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Charles Arthur's avatar

And yet things can be done if you have the right momentum from both ministers and civil service. Back when I was at The Guardian, in 2006 I launched a campaign called "Free Our Data", which advocated making non-personal data held by government free for commercial or personal reuse. (The "non-personal" part is VERY important, obvs.) An example would be map data from Ordnance Survey, which is run as a little company inside government - a "trading fund".

We slogged along for years without much to show for it, until the Brown government in 2010, when Tom Watson became Cabinet Office minister, and was completely in tune with what we wanted to do. There were also some civil servants who thought it was a good idea.

Tom really pushed things through: OS objected strenuously, but he recruited other ministers to the cause and got momentum for this change to happen. Bear in mind that it would blow a hole in OS's budget, so would require Treasury to approve it (or at least not disapprove it). It did help too that Tim Berners-Lee told Gordon Brown at a dinner that this was a good idea and should go ahead.

There were studies and costings and examinations and so on, but in the end it was about pulling the trigger. And just before the 2010 election, the Brown government did, as part of a bigger opening up of data. It helped that the Tories were also looking at the idea, so there was a competitive element.

Some of that was about the timing: in 2010 the whole "internet everywhere" was taking off through mobile, which meant apps, which meant location and and also companies setting up to take advantage of the growing appetite for smartphones and apps.

But the remarkable thing is that it might have been a policy which had never been tried before, so your question of "why didn't this work the last time?" never arose. The one question that did stump me when I first talked about FOD in public was when Tom Steinberg of MySociety, who had civil service experience, said "How can I make the financial case for making this data free to Treasury?"

Only later - jeu d'escalier - did I think of the GPS system, where the US government funds the satellites that then provide navigation for cars and people; the former saves far more in time/ delays/etc than it costs. Finding those sorts of multipliers is tricky when you're first doing policy.

Thanks for indulging me. But I think there is a lesson: a good policy finds its time, and its champion, so perhaps it's worth trying again just because "this time it's right". FOD could never have worked before the internet, before widespread availability of mobiles.

The one part where we failed was getting postcodes included as part of the free data. Apparently that was down to Vince Cable at some point post-2010. Arse.

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Lorna Devenish's avatar

Really good. One of the big obvious policy solutions to sewage in the rivers is retrofit sustainable drainage systems. Hasn't happened because it needs to be delivered jointly by local government and water companies. This government just seems to hate local government and be obsessed with starving them of funds. Setting local government free, funding it, and setting some regulations around this, would go a long way to starting to tackle this issue.

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