes, I know that there are VPN tunnel servers that are exceptions to that – it’s unlikely that the Department needs to keep more than a few hundred /24s for themselves to handle all of those. The more significant problem than cost is that it’d take months for the bureaucrats to argue about what to do, and a few more months to actually implement it, so we won’t be seeing much of this address space for another year or two.

The Department for Work and Pensions is responsible for welfare and pension policy and is a key player in tackling child poverty. It is the biggest public service delivery department in the UK and serves over 20 million customers. http://dwp.gov.uk/about-dwp/what-we-do/

“I may have been mistaken”

Here in the US, we’d tell the national debt to get off its lazy behind and get a job and earn the money instead of taking handouts from the government…

Don’t forget you can’t just update your LAN equipment – all the changes have to be synchronized with WAN networking changes too.  And no field office can be without access to corporate applications for more than half a day (or some such requirement), including the VT-120 emulator software that runs the mainframe applications that are running on a mainframe emulation environment in an outsourced data centre Spain.