Over the summer, we were invited to be a part of the Local Mission Zero Network consultation, and we’re thrilled that our key fragmented data policy recommendations have been included in the new report, as well as recognition for some of our wider work on climate. 

Rt Hon Chris Skidmore OBE MP, former Net Zero Review Chair and one of the co-authors of the report, said:

“The Local Mission Zero Network’s first report, The Future Is Local, sets out over thirty recommendations to further the Net Zero Review’s local delivery mission. It’s clear that if central government won’t step up, it should get out of the way and allow local and regional leaders to forge ahead with their positive vision to achieve local Net Zero in partnership with communities up and down the country. Unleashing their ambition is the most effective way to harness the economic and regional growth opportunities that Net Zero can unlock.

I’d like to thank MySociety for their involvement in the network and also for their input in making key recommendations on the need for better data and information to achieve Net zero.”

The report, co-authored with Lord Ben Houchen, released today, is “intended not only to highlight the continued challenges facing the local delivery of net zero, it also seeks to frame these challenges into a new framework for ensuring local authorities and regions have the certainty to achieve their net zero ambitions”. It is a much needed intervention, and makes clear that “in the current policy environment, and ahead of the next General Election, greater certainty over local net zero is essential”.

Within Recommendation 1, Introduce a Local Net Zero Charter to agree responsibilities and enhance partnership between the UK government, devolved governments and regional, city and local authorities, there are three specific recommendations relating to our fragmented data work:

1f) A Local Net Zero Data and Reporting Framework should be established, in order to provide consistency and increase integrity for reporting across local authorities.

1g) The Net Zero Review recommended that ONS should collect more forms of net zero related data, and this network maintains that net zero will be better delivered the more we know, and where we know action needs to take place.

1h) The need for open source and operable data is also important, if we are to encourage better uses of AI and future systems thinking. This data to be held in a central repository, supported by a central government data convenor.

In the Unlocking the value of fragmented public data report we published last year, we stress the importance of local climate data being published in a way that is useful, ultimately creating positive feedback loops across the economy. It’s great to see the report emphasise this:

“The challenge of fragmented and inoperable data standards is not merely a matter for more effective local authority performance. The future of energy system planning could be better forecast if several datasets were better aligned.” 

The body of the report also highlights our conclusions about the kinds of climate data we need:

more about how  local authorities reflect on their own progress. In these instances, free text which we can semantically search, is often most helpful. We need data around:

• Personnel, systems & processes to manage climate monitoring and reporting. This helps us to understand who is doing the work, and how resource allocation happens. 
• Progress since the last reporting period, and key areas of focus for the period ahead. This gives a vital sense of context and perspective from inside the reporting body, and helps situate the scale of work undertaken against work yet to be done.

Finally, our CAPE project was mentioned as “effective monitor[ing]”, and we were so pleased to see the work we do with Climate Emergency UK to create the Climate Scorecards recognised: “By simplifying complex data, it allowed stakeholders to identify gaps and progress in climate initiatives, empowering communities to advocate for change”.

If you’d like to read the report in full, you can find it here. You may even want to share some of the recommendations from the report with your MP, which you could do using our service WriteToThem. 

Any questions for our policy team? Get in touch: policy@mysociety.org 

Image: Minku Kang on Unsplash

We’re delighted to announce that mySociety has joined the Blueprint Coalition – an influential group of local government organisations, environmental groups, and research institutions working together to deliver local climate action with a joined-up approach. 

The Coalition works across sectoral, geographical and party boundaries to make change happen. We’re excited to join the other members in calling upon the government to provide the crucial support local authorities need to deliver on tackling the climate crisis.

About mySociety

Becoming a part of the Blueprint Coalition isn’t just a milestone; it’s a commitment to a cause larger than ourselves. As mySociety joins hands with like-minded organisations, we are poised to make significant progress in our aim to make climate-related data more accessible. We believe that more information makes for better-informed action, so everything we do puts richer, more usable data into the open, where everyone can use it. 

Our Climate, Transparency and Democracy streams consist of a number of services (such as CAPE, Climate Scorecards, TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, and WhatDoTheyKnow) which we bring to the Coalition alongside our research, policy and advocacy work. Our policy work has been focusing on the issue of fragmented data, and we’re excited to be planning a webinar on this topic with the Coalition – watch this space!

