In this article I share my research on how councils in the UK and Ireland currently publish open data.
Councils publish raw data to be transparent about the information that they hold. It is also published to encourage people and organisations to reuse data to help others do things they want to do or to understand things.
For councils in the UK the Local government transparency code 2015 sets out the minimum data that local authorities should be publishing, the frequency it should be published and how it should be published.
Local government transparency code 2015
‘Transparency is the foundation of local accountability and the key that gives people the tools and information they need to enable them to play a bigger role in society. The availability of data can also open new markets for local business, the voluntary and community sectors and social enterprises to run services or manage public assets.’
Not all data has to be published under the terms of the transparency code. Information that has to be published on a quarterly basis includes:
- expenditure exceeding £500
- Government Procurement Card transactions, and
- procurement information
Information that has to be published on an annual basis includes:
Data covered by this section includes:
- local authority land
- social housing assets
- grants to voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations
- organisation chart
- trade union facility time
- parking account
- parking spaces
- senior salaries
- constitution
- pay multiple
- fraud
The most requested of the information that has to be published by councils tends to be:
- expenditure exceeding £500
- senior salaries
Councils can and do of course publish a wide range of other data. This includes all manner of information ranging from financial and population data to the location of landfill areas, libraries and conservation areas. There certainly seems to be open data available to meet a wide range of interests and needs.
How do councils publish open data?
Councils can publish open data in three different ways:
- through a separately hosted open data site
- through their public website
- through a national open data portal
My research reveals the following breakdown of publishing across these three options:
| Open data publishing approach | Yes | No |
| A separately hosted open data site | 52 (12.7%) | 357 (87.3%) |
| Publishes open data through a local authority public website | 335 (81.9%) | 74 (18.1%) |
| Publishes open data through a national open data portal | 350 (85.6%) | 59 (14.4%) |
Separately hosted open data site
52 councils (12.7%) currently publish to a separate open data site. These sites provide councils with an effective tool for their own use and others. With data comes insight but also the ability to better answer regular enquiries and Freedom of Information requests.
Popular platforms for open data include:
- ArcGIS Hub – a popular cloud platform which is as you’d expect is excellent for presenting data geographically (examples include Argyll and Bute, Canterbury and Cheshire East)
- CKAN – an open source data management system (examples include Angus, Birmingham and Cork City)
- DataPress – (examples include Barnet, Calderdale and Leeds)
- DataShare – originally developed and built by Redbridge Council (examples include: Bracknell Forest, North Somerset and Redbridge).
- DKAN – a Drupal based portal (example includes Cambridgeshire)
- uSmart – a data platform which uses AI and real-time IoT data (example includes Dumfries and Galloway)
Councils publishing open data through their public website
I searched for ‘data’ and ‘open data’ on council websites and failing that ‘transparency’ and ‘payments over £500’ in a vain attempt to find anything. I found 335 councils (81.9%) who publish some form of open data or who reference it elsewhere, on local open data portals or external national portals for the UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland. At times locating this information on a public website was a fruitless activity or just taking up too much time for little reward, so it was left blank on the Airtable database presented below this blog post. Some consistency on the promotion of open data across councils would be welcomed and hopefully make it a little easier to find.
Councils publishing open data through an external national portal
The four national open data portals that I discovered were:
- data.gov.uk – the portal for data published by central government, local authorities and public bodies across the UK
- data.gov.ie – Ireland’s opendata portal
- Open Data NI – providing transparency and innovation in Northern Ireland through the publication of government and public sector datasets.
- Open Data Scotland – a crowdsourced portal, aggregating datasets across Scotland.
Open Data Scotland outshines the others having the best local authority coverage with all 32 Scottish authorities publishing open data and the largest number who have published data over the last year.
Open Data NI has a similarly impressive coverage with all 11 Northern Irish local authorities publishing open data. Northern Irish councils have not kept up the momentum on publishing with far fewer datasets than their Scottish counterparts and less updating within the last year. Ireland’s open data portal boasts some useful functionality but the coverage and take up of Irish councils is not as advanced as the other two previously mentioned.
For me perhaps the most disappointing is data.gov.uk. It lacks much of the functionality of the others and take up by councils in the UK isn’t as great as it might be. This is reflected in the way that some councils have failed to add or update open data for several years. Coverage of councils using it is limited and could be improved. Also data.gov.uk is currently being presented as a new service in Beta. According to Wikipedia the beta version of data.gov.uk has been online since September 2009, so I guess I shouldn’t get my hopes up that things will be improving any time soon.
If you have any feedback on this article, spot any errors in the data below, or would like any help please get in contact.