Post: 2 April 2017
In early 2015 the Environment Agency set out a proposal to transition its charged-for datasets “to open” in three tranches: Flood Data by 1 April 2016, Waste Data by 1 April 2017, and all other datasets by 1 April 2018.
This was in the context of EA’s broader policy to move away from commercial licensing of data assets and towards an open data approach.
Release of the 2016 tranche mostly went to plan, although EA has so far failed to deliver open data on surface water flood risk in England. (Equivalent data is available for Wales.)
Yesterday EA’s data team announced the 2017 tranche: removal of charges on four datasets. These include boundary data for authorised landfill sites and tabular data on permitting of waste sites:
Environmental Permitting Regulations - Industrial Sites
Environmental Permitting Regulations - Waste Sites
Environmental Pollution Incidents
Permitted Waste Sites - Authorised Landfill Site Boundaries
However: none of these datasets has been released as open data. EA has instead applied its more restrictive “Conditional Licence”.
The core terms of the Condition Licence are incompatible with open re-use, and the licence also lets EA apply additional terms to specific datasets. It’s currently unclear what restrictions EA is imposing on re-use of these four datasets. EA’s announcement links to a “Register of Abstracts” dated April 2016, and to Data.gov.uk metadata records (above) that still refer to charges for commercial re-use.
Data protection
On its decision not to release the datasets under the Open Government Licence, EA’s announcement says only that “due to data protection issues and the right to be forgotten, this is not possible.“ There is no further explanation in the documentation.
Presumably EA has done a privacy impact assessment on release of the datasets, but what are the concerns exactly? As these datasets have been shared on commercial terms for some years it seems implausible that EA has suddenly discovered any new privacy issues.
If the datasets contain personal data, has EA considered the viability of releasing open versions with that data redacted? Even simply highlighting the problematic data would be sufficient, since the Open Government Licence explicitly exempts “personal data in the Information”.
Historic Landfill
EA has also, without explanation, decided to maintain charges for commercial re-use of its Historic Landfill mapping data. Removal of those charges is now scheduled for April 2018.
Historic Landfill is precisely the sort of valuable dataset that should be more widely available, particularly at a time when house-building is high on the political agenda. It’s unlikely that EA could sustain data protection as an excuse not to release this data under the Open Government Licence.
Continuing the charging regime for another year means EA is maintaining a barrier to wider re-use of the data. This will only serve the entrenched interests of existing commercial licensees.
Open by default
Is Environment Agency still pursuing an “open by default” approach to publication of data? The introduction of the Conditional Licence and the perfunctory explanations EA has given for applying it to these and many other releases, in place of the Open Government Licence, suggest not.