About the Blueprint Coalition

In December 2020, the Blueprint Coalition published a comprehensive manifesto that serves as a roadmap to expedite climate action and usher in a green recovery at the local level. It outlines the national leadership, policies, powers, and funding required to empower local authorities in making impactful changes on a substantial scale. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of local authorities that have declared climate emergencies, this blueprint serves as a guiding light for collective action towards a sustainable future.

A defining feature of the Blueprint Coalition is its central ethos of fostering partnerships between civil society, national and local governments. Recognising that achieving net zero carbon emissions requires the collaboration of all levels of governance, the Coalition’s work serves as a testament to the power of collaboration.

The Coalition partners include: 

• Ashden
• Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Transport and Planning (ADEPT)
• Centre for Alternative Technology
• Climate Emergency UK
• Friends of the Earth
• Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment (Imperial College London)
• London Environment Directors’ Network (LEDNet)
• Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN) at LSE
• Solace

• in addition to support from London Councils and Green Alliance.

If you’d like to show your support for the Coalition, you can sign up here. And to stay updated on our Climate programme, you can sign up to our newsletter.

Any other questions or comments? Get in touch with Julia, our Policy & Advocacy Manager.

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Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. See page for author.

We’ve recently published a report on fragmented data and local councils’ climate action. Download it here.

At all levels of government, and across the UK, there is growing recognition of the importance of local government in achieving the UK’s climate commitments. From this, there is a growing need to understand the impact of the interventions taking place at a local authority level, and as such, there are growing calls from central government and civil society for more climate data publishing. 

We recognise that these calls for more data do not always take into account the resources needed from within authorities to prepare this data, nor how to make the data useful to the authorities that published it in the first place.

More data publishing makes the climate data ecosystem richer, but smarter data publishing makes it more useful. If we replicate the history of previous central mandates to publish information, we will repeat mistakes that found local authorities using limited resources to put out data in ways that are far too costly to bring together and build upon.

We call this problem fragmented public data, and believe that a little bit more coordination and central support can supercharge the value of the data that local government produces. We need better tools and a better understanding of the skills and resources available to council staff. A realistic analysis of resource limitations of local government, and working with council staff who produce the data, will create more useful results, than a ‘best practice’ that requires obstructively high levels of technical skill. 

Central government has a role in providing more than an edict to publish: it must offer the support and resources to facilitate cooperation and publication of data spread over hundreds of local authorities. Net zero data publication does not have to be a burden. Together, civil society, central and local governments can come together to create a data ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.  To build that ecosystem, we propose the following key principles:

• A collaborative (but compulsory) data standard to agree the data and format that is expected.
• A central repository of the location of the published data, which is kept up to date with new releases of data.
• Support from a data convener to make publication simple – such as, through validation and publication tools, coordinating data submissions, and technical support.

Take action

• Read the full report written by mySociety and the Centre for Public Data
• Sign up for our climate newsletter
• Contact Julia, our Policy and Advocacy Manager, to see how to implement our recommendations in your local area

Around one third of the UK’s emissions are within the power or influence of local authorities. Every local authority across the UK must be taking action to tackle climate change, in order for the UK to reach its 2050 net zero goal, and for local authorities themselves to reach their own net zero targets. 

mySociety builds services that support local authorities and their communities in their climate action planning. Through tools like the Climate Action Plan Explorer (CAPE) and our work on Climate Scorecards, we bring together local authority climate plans from across the country to make knowledge sharing easier, and the information more accessible. We know that council officers already use CAPE when seeking out best practice in different policy areas, but in order to improve these tools we need more data, and for that data to be published in an open format. That way, we can build and combine the data to make it more accessible, and more useful, for everyone. 

The data we need

1. To understand local authority emissions: structured data of council’s scope 1-3  emissions
2. To understand the effect on the area: Broader data about the local authority’s influence and activities in their wider local area
3. To understand development, setbacks and changes: Context and reflections from the public body on their own progress and future plans

Running through this, this information needs to be published in a way that avoids the problem of public fragmented data, to unlock the most value from publishing this data. 

Understanding local authority emissions

84% of councils have a commitment to bring their own emissions, or those of their area, to net zero by a certain date. To this, it’s essential for public bodies to publish structured data of their scope 1-3 emissions.

These scope 1 (direct operational), scope 2 (indirect from supplied electricity & heat) and scope 3 (supply chain & other indirect) emissions should be broken down by source and by year, from a baseline year. Reporting templates for this are already in use for local authorities in Scotland and Wales.

