In March 2006
The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for the raw data gathered by Ordnance Survey (not to mention data gathered on its behalf by local authorities at public expense) to be made freely available for reuse by individuals and companies, as happens, for example, with such data in the USA. However, Ordnance Survey claimed that the quality of the freely available government mapping in the USA is low or variable because of funding issues. On the 7 April 2006 the
Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) received a complaint from the data management company Intelligent Addressing. Many, although not all, complaints were upheld by the OPSI, one of the conclusions being that Ordnance Survey "is offering licence terms which unnecessarily restrict competition". Negotiations between Ordnance Survey and interested parties are ongoing with regard to the issues raised by the OPSI report, Ordnance Survey being under no obligation to comply with the report's recommendations. In June 2006 the Free our data campaign asked "In an age when it is not seen as appropriate for the public sector to run power stations or railways, why is it running nationalised industries in what should be the most dynamic sector of all, the web-based knowledge economy?" And said that "The question lies at the heart of our campaign, which argues that government's role should be to collect and administer high-quality raw data, but make it freely available to everyone to create innovative services". Transport Direct's chief executive, Nick Ilsley, said that research by the department prior to Transport Direct's launch had shown the private sector was not interested in providing a one-stop all-purpose site. In April 2007,
Cabinet Office Minister
Hilary Armstrong commissioned
Ed Mayo and
MySociety director Tom Steinberg to draft a "Power of Information Review" on how the government could serve the public's information needs better. The resulting report led Cabinet Minister
Tom Watson, MP to create a 'Power of Information Task Force. Since August 2007, Ordnance Survey has contracted the
political lobbying company Mandate Communications to help campaign against the free data movement and discover which politicians and advisers support Open Data or have questioned Ordnance Survey policies. In 2008 MySociety requested to OPSI that the dataset should be made available for re-use as
Open Data rather than at a charge of £7,500. In April 2008
Tom Watson MP,
Parliamentary Secretary at the
Cabinet Office said that pledged to turn upside down the British public's "recipient relationship" with official information. The 'Power of Information Taskforce Report' was published by the Cabinet Office in February 2009. It reported that although the National Public Transport Data Repository, described itself as ‘Crown Copyright’ investigations showed this database is not actually government data and that the NPTDR charges significant fees for use. The report suggested that there should be a presumption in favour of information which has been created by public sector bodies being available for re-use. They also suggested that there should be a clear and consistent copyright and licensing rules applied making it easy to work with data from multiple sources in the public sector. They recommended a 'Crown Commons' style approach with "highly permissive licensing scheme that is transparent, easy to understand and easy to use, modelled on the 'Click Use' licence". Also in February 2009 Tom Watson MP from the Cabinet Office advised that the UK government would put
Open-source software on equal footing for procurement; stating that "Procurement decisions will be made on the basis on the best value for money solution to the business requirement, taking account of total lifetime cost of ownership of the solution, including exit and transition costs, after ensuring that solutions fulfil minimum and essential capability, security, scalability, transferability, support and manageability requirements." and "Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility". In August 2009 Tom Watson MP mused on his website under the title "Wacky terms and conditions" about why the DirectGov version of the transport direct portal included this condition: "you may retrieve and display Content from the Website on an electronic visual display device, print individual pages on paper (but not photocopy them)". In September 2009 Sir
Tim Berners Lee and Professor
Nigel Shadbolt who had been appointed by Gordon Brown to advise the Government on how to make data more accessible to the public were invited to Number 10 Downing Street to present their early findings to the cabinet. In October 2009 Tom Watson MP questioned why railway timetables were the train operators' private intellectual property. He asked Junior transport minister
Chris Mole: "Does not my hon. Friend think that the timetable data belong to the people, and that we should make them available for free?". He also proposed an
Early Day Motion that read "That this House calls on the Government to ensure that transport timetables for rail and bus operators are made freely available for re-use, using an open standards format, thus enabling voluntary and commercial organisations to publish the data on their own digital platforms". It was signed by 32 MPs. In November 2009 the then Prime Minister,
Gordon Brown announced that "mid-scale" data from Ordnance Survey would be made available for free reuse, including commercial applications, from April 2010. A consultation was held inviting responses between 23 December and 17 March by the Department of Communities and Local Government. In December 2009 Local Transport Today reported that 'Data release could spark transport IT innovations". The magazine reported that "Among the data to be made accessible through the site are trunk road traffic volumes, the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database and the National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR)". A DfT spokeswoman was reported to say: "We will seek to embrace new technology to enable partners to provide exciting, user-focused services such as recently seen with satellite navigation and iPhone applications," In January 2010 a new government web-service,
data.gov.uk was unveiled which would "offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use". The aim of the project was to "kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information". The US had recently launched
data.gov and London Mayor
Boris Johnson had created the London Data Store the same month. In March 2010 the Prime Minister
Gordon Brown announced that the NaPTAN dataset was to be immediately made available from the data.gov.uk site as
Open Data, as well as confirming an impending release of
Ordnance Survey data. In his speech he observed that at present public transport timetables and real-time running information was owned by the operating companies but that the government would work to free it up. He also said that "from today we will make it a condition of future franchises that this data will be made freely available". Also in March 2010 a
Freedom of Information request was made to the Department for Transport inquiring about arrangements that had been made for the release of cycling data that was being collected for the portal at public expense. It requested information about any claims the
Ordnance Survey would have over the data and if so the terms, and prices charged for making the data available to Ordnance Survey customers. Also the cost to a Local Authority for adding their area to the planner and for notes of any meetings of project boards and working parties. A response was published on 1 April 2010. On 1 April 2010 Ordnance Survey released the brand
OS OpenData, under an attribution-only licence compatible with
CC-by. Various groups and individuals had campaigned for this release of data, but some were disappointed when some of the profitable datasets were not included – withheld for the counter-argument that if licensees do not pay for OS data collection then the government would have to be willing to foot a £30m p.a. bill, to obtain the future economic benefit of sharing the highly detailed mapping produced by the UK's national agency. The files have been cached on the
MySociety website for convenient download. June 2010 saw
Transport for London release a substantial amount of its data for free reuse, even in commercial settings. This did not include the roundel or Underground schedules, though the Underground data was released in the following months. Following the release of this data numerous "apps" for phones and online facilities appeared that made use of it. On 12 January 2011 the
Coalition Government revealed that it was planning to establish a
Public Data Corporation (PDC). The goal being to make the UK Government data provided in a much more consistent fashion as well as freeing more data for public and commercial use. The idea of the PDC was later dropped in favour of grouping a number of government data providing organisations to form the
Public Data Group. While the UK didn't have a predefined process for keeping data it publishes up to date as late as 2017, at the end of 2017 such a process was set. In 2018, the responsibility for data policy, including open data, has been moved from the Government Digital Service (GDS) to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. ==See also==