The Department of Health, Department for Transport, Met Office and Land Registry were tasked this week with releasing huge amounts of data for free re-use in web ‘apps’, scientific research and new business products.

This week’s growth plan included a slew of announcements on transparency which, the Cabinet Office’s director of transparency Tim Kelsey said in an interview with CSW, “underline how far people have gone right across the piece.” The pledges on data held by the Met Office and Land Registry, he said, “speak clearly of the commitment of those trading funds to maximising the economic growth potential of their data, which does mean giving much more of it away either at lower or at no cost.”

The debate over whether trading funds should make a return on their data or give it away to stimulate economic growth began some years ago under the Labour government, but Kelsey argued that the coalition has now reached a conclusion.

“There is a clear consensus that government will create more value by releasing data more freely when it can. That’s the community’s consensus and it’s also my view and [Cabinet Office minister] Francis Maude’s view,” he said. Although there are “contexts where we need to be mindful of the costs of data collection and appropriate recovery”, he added, the government is “prioritising making more data more freely available.”

Clear objectives: the growth plan sets out the government’s plans on...

Health
Link datasets from primary and secondary care, and make anonymised information available at a national level on patients’ treatment, prescriptions and outcomes. This will help health researchers and pharmaceutical firms to better understand conditions and interventions, and support better commissioning by NHS institutions. “The NHS has great data assets, and we should be making those assets available – without compromising patient confidentiality – so that the life sciences innovators can develop new ways of treating people,” commented transparency chief Tim Kelsey.

Weather
Publish the Met Office data behind public weather forecasts, plus real-time observations data.

Property
Make available Land Registry information showing all property sale prices.

Transport
Release real-time data on train and bus movements, and on roadworks down to the local level. Legislate so that the Civil Aviation Authority can publish data on the performance of aviation service providers, improving decision-making by those buying flights or airfreight.

Welfare
The Universal Credit IT system is being designed so that benefits data can be published during the first year of operation. Government will also consider how to link welfare datasets to other government and commercial data, improving the information’s value to industry.

Supporting open data
Establish an Open Data Institute in East London to “innovate, exploit and research open data opportunities”, and create a Data Strategy Board of data users with £7m to spend over three years on making data more freely available.

Written by Matt Ross, CSW