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BMA calls for suspension of SCR uploads

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:05:31 GMT

The British Medical Association has written to health minister Mike O'Brien, expressing 'serious concern' about the widespread introduction of Summary Care Records

The BMA also repeated its recent call for opt-out forms to be included with the information being sent to patients, and demanded that comments made by the BMA be withdrawn from a promotional video made by NHS Connecting for Health.

The letter, signed by BMA chair Dr Hamish Muldrum, GP committee chair Dr Laurence Buckman and NHS IT working party chair Dame Deirdre Hine, expresses "our serious concern about the recent accelerated roll out of the Summary Care Record," referring to the decision to introduce SCRs in five strategic health authority areas in December 2009.

It said the BMA has accepted only a limited introduction of SCRs, on the basis of "a further thorough independent evaluation". "We are therefore very surprised and disappointed that a much wider roll out was announced in December 2009 and this is in progress counter to the BMA's position above," it added.

The letter says that "a significant number of members" of the BMA's GP committee are calling for a boycott of uploading patient information onto the Spine to create SCRs. Although it does not go that far, the writers urge the Department of Health to halt SCR introduction in new areas, so that research on its introduction by University College London can be considered.

"Failure to do so will jeopardise the earlier gradual implementation and potentially the whole programme," it adds. "We are deeply disappointed that the current national roll out has bypassed the BMA's views, and ignored our goodwill which we have provided up until now."

The Department of Health denied that the introduction of SCRs was being rushed, as it has taken place over five years. "All patients in England over the age of 16 who are registered with a GP will be written to personally about the introduction of Summary Care Records. We absolutely support the right of any patient to opt out of having a record and have provided various options to make this process straightforward," said a spokesperson.

"Patients have at least 12 weeks to decide if they want to have a Summary Care Record. After this period, they are able to change their mind about having a record at any time," the department added.

The spokesperson pointed out that access to SCRs is open only to healthcare professionals who are directly involved in a patient's care, with the patient's permission, with use of smartcards using Chip and PIN technology and with all accesses recorded so they can be audited.

DoH launches no smoking iPhone app

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:51:56 GMT

The health department has spent around £10,000 developing an iPhone app to help users stop smoking

The application will provide daily hints and tips on how to manage cravings and keep a tally of how much money quitters have saved since they stopped smoking.

It will also direct people to local NHS Stop Smoking Services and include a direct link to the stop smoking helpline. Launched on 10 March 2010, No Smoking Day, it is available from iTunes, www.smokefree.nhs.uk and NHS Choices.

The department said that a similar iPhone application it launched in December 2009 to help people keep track of their alcohol intake has been downloaded 65,000 times so far.

It justified releasing this only for Apple's mobile equipment on the basis that 61% of mobile online access to NHS information is currently through an iPhone. For the iPod Touch the figure is 17%, 2.75% use a Nokia 5800, 2.11% a Nokia e71 and 4% a BlackBerry.

Smokers who do not have an iPhone or iPod Touch can text the word calculator to 64746 to receive information on an NHS Choices smoking calculator.

MoJ halves consultancy spending

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:05:00 GMT

The Ministry of Justice reduced its consultancy spending from £20.7m in 2007-08 to £10.5m in 2008-09 despite the failure of other departments to meet government cost cutting targets

According to a parliamentary written answer from Lord Bach, consultancy and technology company Accenture suffered from a particularly big fall. It said that the majority of payments related to its development of the electronic case management system Libra for the department.

The MoJ, created in 2007, paid Accenture £15.5m in 2007-08 for its services. This fell to £3.9m in 2008-09, according to a parliamentary written answer published on 8 March 2010.

Lord Bach told Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Northover that Libra has improved the exchange of information between the courts and criminal justice organisations such the police, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Office of Criminal Justice Reform. "This has led to a reduction in duplication of work and has enhanced services to court users, improving scheduling and monitoring of cases," he added in the written answer.

The government introduced plans to cut consultancy expenditure across all departments by around 50% after a 2006 National Audit Office report found that Whitehall was spending around £1.8bn a year on consultants.