Understanding and sharing local authorities impact on their area

In addition to scope 1-3 emissions, the ‘one third’ figure above draws on the fact that local authorities have considerable influence over their wider local area. To help build a more detailed picture of the work taking place across local authority areas, we need structured data covering:

• Organisational plans and targets relevant to climate change, progress against these, and plans for future progress. These plans and targets are generated internally by the local authority or public body, but should capture the work they are doing internally and externally to support their wider community. For example, Aberdeen City Council’s recent submission using the Scottish Framework highlighted their Housing Strategy which included energy efficiency measures for privately owned, privately rented, and social housing.
• Details of carbon saving projects across the local area. These will be unique to the reporting body, but will again illustrate what is taking place across that authority’s local area, and may provide inspiration and opportunity for other public bodies. In the Scottish template, authorities are asked to provide structured data about all carbon savings from projects, and  the top 10 carbon reduction projects to be carried out by the body in the report year.
• Risk assessments and action plans for climate adaptation. These help to build a picture of the planning across the local area, and sharing this will help councils facing similar challenges to enhance their own planning. 

Progress tracking 

In order to provide the most useful data and tools, we also need to know more about how  local authorities reflect on their own progress. In these instances, free text which we can semantically search, is often most helpful. We need data around:

• Personnel, systems & processes to manage climate monitoring and reporting. This helps us to understand who is doing the work, and how resource allocation happens. 
• Progress since the last reporting period, and key areas of focus for the period ahead. This gives a vital sense of context and perspective from inside the reporting body, and helps situate the scale of work undertaken against work yet to be done.

Publishing data usefully

Requirements to publish data put extra costs on public authorities. As such, we need to make sure that this is done in a way that the data is most useful and accessible.

Fragmented public data is a problem that happens when many organisations are required to publish the same data, but not to a common standard or in a common location. With The Centre for Public Data, mySociety has published recommendations on unlocking the value of fragmented public data.  We recommend: 

1. A collaborative (but required) data standard to agree the data and format that is expected. 
2. An online central repository of the location of the published data, so that data users can find it easily.
3. Support from the data convener to make publication simple and effective.

This applies to information directly about climate data, but is also a useful requirement for any new requirement to publish. For instance, while both EPC ratings and datasets of council assets are required to be published, in practice the lack of a coordinated publishing approach for assets data means this data cannot be combined to understand energy efficiency of council properties across the country. 

Take action

This is an evolving document and we want your feedback! Get in touch.

• Read the Fragmented Data report (written by mySociety and the Centre for Public Data) for more detail, examples and case studies.
• Sign up for our climate newsletter
• Contact Julia, our Policy and Advocacy Manager, to see how to implement our recommendations in your local area.

Header image: Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

As a joint project between mySociety and the Centre for Public Data, we have written a set of simple principles for how to get the most impact out of publishing public data.  You can read the report online, or download it as a PDF. 

Fragmented public data is a problem that happens when many organisations are required to publish the same data, but not to a common standard or in a common location. Data is published, but without work to join up the results, it rarely has the intended impacts. 

The results of this are frustrating for everyone. Data users cannot easily use the data, policy makers do not see the impact they want, and publishers in public authorities are required to produce data without seeing clear results from their work. 

Better and more consistent publication of data by local authorities helps enable understanding and action at scale across a range of areas. At the same time, we recognise that the technical advice given has assumed higher levels of technical capacity that in practice is possible for many data publishing tasks. Our goal has been to make sure our advice makes data more accessible, while having a realistic idea of technical capacities and support needed for data publishing. 

This report recommends three minimum features for a data publishing requirement to be successful: 

1. A collaborative (but compulsory) data standard to agree the data and format that is expected.
2. A central repository of the location of the published data, which is kept up to date with new releases of data.
3. Support from the data convener to make publication simple and effective – e.g. through validation and publication tools, coordinating returns, and technical support.

We recommend that:

• Whenever government imposes duties on multiple public authorities to publish datasets in future, it should also provide the staff and budget to enable these features.
• The Central Data and Digital Office should publish official guidance covering the above.

You can read the report online, or download it as a PDF. 

Better data publishing helps climate action

This project is informed by recurring frustrations we have run into in our work. Projects such as KeepItIntheCommunity, which mapped registered Assets of Community Value, were much more complicated than they needed to be because while transparency was required of authorities, coordination was not – meaning the task of keeping the site comprehensive and updated was enormously difficult. In principle, we could build a tool that empowered communities in line with the intentions of the original policy makers. In practice, a lack of support for basic data publishing made the project much harder than it needed to be.

