Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information

The Prime Minister has appointed an independent team to review when Government records are made available to the public. This review will centre on whether, in the light of Freedom of Information and other considerations, there should be any changes to the ‘30 year rule’ – the time span under which most public records are transferred to The National Archives and opened for inspection. 

The 30-year rule review consultation was opened in early January and closed in mid-April 2008. The review team will report to the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor by the autumn of 2008.

APPSI believes the 30-year rule is anomalous in policy terms and unnecessarily inhibits the re-use of public sector information.

APPSI recommends that the emphasis of the 30-year rule is changed to one of openness; and that public records should be made available earlier to encourage greater re-use of public sector information.
Full response see The Panel’s response to Consultation on the 30 Year Rule (PDF - 160 KB)

Models of Public Sector Information provision via Trading Funds (the ‘Cambridge Study’) 

This study arose as a response to the government’s acceptance of the Power of Information Review study's recommendations.  Carried out by distinguished economists and lawyers from Cambridge University, this study analysed the impact of adopting different models for the provision of public sector information by trading funds.  Its basic task was to examine the cost and benefits for society, and the effects on government revenue, of four different charging policies: profit-maximisation, average cost (cost-recovery), marginal cost and zero cost; both on their own and when interacted with various data distinctions such as raw versus value-added, and unrefined versus refined.  The study focused on the six largest trading funds by data provision.

The authors found that, for many products, limitations of data and/or ambiguities about the nature of the good itself (particularly the data/service divide) would have made the analysis so speculative as to be of little value. Based however on an analysis of the data made available to them and a series of assumptions – which they judged to be conservative – the authors generally confined their analyses to comparing the existing average cost (cost-recovery) regime with marginal cost. On this basis, they concluded that:

• In most cases, a marginal cost regime would be welfare improving (that is, the benefits to society of moving to a marginal cost regime outweighed the costs).
• A change in charging regime should not have a detrimental impact on the performance of trading funds in terms of efficiency or data quality, providing a suitable governance and regulatory regime is put in place.

Highlight of the meeting on 21 February 2008:

APPSI members put forward ideas for the future direction of the Panel’s work.

Minutes - 21 February 2008

The Data Sharing Review was set up to:

• consider whether there should be any changes to the way the Data Protection Act 1998 operates in the UK and the options for implementing any such changes
• provide recommendations on the powers and sanctions available to the regulator and courts in the legislation governing data sharing and data protection
• provide recommendations on how data-sharing policy should be developed in a way that ensures proper transparency, scrutiny and accountability.

The Data Sharing Review consultation runs until 15 February 2008. See Data Sharing Review Consultation: http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/data-sharing-review-consultation-paper.pdf

Summary of APPSI’s response to the Data Sharing Review – 6 February 2008

• Significant growth in the re-use of public sector information will only be achieved if the public and national and local government, are confident that personal information is protected;
• that there are robust and transparent processes to control and monitor the sharing of information;
• and that public and private sector bodies are held accountable for an unauthorised or inadvertent sharing of personal data.

Full response see The Panel’s response on Data Sharing (PDF - 137 KB)