Devolution is about to hand England's mayors more power than any local leader has held in living memory, once all the re-organisations across health, police, fire and local government are complete. For the first time, one elected person will be accountable.
That is the moment joined-up data stops being optional.
The case is proven – we know outcomes are better when we collaborate and share information. The Troubled Families programme pooled data across councils, police, health and Jobcentre Plus, and by 2020 had recorded 350,000 positive family outcomes – even though its own evaluations kept reporting that data sharing and IT integration remained the stubborn, recurring barrier.
The same challenge lies behind every question a mayor will now face each week: who is in temporary accommodation and also in A&E; which 16-year-olds quietly disappeared from the system when school ended.
Answering means data following the person, not the organisation.
Britain has been reorganising government data services for 15 years and joining up remarkably little of it.
As boundaries align, leaders should have a total and accurate view of a place. But a holistic view demands common definitions, matched identifiers and someone willing to arbitrate. There are pieces of an answer – unique property reference numbers, iStandUK with its mission of promoting and developing data standards for local public services, Open Referral UK and Scalable Approach to Vulnerability Via Interoperability (SAVVI) to produce national data standards that result in reduced hardship for vulnerable people and households. But there is no settled, mandatory, general-purpose way for councils and strategic authorities to share local data with each other.
There is even a Mayoral Data Council, set up in 2025 to give mayoral data leaders a voice in Whitehall – but so far it is a forum, not an operating model. We risk every new authority buying its own answer from whichever supplier gets there first. We risk a plethora of bespoke platforms, none of them speaking to each other, each defensible locally and collectively useless.
I hope it doesn't happen, but someone needs to act fast.
Ben Page is visiting professor at King's College London