This problem also affects our work around local government and reducing emissions. Local government has influence over one third of emissions, but much of that is indirect rather than from the corporate emissions of the authority directly.  As such, many activities (and datasets) of local government have climate implications, even if the work or data is not understood as climate data. For instance, the difficulty in accessing the asset data of local authorities makes it harder for civil society to cross-reference this information with the energy rating of properties, and produce tools to help councils understand the wider picture. 

In future we will be publishing in more detail the kind of data we think is needed to support local authorities in emission reduction – but emissions reduction cannot be isolated from the general work of local authorities. Improving the consistency of the data that is published helps everyone better understand the work that is happening, and makes local government more efficient. 

Sign up to hear more about our climate work, or to the monthly mySociety newsletter. 

Photo credit: Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash

Identifying opportunities for levelling up and net zero both require high quality, comparable local data 

The levelling-up white paper sets out the government’s direction and strategy for reducing regional inequalities, a much-needed objective as the UK has one of the worst regional inequalities in the OECD countries. The paper outlines new opportunities for local authorities to have devolution-style powers and gain more autonomy by 2030. 

There is a large gap in the levelling-up agenda: the white paper does not put the recently published net zero strategy at its heart. Both levelling up and net zero require systematic changes to the role local government plays in directing the economic activities of their area, and engaging and working with communities and citizens.

Improving local data is important to boosting local economies while delivering a net zero transformation, and implementing those two as one comprehensive package will help fully embed environmental considerations in economic decisions.

Levelling up and net zero have to be approached as a mutually supportive package, and not as two separate packages. Their implementation will create new economic models and lead to new governance structures. Both require new transparency mechanisms to enable citizens to track progress towards commitments.

A new independent body to gather, enhance and make data accessible to local governments and citizens

Both the levelling up and net zero agendas would benefit from high quality, evidence-based, and comparable local data.  In the current situation, local data is not easy to navigate and does not always allow easy data discovery, aggregation and re-use. 

mySociety and Climate Emergency UK have been working to transform a situation where council’s climate plans are hard to find and understand by making council climate action plans accessible on a central website, and producing comparison tools and scores on the basis of written commitments found in climate emergency plans to spur comparisons, identify best practice, and improve performance.

The importance of improved local data is recognised in the levelling up white paper announcement of a new independent body (p. 138) to gather, enhance, and make data accessible to local governments and citizens. Creating central pools of information helps spread learning and improve accountability, without undermining the local innovation that devolving power and responsibilities to local authorities and communities unlocks. The stated goal of this new body is to improve local leaders’ knowledge of their own services while increasing central government’s understanding of local authorities’ activities. This new body can play a very important part in improving the local data ecosystem.

This new  capacity is equally important to the goal of net zero. It would be a missed opportunity not to strongly consider how this body could support local governments’ move towards net zero, and enable a transparent and just transition. 

Addressing the limitations

Creating high quality local data is important to improving outcomes, but will also demonstrate the limits of current financial constraints. To deliver ambitious and sustainable transformations in both regional inequality and net zero requires sustained and structured investment in the resources and capacities of local authorities. Addressing inequalities through better local data should not be limited to collating data on economic inequalities, and it is therefore critical that the new datasets also highlight local health inequalities and gaps in social care funding that significantly contribute to existing inequalities that, in turn, lead to poor engagement in climate action. Data should not be a stick to beat local governments, but a tool to help them articulate problems and find solutions. 

The plan is for the new independent data body to be co-designed with local government, but it is also important that this reflects the needs of local communities and citizens. Citizen engagement and participation is vital for both levelling up and net zero. As outlined by the Climate Change Committee, 62 per cent of the measures needed to meet the country’s net zero goal will require some form of behaviour or societal change, and this should be reflected on how data is used to drive accountability and transparency.  

As more plans about this new data body emerge, we will advocate for it to support the transition to net zero through promoting inter-council learning, central government understanding, and community accountability. 

What mySociety is doing around net zero and data

mySociety is working to repower democracy and enable new approaches to reducing carbon emissions. We are taking our experience running services such as TheyWorkForYou, WhatDoTheyKnow and FixMyStreet to work with partners and explore new services to reduce emissions within the scope of local authority activities.

To date, we have worked with Climate Emergency UK on the Climate Action Plan Explorer and the Council Climate Plan Scorecards, making local climate action plans more discoverable and accessible for local governments, campaigners, and citizens.

We are currently embarking on a series of prototyping weeks to explore different possible approaches with different partners. To hear more about our work, sign up to our climate newsletter.

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Image: Retrofitting homes in progress, by Ashden