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The team behind Whitehall's huge public data project, including ‘web' inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, want to make information on local government similarly accessible to residents. Sir Tim and his Cabinet Office team unveiled their latest venture last week – a website offering the public access to a vast range of official Whitehall data linked to public services, including schools ratings maps, health statistics, local crime rates and information on planning applications. The site – data.gov.uk – is for public or commercial use, and has been partially designed so that individuals or firms can turn more than 2,500 data sets on particular issues into easy-to-use information services for the public. Developers have already built a site aimed at parents, which maps the location of schools which receive high Ofsted ratings. Other projects already include a site that allows people to report and map potholes and road hazards following the recent cold snap across Britain. Much of the data has existed for years, but has only been available to the public on request. Launching the site, Sir Tim said: ‘Government data is something we have already spent the money on… and when it is sitting on a disk in somebody's office, it is wasted.' The current site is focused mainly on central government data and contains just a fraction of information held by local authorities. But Sir Tim revealed plans ‘to work with local government to extend public data principles there, through a Local Public Data Panel', chaired by Nigel Shadbolt, a data expert at Southampton University. Professor Shadbolt has worked on the Cabinet Office project alongside Sir Tim since last summer. Speaking to The MJ recently, a senior Downing Street source said making council data publicly available would ‘support key aims of central government's plan to extend "localist" policies' Transparent local data would, for example, complement the CLG's Total Place programme. Total Place pilots are currently experimenting with ways to improve local services by merging budgets from a range of public bodies, and devolving decision-making about local priorities, and how to spend taxpayers' cash most effectively, to local public sector managers. ‘Opening up most local authority data to the public would allow residents to inform those decisions more effectively,' the Downing Street source added. London mayor, Boris Johnson, plans to publish an online ‘data warehouse' on 29 January, containing at least 200 data sets on services in the capital.

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WHITEHALL

Web guru unveils new age in public access to service data

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