I would first like to thank you very much for this opportunity to talk to you.
I'll give you a little bit of background, as you say. I'm head of e-services and strategy at the Office of Public Sector Information. I have worked around the issues to do with open data, and publishing data in particular, for about five years as a public servant and have been involved in most of the initiatives the U.K. government has taken forward around open data publishing and how we do that well.
In policy terms, we distinguish between access legislation, which is covered by freedom of information legislation—you're just hearing about the Freedom of Information Act that we have in the U.K.—and re-use issues, which are about people who may take the information that government has made available and build maybe new commercial products or build applications that potentially help the citizen to hold government more to account.
There has been a long-running separation between access on one side and what we would call re-use on the other. Re-use probably involves more the economic use and the economic contribution that public sector information and public data can make. It also involves the use we now see for transparency, as well as the contribution that having better public access to data and better use of public data can make to new models of delivering public services. So the re-use agenda tied into lots of different agendas: an economic agenda, a transparency agenda, and a public services reform agenda along with the changing role of the state in society.
These have all driven a number of initiatives over the last decade or more in the U.K. A very striking and important moment was the coalition agreement that sets the policy framework for the current Parliament. The coalition agreement enshrines a number of obligations, a number of commitments with regard to our data publishing.
You've heard the commitment around publishing spending data and the idea that if we publish spending data, not only would the public be able to hold the government more to account but people would also be able to understand better what public organizations are doing and potentially public servants will make different decisions about how they spend public money. Also, information about the organizational structure of government, how much civil servants are paid, who reports to whom, and who is making decisions would be published.
Simultaneously, there's a very strong focus around growth, and quite a lot of work is happening at the moment with respect to further adapting the policy framework to try to make sure the private sector and the voluntary sector have the access they need to key government data sets.
For the first time--and this is very interesting--given this long-running separation between access and re-use both in policy terms and in terms of our statutory framework, the freedom bill that has been introduced to the U.K. Parliament proposes amendments to our freedom of information legislation...[Technical Difficulty—Editor]...right to government data sets and defines what a data set is. So for the first time we actually see those two strands potentially coming together in our statutory framework. That's just to give you a flavour.
My particular competence is around the technologies we have to enable this and the possibilities that new technologies, particularly on the web, will open up for bringing information together from lots of different sources, as well as why that's important and why suddenly data is, as I've heard it described, the new oil. It's an amazing resource that people are able to do all sorts of wonderful things with.
With some of that it's very much the government's role to enable from many different policy-check tests.