A number of government departments have failed to cut spending, with at least seven increasing their expenditure on consultants during 2008-09. These departments include Work and Pensions, the Home Office, Communities and Local Government and Transport.

Chris Pennell, senior analyst at Kable, said: "The drastic cut in consultancy expenditure is as a direct result of firstly, the ending of the department's reorganisation programme – it has finished the change programme which aimed to unify the individual parts combined to form the MoJ, including aligning the disparate ICT elements. The MoJ is now embarking on the procurement phase of the programme to consolidate and standardise the ICT infrastructure.

"Secondly, the MoJ has made commitments to the overall drive to reduce by 50% total expenditure on consultancy services across the public sector. Although the government introduced targets to cut spending on consultancy services, a number of departments will struggle and it's unclear how these cuts are supposed to happen or where they are going to come from."

In another parliamentary written answer to Baroness Northover, the Department for International Development revealed that its consultancy expenditure had increased by nearly £2m. In 2007-08 it spent £8.9m on consultants, with the figure rising to £10.8m in 2008-09.

HMRC resorted to paper for millions of cases

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:02:36 GMT

A delayed IT system forced HMRC to revert to manual processing for 35m cases in 2008-09, according to the Commons Treasury Committee

The committee's report on the department's performance during 2008-09, published on 9 March 2010, says that despite substantial investment, HM Revenue and Customs' IT performance was "uneven".

In a previous report the committee had recommended that HMRC improved its contracts with IT suppliers and noted that one system has been delayed by a year. A consequence of this delay was that during 2008-09 the number of cases which needed manual processing increased from 16.5m in 2007-08 to 35m.

Against this background the committee says it as surprised to see HMRC declare in its annual report that it had been "hailed as a shining example of how to use technology to take government services to a new level".

It describes HMRC chief executive Lesley Strathie as remaining "bullish" about the department's IT progress, including a new agreement with its suppliers under the Aspire contract, which Strathie says will significantly reduce costs for the department over the coming years.

In its conclusion the report says that the future performance of HMRC will be highly dependent on improvements to its IT systems. "We will continue to monitor progress of its IT up-grading progress, including the new Aspire contract," it says.

The findings also reveal that the number of complaints about the department's online services increased from 514 in 2007-08 to 1,443 in 2008-09.

Furthermore, its contact centres answered only 57% of all attempts to call its helplines during the year.

The committee says that HMRC responded to this by saying that its performance is affected by peaks in contact – tax credit renewals (April to August), child benefit and return to education notifications (August and September) and the self assessment filing deadline (January) – but that performance outside these peaks is better and that they answered 75% of call attempts for all but three weeks in the non-peak period.

"Performance at HMRC remains mixed with considerable room for improvement and considerable challenges remain to be overcome if HMRC is to achieve this improvement," the report says.

"Noting a 7% increase in total recorded customer complaints, we urge HMRC to reflect on whether customer experiences of HMRC are yet improving as much as their summary of 'strong progress' implies."

Government disputes extent of PCS strike

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:40:35 GMT

Union members are taking part in 48 hour strikes affecting HMRC contact centres and outsourced IT staff for the DWP and the MoD

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said the strike over plans to reduce redundancy payouts saw more than 200,000 public sector workers refusing to cross picket lines, reports The Guardian.

The union said that those on strike on 8 March 2010 included some 999 operators at the Metropolitan Police Service, more than 3,200 staff at HMRC in Longbenton and 660 of the 700 staff at the same organisation's contact centre in Dundee.

It added that around 1,000 PCS members working for HP Enterprise Services were also taking part in a separate two-day strike over pay freezes and job losses, including those working on contracts for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in Newcastle, Washington, Preston and near Blackpool.

But the government said its own monitoring suggests only 80,000 of the 270,000 PCS civil service members are taking part. Four out of the five civil service unions accepted a compensation deal last month.

The strike is over plans to reduce payouts for civil servants made redundant in order to save £500m over three years. The government insists it has already compromised with unions to protect low-paid workers and preserve their higher payouts. But the unions say their members still stand to lose thousands of pounds and that the deal is part of moves to make it cheaper to sack people as the government tries to reduce the wage bill.

