The Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) is not the sexiest sounding body. It appears to have fallen direct from quango heaven, and elicits many a blank look even from those with a good understanding of government. But it’s an important body: for five years now, the panel has advised ministers on how government can profit from the data it produces and holds, and provided a voice for the industries that want access to it.

Working alongside the Office of Public Sector Information, which acts as a gateway or buyers that want to access government data, the panel has also taken on a role as the adjudicator of disputes over the provision or withholding of information.

If it all sounds a bit dry, then perhaps sat-nav is a good demonstration of the growing value and importance of ‘public sector information’. That technology would not have become a must-have driving accessory if Ordnance Survey had not decided to resell its geographical data. By licensing map data to the likes of TomTom, Garmin and Becker, the government has enabled the creation of an industry worth an estimated £200m each year.  “It’s not the biggest industry in the world”, Richard Susskind, APPSI’s former chairman admits, “but it brings into focus something that would be impossible otherwise”.

Susskind, a legal and IT expert who used to advise the Lord Chief Justice, joined APPSI when it was set up in 2003 as a body of experts from government, industry and academia that could advise ministers. At that time, Susskind says there was very little appreciation of how the demand for public sector information was growing, powered in part by the internet’s ability to ease access to data. It was a struggle, he says, to get those in government to recognise the importance of the data that departments across government hold. “For a couple of years, we felt like we were crying in the wilderness”, he recalls, “but then suddenly in the last year everyone has become interested.”

Those interested parties have included junior justice minister Michael Wills, who specifically asked the prime minister for the data issue to be included in his brief. And Susskind, who has now handed over the chairman’s role to former Statistics Commission chairman Professor David Rhind, says such interest and support is vital for a non-departmental public body such as the APPSI.

“No matter how sound your research, cogent your arguments and compelling your case, how interesting what you’re doing is, unless you have ministerial energy and buy-in and support it is really hard to pursue an agenda.”

That buy-in has extended to departments other than APPSI’s parent, the Ministry of Justice: the Cabinet Office, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), the Treasury and the Office of Fair Trading have all commissioned or carried out work into the question of how public sector information should be reused and priced.

The pricing issue in particular is a contentious one. Taking the two extremes, either departments can charge for the reuse of their information – Ordnance Survey earns about £100m a year from licensing – or they can hand it out for free in the hope that this will bring bigger wealth to the economy and society as a whole.

Susskind firmly believes that the latter option is the best way forwards. “The growth in the economy that the liberalisation of information will provide – through tax revenue, as one example – will produce greater revenue than licensing,” he explains. For Susskind, “licensing is the safe, limited model” – but he adds that many such revenues are “funny money”: cash circulating within the public sector as one government-funded body pays another.

However, Susskind accepts that the free info model will not be a popular one with the bean counters within organisations such as the Met Office and Ordnance Survey, which as trading funds must meet their own costs. “It’s unlikely they will want to give information away”, Susskind admits.

While Susskind welcomes the flurry of activity and interest around the issue, he is keen that the government take the research that has already been produced (see box) and create a clear policy, possibly under the aegis of a single information minister. “At some stage, there’s got to be a decision made at a very senior level,” he says. “How do we make the most of this asset? That question remains unanswered.”