The new government’s plans for a national data library and a regulatory innovation office could be part of a bigger data-sharing landscape, according to experts at the Connected Places Catapult. Such a landscape could unlock the value of data across the economy and help tackle the major challenges society faces, including climate change.
The experts are:
- Sarah Hayes, independent consultant and Connected Places Catapult ambassador;
- Mark Enzer OBE FREng, strategic adviser at Mott MacDonald;
- Justin Anderson, director of the Digital Twin Hub at the Connected Places Catapult; and
- Geoffrey Stevens, director of data, at the Connected Places Catapult.
The plans for a national data library and a regulatory innovation office feature in the Labour Party’s manifesto.
In a blog post hosted on the Digital Twin Hb website, the four noted: “A regulatory innovation office presents a huge opportunity to provide data and digital governance across the whole economy while working to join up the effort of existing regulators. Our regulators are highly specialised, and we need that, but as called for by the National Infrastructure Commission and the Climate Change Committee, they need to collaborate more on non-sector-specific issues like climate change and data.
“Cross-sector issues require systems thinking, and you can’t get systems thinking to have impact without collaboration. A regulatory innovation office needs to take responsibility for making rules about how we share and use data across the economy working with existing regulators who already think about this – ICO, CMA, Ofcom, Ofgem, Ofwat, ORR, DRCF and more. These rules would form part of our data-sharing infrastructure, an infrastructure that would enable us to share data securely across all parts of the economy.”
The quartet also said that a national data library that brings together ”existing research programmes and helps deliver data-driven public services” needs to be based on a distributed model of data sharing, with a distributed architecture, rather than a centralised one.
National data library
They added: “A national data library needs to be recognised as part of data-sharing infrastructure, because the latter is infrastructure and needs to be developed for the benefit of all. This means the data-sharing infrastructure needs funding and regulation, in the same way as, for example, transport infrastructure. Public and private sector data both need to be shared using this infrastructure, but according to a common set of rules that keep us all safe.
“We’ve not been without ideas and technical progress here in the UK, [but] what we haven’t managed to do so far is to guide this progress under a common governance framework. We haven’t had the oversight to drive this forward. We have a huge opportunity right now to put some governance in place under a new secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Peter Kyle, to enable our brilliant domestic tech sector to get on and provide secure, resilient and scalable data sharing.”
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