Mark Serwotka, the PCS general secretary, said: "The government needs to stop burying its head in the sand and wake up to the scale of anger that has been generated by their plans to cut jobs on the cheap.

"Loyal civil servants face losing tens of thousands of pounds if they are forced out of their jobs. The government is tearing up their contracts in front of their eyes, yet claims it can do nothing about bankers' bonuses because of contractual obligations."

Tessa Jowell, the Cabinet Office minister, said: "More than 70% of PCS members have decided not to take part in today's action. This means that 85% of all civil servants are working as normal today. Across the country services to the public are largely unaffected – all job centres and benefits offices are open, border entry points are working normally and court services are being maintained."

Liverpool to spend £26m on schools ICT

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:05:00 GMT

Liverpool City Council has received government approval for its Building Schools for the Future (BSF) plans, worth £350m in total

The plans, which are part of BSF's sixth wave of spending, include the provision of ICT services at 24 secondary schools in Liverpool. These will be rebuilt and refurbished in five phases from 2013 to 2017.

A spokesperson for the council told GC News: "Of the £350m being spent on BSF, over £26m will be on IT. That accounts for around 7.3% of the overall BSF spend."

According to a notice published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 3 March 2010, the preferred supplier will install telecommunications equipment, computers and information processing technology.

The notice also says that the council is "seeking an innovative private sector partner or partners to participate and invest in a new Public Private Partnership vehicle (a Local Education Partnership or LEP) to be established jointly with some or all the contracting authorities".

Warren Bradley, Liverpool City's Council leader, said: "Building Schools for the Future is a once in a generation opportunity, and I'm delighted the government has given our plans the go ahead. It's great news for Liverpool and paves the way for us to transform education at every secondary school in the city."

The new investment follows Liverpool's involvement in wave two of BSF, which includes the overhaul of six secondary schools under a previous funding round. Work for wave two is due to finish next year. Liverpool Direct was set up by the council and BT in January last year to provide technology and ICT support for the schools involved in wave two.

DNA policy 'impossible to defend' say MPs

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:36:49 GMT

The House of Commons' Home Affairs Select Committee has recommended changes to the retention periods for DNA profiles

"The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle," the committee says in a report published on 8 March 2010.

About 5m people have their personal profiles recorded on the National DNA Database, but just fewer than 1m of them have no record of any offence on the Police National Computer.

Although the committee does not want a return to the pre-2004 situation of DNA being collected only on charging and not on arrest, it says that it should be easier for those wrongly arrested or who have volunteered their DNA to get their records removed from the database.

It does not, however, recommend a particular period for the retention of DNA data. "Given the complexity of the issues and the conflicting evidence about what would be an appropriate length of time for retention, we are unable to recommend a specific period other than to say that we would regard three years as the minimum length of time for which such profiles should be retained," the report says.

The findings indicates that as few as 0.3% of crimes result in conviction as a result of DNA evidence. The committee believes that DNA alone is unlikely to result in a conviction for crime, but that DNA profiling and matching are "vital tools in the fight against crime".

The committee's investigations were prompted growing public concern about the increasing size of the police National DNA Database, the over-representation of certain ethnic and age groups on it and that it contained information about people never charged or convicted of a crime.

Government IT under siege, says minister

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:10:07 GMT

The government was hit by 300 significant attacks on its core computer systems last year, according to security minister Lord West

Foreign states and terrorist groups are regularly launching cyber-attacks on the UK's computer systems with the potential to cause widespread damage, according to the government's security minister, reports The Observer.

Lord West of Spithead, who is parliamentary under-secretary for security and counter-terrorism, told the Observer that the UK was under daily cyber attack, often from agencies working on behalf of foreign governments.

He said there had been "300 significant attacks" on the government's core computer networks in the last year and warned of chaotic scenes if one successfully targeted infrastructure such as the UK's communications systems.

The security service MI5 has warned that tackling espionage conducted by Chinese and Russian agents is taking up an increasing amount of its time.

West declined to identify the states carrying out the cyber-attacks on UK computer systems, but it is clear that he shares the service's fears that some states are using communications systems and computer networks to seek confidential information held by government agencies and private companies in the UK.

