Reading MHCLG Digital’s blog post Setting the foundations for effective data use in local government was a timely reminder that while great work continues to be done on developing and implementing open data initiatives in the public sector, there are still many barriers - especially when it comes to the information held by individual local authorities.
At Unboxed, we believe in the power of data for good decision making and improving service delivery, so that our communities become better places to live and money can be channelled into the right initiatives.
We also believe that this data should be open and transparent where possible, and available via public APIs, not only so that citizens can see what is happening around them, but so that other organisations - whether these are government departments, private companies or individuals - can build their own applications using these APIs.
At national government level, deciding how to structure data and making a distinction between public information and what should remain private can sometimes present its own challenges. The open-source Petitions codebase we developed for the Government Digital Service, which is used by the UK and Scottish Parliaments and the Senedd, is a great example of an API that enables developers to build their own applications to display and query public sentiment.
However, the recent constituency changes and the work we needed to do to update the API is a reminder that providing public data is a long-term commitment that needs planning and regular maintenance.
When it comes to local government, the challenges are multiplied. Historic decisions by individual councils to procure different IT systems to carry out the same task has led to a patchwork of data availability across the country - and often this data is not available via API, but locked up in proprietary databases.
In the worst case scenarios, there is no digital data available at all, and in other cases it may be presented as PDFs or scans rather than as well structured data that can be queried and used in other applications.
Even where the data is public and well structured, the structure may vary from one council to another, making it so difficult to create a uniform picture across different geographic areas that all but the most determined developers would be deterred.
We think it’s urgent to unlock all the useful information that is currently confined to the digital equivalent of closed filing cabinets in local authorities up and down the country
When Unboxed began working with a consortium of councils to transform the way planning applications are processed, providing a public API to expose planning applications across the country was high on our list of priorities. With the subject of planning high on the agenda of the new UK government, it is more important than ever to build a detailed, consistent picture of planning activity (applications and decisions) that can be used to make the right decisions about what the UK’s built environment will look like in decades to come.
One of the developers on the Back office Planning System (BOPS), Ben Baumann, recently spoke about how we had harnessed the power of the open planning data provided by the BOPS API to build a reference application in the form of a map that anyone can query to find planning applications near them.
Examples like this are a timely reminder of the importance of open data standards. We think it’s urgent to unlock all the useful information that is currently confined to the digital equivalent of closed filing cabinets in local authorities up and down the country.
You can hear Unboxed’s Martyn Evans and Laura Smith talking about the challenges of launching services across local government at SDinGov later this month.
