4.7 Data expected to have economic value includes data that has not previously been made available, and data that has been traded but could be released under less restrictive terms. Examples of the former include the healthcare information to be made available to support the life sciences sector and other health services. The Department of Health's business case for a new Clinical Practice Research Datalink estimates benefits of £446 million, with costs of £275 million over ten years. The benefit figure mainly comprises efficiency savings from reducing the costs of medical studies and does not include wider economic benefits, such as potential job creation in the life sciences industry. The Government intends to charge users to cover the costs of the data linking process.
4.8 For the release of practice level prescribing data, the impact assessment estimates the costs of the publication to be £450,000 in the first year and £100,000 in subsequent years. The Government expects that the release will lead to increased innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. It also expects that publication will generate efficiency savings as increased transparency of prescribing patterns encourages better prescribing. However, the impact assessment does not monetise the economic benefits, describing them as difficult to measure and speculative.
4.9 Data known to have economic value include those already traded. Data held by the Ordnance Survey, Met Office, Land Registry and Companies House trading funds accounted for 60 per cent of all income received for public data in 2006. A recent academic paper, based on the 2006 Office of Fair Trading survey of income earned from public data, estimates potential gains from moving from charged-for to an open data regime in the UK of between £1.6 billion and £6.0 billion a year.30 Their data are particularly economically valuable and are often referred to as 'core reference data'. This includes maps, address databases, land records and weather data, which provide opportunities for linking to other data sets to enhance their value. However, established licensing arrangements can provide barriers to use, limiting the potential for economic benefits.
4.10 Trading funds must break even over a time period specified in their Trading Fund Order. Current revenue from selling data, as opposed to other services, varies by trading fund. A 2008 study commissioned by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) and HM Treasury estimated that the Met Office would lose around 1 per cent of its revenue were it to make raw data available for free, while at the other extreme, the Ordnance Survey would lose 26 per cent of its revenue from data sales to non-government sources.31 The potential financial implications of free data release therefore vary widely across the funds.
4.11 As a first step, the Government has announced some releases from these trading funds as open data. Examples include weather forecast and real-time observation datasets, and prices paid for residential property in England and Wales. The business case for this release estimated economic benefits of £60 million, with additional wider social welfare benefits of between £6 million and £27 million, over 20 years. This compares with costs of about £11 million over that period. Releasing the Met Office weather data sets make up 84 per cent of the total economic benefits.32 We tested whether the business case complied with good practice in central government, and found that:
• neither the Met Office nor the Cabinet Office has assessed the impact of releasing weather data as open data on the wider market, so the benefits included in the business case are highly uncertain;
• it does not cover costs other than implementation costs and the loss of income due to free release of data sets previously charged for. For example, additional revenue loss may be expected from increased service competition from new commercial applications; and
• for the financial year 2012-13, the estimated revenue losses for the trading funds lie between £5,000 for the Met Office and £600,000 for the Land Registry. Based on revenue currently obtained from statutory and commercial data sales, this suggests that the planned releases represent only a part of the economically valuable data sets held across the four trading funds.
4.12 The Government announced in its Autumn Statement 2011 new governance arrangements for the four trading funds. They will form a Public Data Group and continue their trading functions. A separate Data Strategy Board will promote release of open data. It will receive at least £7 million in the current spending review period to buy data from the Public Data Group or wider public sector for free release. In future, the Data Strategy Board will seek to agree a proportion of dividends from the Public Data Group, to increase its funding. The Cabinet Office has not yet produced broader policy on open data from trading funds.