"The moment you mention a particular state, they will deny it," West said. "The problem with cyberspace is that attribution is extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to do it in terms of evidence that would be necessary in a court of law."

However, he said the UK government had sufficient intelligence to be confident that it knew who the main perpetrators were. Russia has been widely blamed for launching debilitating cyber-attacks on Estonia and Georgia. West said such actions prompted new questions.

"If I went and bombed a power station in France, that would be an act of war," he said. "If I went on to the net and took out a power station, is that an act of war? One could argue that it was."

And he warned that there might come a time when the UK would feel compelled to retaliate. "If some state sponsor keeps trying to get into your systems, probably for industrial espionage, are you going to go back into their system and bugger it up? We're all capable of doing these things. At the moment we wouldn't do that, but maybe this is where we need to have discussions."

He suggested that the UK needed to be prepared to tackle a spectrum of threats in cyberspace, including those posed by criminal gangs and terrorists. "I'm very worried they [terrorists] may start becoming cuter and try to use our connectivity to have a go at our critical infrastructure, things [that control] our services, our food [distribution] and water supply," he said. Terrorists were currently "not brilliant" at attempting this sort of attack on infrastructure, he added, but they would learn fast and "we've got to be ahead of them".

As an example of the potential effects, he talked about what would happen if time signals from global positioning system satellites were disabled. "Not a single cash machine would work, the Docklands Light Railway wouldn't work, you wouldn't be able to berth oil tankers, great chunks of our transport infrastructure would stop," West said.

He drew comparisons with ice storms in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, several years ago. "All the power went down; there were riots with people smashing into stores," he said.

The government is so concerned at the evolving threats in cyberspace that this month it launched the Office of Cyber Security, which draws on expertise from organisations such as GCHQ, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. The OCS is engaged in planning exercises looking at warfare in 2015 and 2040. Another part of its remit will be tackling online fraud.

West acknowledged that the 2012 Olympics would be a target for cyber-attacks. "People will be trying to get into the Olympics [ticketing] site to see what they can do," he said.

GC Awards draw record entry

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:05:00 GMT

The shortlist for the GC Awards for public sector IT has been drawn up from a record number of entries

More than 230 submissions came in from a wide range of public sector organisations, indicating the enthusiasm for the longest established and most prestigious accolades in the field.

Projects from central and local government, the health service and policing have reached the shortlist in the five categories, and there is a similar diversity in the background of the individuals shortlisted for the Innovator of the Year award.

The GC Awards have been running since 1996 and are supported by the Cabinet Office, the British Computer Society and Socitm, with the The Guardian as official media partner.

The shortlist for the best projects is as follows:

Delivering Efficiency
West Hertfordshire Hospital NHS Trust - Wizrad
Westminster City Council - ICT Remodelling
Welsh Assembly Government, Value Wales – XCHANGEWALES
Stockport Council, Business Services ICT - Systems Thinking

Collaborative Working
Hertfordshire County Council, GES Connect Digitally - Online Free School Meals Project
Defra, HMRC, Business Link - ITSW, Automatic Licence Verification Project
Communities and Local Government - The Data Interchange Hub and Places Analysis Tool
NHS Herefordshire and Herefordshire Council - Joint Technology Strategy

Customer Services
Department for Work and Pensions - Jobseeker's Allowance Online
Customer Service Direct - Calls to action: improving public access to council services
Insolvency Service - Debt Relief Order Project
London borough of Richmond upon Thames - Customer Excellence Programme

Transformation
Flintshire Community Safety Partnership: FNWA/OWL
London borough of Harrow - Waste Project
Northern Ireland Guardian ad Litem Agency - Guardian Case Information System
Department for Work and Pensions and Corporate IT - Government Connect Secure Extranet

Shared Services
Capital Ambition - Pan London Out of Hours Shared Services Framework
Department for Children, Schools and Families - Schools Recruitment Service
IT Assist - The Northern Ireland Civil Service ICT Shared Service Centre
Department for Work and Pensions Shared Services - Expansion of shared services to other government departments

Innovator of the Year
Carl Faulkner - Normanby Primary School, Middlesbrough
Gary Simpson - e@SY Connects
John Thornbury – Worcester Acute Hospitals
David Wilde – Westminster City Council

The final decisions will be made by a panel of senior public sector officials, with the winners to be announced at a gala event in London on the evening of 21 April.

