The government is looking at whether public bodies should have more freedom to charge for access to their data, and we’ve responded to its call for evidence.

There are good reasons to be cautious about this. Peter Wells has written about some of them: charging reduces the number of people who can make use of public data, while adding new costs around licensing and administration.

In our fragmented public data report we recognise that public bodies can already spend considerable time publishing data without seeing much evidence of what happens to it afterwards. Where that data is difficult to find or combine, its potential value isn’t realised and the people doing the work have less reason to see publication as worthwhile.

Charging offers one answer to this, in that income is easy to demonstrate, but it decreases the overall value and impact of the data. We’d rather see the government get better at making the wider impact of open data visible: who uses it, what they build with it, where it is reused elsewhere in government, and what difference that makes. Better impact tracking would help teams make the case for investing in open data without needing to turn it into a source of income.

There’s also a longer-term problem with using charging to fund new data services. If a team is encouraged to generate income from its data and does so successfully, that income starts supporting the service. At that point, making the data open means finding the money somewhere else. The Postcode Address File is a longstanding example of how difficult this can be to unwind. Once licensing income becomes part of how a service is funded, opening the data and replacing that income become the same problem.

This is why we’re wary of encouraging individual public sector teams to become ‘entrepreneurial’ and develop their own income streams from data. If a new dataset turns out to be particularly useful, we’d rather that provided evidence for investing in it as shared infrastructure than a reason to keep charging for access to it.

The government has identified a real problem: it can be difficult to make the case for spending money on open data when the benefits are spread across lots of different organisations and users. We think this could be tackled through better shared infrastructure and impact tracking, rather than making public data pay for itself, which would only limit its reusability and lock it away in the long term.

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