A Conservative government would place information online about government jobs, NHS performance and performance of local services, and then let the public request further datasets.
Opposition leader David Cameron told an audience at Imperial College in London that, if elected, his government would publish far more data online in standard formats, to allow more reuse and mash-ups.
This would include a single online system for government jobs. "Not only could you find out about vacancies for yourself, you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer and make sure your money is being put to proper use," he said on Thursday.
Cameron said a similar system would be established for NHS data. "Again, imagine if this information was in your hands. You'd be able to compare your local hospital with others, and do something about it if it wasn't good enough. Choose another hospital. Voice your complaint to a patient group. Make change happen," he said.
He said the government plans to reduce the amount of data it publishes on schools, replacing league tables with report cards. "We're going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative government, we will find the most useful information in 20 different areas, ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic, and publish it so people can use it," Cameron said.
"This information will be published proactively and regularly — and in a standardised format so that it can be mashed up and interacted with. What's more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new 'right to data' so that further datasets can be requested by the public," he added.
Cameron said that a Conservative government would require the online publication of crime data, council-meeting minutes and local service data, as well as every item of government spending of more than £25,000.
"This will give people the power to hold local government to account, and to develop new public services — like a local version of TheyWorkForYou, or Bebo applications that tell teenagers when the local sports centre is open — as well as the power to see which councils are providing the best value for money, so residents can demand the same from their own," he said.
His comments reflected thinking by Tim Berners-Lee, who has been appointed by the government to advise on publishing its data. In an online article, Sir Tim argued that "raw (government) data should be made available as soon as possible," with easy-to-publish information put online first.
Cameron also reaffirmed his party's plans to take the opposite approach to personal data, by cancelling or reducing the scope of several government databases. "Today, we are in danger of living in a control state," he said. "Almost a million innocent citizens are caught in the web of the biggest DNA database in the world — larger than that of any dictatorship."
"Faced with any problem, any crisis — given any excuse — Labour grasp for more information, pulling more and more people into the clutches of state data capture," Cameron said of the government. He quoted a Privacy International report which said the UK had the worst privacy record of any country in Europe.
"If we want to stop the state controlling us, we must confront this surveillance state," Cameron said, having criticised the identity scheme's requirements for images, signatures and fingerprints. "So the next Conservative government will scrap the ContactPoint database of children's details. We will scrap the ID Card scheme. And we will remove innocent people's records from the DNA database."