Conservatives want big IT deals delayed

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:27:42 GMT

Shadow minister Francis Maude has asked the cabinet secretary to postpone the signing of important IT contracts until after the election

In a letter to Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Office shadow Maude added that a minister must justify any cases where the government decides it must go ahead with a new deal.

The Conservative Party is concerned about recent big deals signed by the Department for Work and Pensions, the renegotiation of contracts for the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) and the possible signing of a £1bn logistics deal by the Ministry of Defence.

"A moratorium on contracts should be standard practice in the run up to a general election," said a spokesperson

Stephen Roberts, principal analyst at Kable, said: "The six week shut down in the run-up to an election is already a hindrance to procurement planning.

"While Maude's concern about politicised issues such as the NPfIT are understandable, it would be a shame if there was further delay to pressing but uncontroversial Whitehall procurements such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's telecommunications replacement, the shared service procurement for the Ministry of Justice and the consolidation proposals at Communities and Local Government."

Councils place microchips in bins

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:44:46 GMT

68 local authorities have bought bins with chips which could be used for pay-as-you-throw schemes – but only 15 are currently using them

Big Brother Watch, a campaign by the founders of the TaxPayers' Alliance, says that research using Freedom of Information requests has found that the number of councils making use of chipped bins has risen from 42 a year ago, and that chips have been installed in at least 2.6m households' bins.

However, the FoI responses show that only 15 of these councils are currently monitoring the chips, for around 820,000 households. Some councils have bought the chips, which they have said add between 10p to £1.25 to the cost, to "future proof" bins, while others have now discontinued monitoring.

The 15 councils monitoring microchips in bins are Antrim, Basildon, Belfast, Craigavon, Gedling, Halton, Hastings, Lancaster, Leeds, Ribble Valley, Sefton, South Oxfordshire, Warwick, Wiltshire (only in part of the county) and Windsor and Maidenhead.

Some are collecting data only from households which have volunteered to participate in recycling schemes. Others say they collect household data to monitor the performance of contractors or staff, or to look at aggregated figures for areas rather than for individual households.

Bristol City Council has agreed to pilot a pay-as-you-throw rubbish refuse charging scheme, although it is not recorded as a current user in the Big Brother Watch research.

In total, the 68 councils spent £1.02m on installing and maintaining such systems over the last 12 months. The biggest authority involved, Leeds City Council, says that £1 of the £18.50 cost of each new bin goes on its chip. It 16,000 of its 215,000 households' bins each year.

Big Brother Watch claimed that the councils are preparing for a nationwide introduction of pay-as-you-throw rubbish collection. "Councils are waiting until the public aren't watching to begin surveillance on our waste habits, intruding into people's private lives and introducing punitive taxes on what we throw away," said Alex Deane, the campaign's director.

"The British public doesn't want this technology, these fines or this intrusion. If local authorities have no intention to monitor our waste then they should end the surreptitious installation of these bin microchips."

UKBA Croydon staff hampered by IT

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:22:50 GMT

Staff at one of the UK Border Agency's largest offices are 'hampered' by poor IT, according to the agency's independent chief inspector

John Vine made an unannounced visit to the Croydon Public Enquiry Office (PEO) in February and said it was "disappointing" to find that information on customer waiting times on UKBA's website and at the PEO was inaccurate.

In a report published on 5 March 2010, Vine wrote: "In this inspection, I found staff were on the whole professional and committed to their work. However, they were hampered in the level of service they could provide to customers by IT failures, queues for office equipment and insufficient accommodation."

The inspector's team undertook an exercise to test the PEO's appointment booking system, anonymously making 80 online and telephone enquires. They found it was easier to obtain information online and that the online system provided earlier appointment dates than telephone booking.

Croydon PEO deals with up to 300 people a day. It offers a same day service for considering applications for permission to extend a stay, or to stay in the UK permanently.

Chief executive of UKBA Lin Homer said of the findings: "The chief inspector's report recognises the quality of our decision making and the professionalism of our staff. Our European neighbours are keen to learn from and adopt our expertise.

