Our recommendations for the new Office for Local Government
The Government set up a new organisation last summer, the Office for Local Government, or Oflog. “‘Oflog’ is quite the acronym - what do they do?” you may ask.
Well, Oflog’s goal is to improve data on local government performance: “to provide authoritative and accessible data and analysis about local government performance and support its improvement”. And to understand what that means in practice, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee held an inquiry.
We submitted evidence to the inquiry with our friends at mySociety, flagging up the simplest, punchiest way that we think Oflog could help local government: by tackling ‘data fragmentation’.
What is data fragmentation?
As we’ve written before, local authorities are required to publish important data, such as all their spending over £500, but typically without any central coordination. So local authorities currently publish this data on their own websites, in different formats and unpredictable locations.
Why does this matter? Well, let’s say you want to know how much each local authority spends on consultants. To understand this basic fact, you would need to search all 333 council websites each month, and import each spreadsheet into a central database, ensuring all the data is formatted in the same way, before even beginning any analysis.
Think that sounds too difficult? Well so do most of the companies, journalists and researchers who could benefit from most of the data. published by local authorities That’s a huge wasted opportunity.
What can Oflog do?
To help fix this problem, we recommended to the inquiry that Oflog’s role should include two key responsibilities. From now on, whenever each local authority is required to publish activity data, Oflog should:
Coordinate a mandatory data standard - the rules on what the data contains and the technical format in which it is published, so it’s easy to use.
Maintain either a central repository of the data, or the location of the published data (e.g. a list of URLs), so it’s easy to find.
Without this, local authorities will continue to create fragmented data, costing money to publish, but rarely being used in practice.
To see all our recommendations, read our full evidence to the inquiry. And if you’ve been inspired to fight data fragmentation, there’s another opportunity to shape Oflog’s role: we encourage others to respond to the new Oflog consultation before 14 March.
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve spoken about this with mySociety before: read our joint report on fragmented data for more detail. And as always, we’d love to hear your views: get in touch at contact@centreforpublicdata.org.