Madrid: 9 June 2010

At the recent meeting in Madrid titled: Realising the Value of Public Sector Information that was jointly organised by the European Public Sector Information Platform and the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade the UK Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) was publicly thanked for the help and mediation services provided to EuroAlert.

During the roundtable titled: Turning PSI re-use in new business models and innovation services Mr Jose L Marin of Euroalert thanked the UK Office Public Sector Information (OPSI) for the mediation services provided which unfortunately did not open up the public sector information that had been requested. Euroalert have published (Spanish) (English) a news topic on the issue.

Since the Madrid meeting the web site countculture has published an article titled: Right to Government Data… unless it’s been outsourced. The article refers to the Madrid meeting and uses the EuroAlert case as an example.

The article states:

“A current example

“Enough about the generalities. Let’s look at a specific case – one that was raised at the EPSI conference in Madrid last week, by Jose L. Marin from Euroalert. Turns out they’d been trying to get access to the information from the Supply2.gov.uk government tender portal, which is run on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) by BiP Solutions. In fact, according the the website, BiP Solutions are [merely] the service provider for the Supply2.gov.uk portal and are… responsible for its development, support and maintenance.

There’s clearly a case for making this information as widely available as possible, as you want the public bodies to have as good a choice as possible.

However, despite their best efforts, Euralert have not had any luck getting access to the data. They’d even enlisted the help of the good people from OPSI, who are tasked with facilitating access to public data. But even this didn’t work, as last week they received an email from OPSI, with this response from BIS.

As you are aware, both BIS and BiP have refused Mr. Marin’s request. There are both policy and commercial reasons why this decision has been made.

It is BIS’ view that the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2005 are not applicable in the circumstances. The information which Mr. Marin is seeking is not “held by a public sector body” as required by Regulation 4; BIS is a public sector body, but does not hold the information, BiP holds the information, but is not a public sector body. Furthermore, Regulation 7 makes it clear that decisions on re-use are a discretionary matter for the public sector body concerned. In the event that we considered that the Regulations did apply, we would nonetheless have still decided not to permit the re-use Mr. Marin requests for policy and commercial reasons.

In the alternative, if Mr. Marin considers that the information on Supply2Gov is held by the public sector bodies which placed the contract opportunities on the site, then the request for re-use in relation to each contract opportunity should be made to the public sector body concerned, not to BIS, which does not hold the information.

There’s something rather patronising and condescending about this response that I find quite appalling. In short, we don’t want you to have the data, and because it’s held by a private company there’s nothing you can do about it, and frankly you wouldn’t understand the reasons even if we could be bothered to tell you.”

Related news topics

PSI Meeting 2010: Preliminary Report