"The UK Border Agency is concluding asylum cases faster than ever before, with the majority concluded within six months, down from an average of 22 months in 1997. We are working to ensure there is a realistic plan for dealing with all asylum claims that have not been concluded within six months."

She added: "We recognise that we need to continually improve our processes and performance and therefore welcome the chief inspector's recommendations. We will continue to develop a faster, more secure and efficient asylum system."

Vine has said he plans to make further unannounced inspections of UKBA operations later in the year.

Aberdeen plans £12m virtual desktops

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:27:58 GMT

One of Scotland's largest city authorities has entered the market for a managed data centre and virtual desktop environment

Aberdeen City Council has published a tender in the Official Journal of the European Union for a five year, £12m deal for a single supplier of a range of services, including a desktop communications software package, data storage, computer archiving and disaster recovery.

The document notes that the council operates a mixed platform that includes Unix, Intel, Sun, Oracle, Novell and Microsoft, and that at the moment there are no plans to replace or upgrade any applications.

It adds that, while the deal does not extend to the city's schools, there may be scope in future to develop a single ICT environment for its corporate and education sectors.

OS and Land Registry open shared centre

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:16:01 GMT

The Land Registry and Ordnance Survey have opened their joint data centre, which they expect will save them up to £300m annually

The move, which was announced in October 2009, is claimed to be the first of its type for central government. The Land Registry is leasing Ordnance Survey 219 square metres of serviced and managed space in two data centres at separate sites. These physically separate their organisation's workforce from its 'live' IT systems.

By the end of 2010 Ordnance Survey will have both the Gloucester data centre and its second site – at its new head office currently being built in Southampton – fully operational. Meanwhile, Land Registry will use the extra capacity available at its data storage centre.

Bob Goodrich, Ordnance Survey's director of information systems, said: "We're very pleased to be able to implement this step-up in our delivery capability and continue our relationship with Land Registry. In the current economic climate it is essential that we realise cost savings throughout our organisation, and sharing space with Land Registry enables us to do this and to support the government's ICT strategy.

"Now that we have completed fitting out the area we will begin migrating our infrastructure and aim to have completed this by late summer 2010."

Land Registry's director of information systems John Wright said he hopes other public sector organisations will take similar steps.

Present data better, says watchdog

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:10:00 GMT

The Audit Commission says government bodies need to make published information more accessible to the public

The discussion paper, The truth is out there, says that government bodies should be more "realistic" about what information the public will engage with and actively use.

It says that presenting raw data alone is not enough and could cause more harm than good if poorly presented or hard to find. It adds that organisations need to be more transparent when publishing information.

The commission says that publishing of data on alternative platforms, such as user-led sites, is a way of reconnecting with people. It cites the success of sites like Fixmystreet.com which enables people to register dissatisfaction with their local environment.

"In a free market in information and interpretation, credibility will be a valuable characteristic worth developing. But for others, a single voice delivering reasoned, independent judgement can be expected to carry more weight," says the paper.

The commission also acknowledges that trust in public bodies' data is low and that limited enthusiasm is shown for online tools like NHS Choices. The commission says only 4% of patients use the site to make key health choices.

It calls for more money to be spent on accountability portals and websites, saying technological advances mean the cost of developing such tools is relatively small.

Chief executive of the commission Steve Bundred said: "Making information available online can do more than help people make choices about using public services. It can enhance democracy by giving people more of a voice. If we know what decisions our councillors or MPs are facing, what they are spending taxes on, and what the results are, we can hold politicians and public servants to account, identify waste and even expose corruption.

"But this will work only if the information in the public domain is accurate, understandable and trustworthy. If it is not, poor decisions will be made and trust in public data further eroded. Not all of the information in the public domain yet meets those standards. If the benefits of transparency are to be realised, it needs to."

The discussion paper follows the Audit Commission's 2009 report, Is there something I should know? That found that only 5% of the councils it assessed had excellent quality of data and the majority met only the basic requirements of data quality.

The government launched Data.gov.uk in January, which contains thousands of data sets from across government, published in a reusable format.