This was an external review by Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety, and Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the National Consumer Council, produced with support from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. It was commissioned in February 2007 and reported four months later. Its terms of reference were:
“To explore new way developments in the use of citizen- and state – generated information in the UK, and to present an analysis and recommendations to the Cabinet Office Minister as part of the Policy Review.
Sub Questions to be addressed were:
- What is already going on? How significant is it?
- How can government catalyse more beneficial creation and sharing of information, and mutual support, between citizens?
- What can be done to improve the way government and its agencies publish and share the data they already have?
- Are there any notably information opportunities or shortfalls in sectors outside government that those sectors could work to rectify?”
The report’s 15 conclusions included:
- To encourage innovation in the re-use of information by non-commercial users, UK trading funds should, in consultation with OPSI, examine the introduction of non-commercial re-use licences, along the lines of those pioneered by the BBC’s Backstage project and Google Maps.
- By Budget 2008, government should commission and publish an independent review of the costs and benefits of the current trading fund charging model for the re-use of public sector information, including the role of the five largest trading funds, the balance of direct versus downstream economic revenue, and the impact on the quality of public sector information.
- To ensure the most appropriate supply of information for re-use, government should consistently apply its policy of marginal cost pricing for ‘raw’ information to all public bodies, including trading funds, except where the published economic analysis shows this does not serve the interest of UK citizens.
- To improve the supply of government information for re-use, the Better Regulation Executive should promote publication of regulatory information, and should work with OPSI to encourage publication in open formats and under licences permitting re-use.
Government’s response was to accept the first, second and fourth of these recommendations, pointing out that the third would depend on the outcome from the study proposed in the second.
See Power of Information Review Report (PDF - 280 KB)
Professor Avinash Persaud, APPSI's economics expert, has written a short note that analyses the provision and value of PSI for HM Treasury. In this paper, Professor Persaud argues that
"to facilitate appropriate investment and development of the PSI economy, a necessary early step will be for the whole value chain of PSI across the economy, and to government revenues in particular, to be more visible."
He also recommends
"that any study of trading funds focused on the three largest and tried to draw some general conclusions across their differences, rather than tried to tackle trading funds as a generic group."
See 'A Short Note On Analysing the Provision and Value of Public Sector Information'.