4.1 A key objective of releasing more public sector information is to generate economic growth. The Government made a series of announcements relating to this objective in its Autumn Statement 2011,25 including:
• new open data commitments, such as real-time running information on trains from Network Rail, to support developing web-based applications enabling more productive use of passengers' time;
• new commitments for licensing large data sets, including the Clinical Practice Research Datalink service which will provide linked, non-identifiable patient level primary and secondary health data. The Government expects this to promote growth in the life sciences research sector, for example, by reducing the costs of clinical trials;
• commitments to consult, for example, on linking welfare data to other public and commercial data to develop data and analytics markets relating to customer information;
• new governance arrangements to oversee access to data held by trading funds (see paragraph 4.7); and
• establishing an Open Data Institute to develop business innovation and exploit commercial opportunity from releasing public data. The institute will receive £10 million funding from the Technology Strategy Board over the current spending review period, with matched funding from industry and academia.
4.2 While most announcements were for future commitments, the Government made a series of data sets available with the Autumn Statement 2011, for example, detailed weather observation and forecast information (see paragraph 4.11). However, many outlined measures continue to be developed. It is therefore too early to conclude on their likely success. This section instead considers the variations in estimates of the economic value of public sector information and reviews some of the arrangements the Government has announced to stimulate growth from public data.