London: 24 March 2010

The UK Government HM Treasury has announced in the UK Parliament and published the Budget Statement.

Chapter 6 of the Budget report titled: Protecting public service’s states:

“Opening up Data

6.51 The Government has delivered on its Smarter Government2 commitments to open up data, promoting transparent and effective government and improving services through empowering citizens and supporting innovative enterprise. For example, the data.gov site was launched in January 2010, making over 3,000 data sets available from a single access point, and the Met Office has released a new open access weather application. The Government will also continue to develop the new national crime mapping service, which enables anyone to type in their postcode and get accessible, regular and user-friendly information about crime in their area, what action police are taking and what is happening to criminals who are caught. The Government’s response to a consultation on the release of Ordnance Survey data will be published by the end of March 2010, and from 1 April, a substantial package of data will be freely available to the public without restrictions on re‑use. In addition, the Local Public Data Panel is working with leading local authorities (Local Data Exemplars) to make their data available via the data.gov website, with the first set of data expected to be available by the end of April 2010.”

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