Update: 26 July 2017
Subsequent to my post below VOA has removed the use restriction (“may be reproduced without formal permission or charge for personal or in-house use only”) from the landing page for its LRR tables. The information is now unambiguously re-usable under the Open Government Licence. Many thanks to VOA for taking action on this.
Post: 17 July 2017
Local reference rent tables are published each month by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). LRR tables are used as a guide by local authority rent officers when they calculate housing benefit entitlement of private rented sector claimants.
Most material published on GOV.UK is re-usable under the Open Government Licence. However the landing page for VOA’s recent LRR tables (from October 2014 on) includes a restriction on re-use. The tables “may be reproduced without formal permission or charge for personal or in-house use only”.
It’s unclear why VOA has imposed this restriction. Older LRR tables (on the old VOA website) were released under the OGL.
Back in May I submitted a re-use request to VOA for the newer LRR tables, and last week they responded with permission for me to re-use those tables under the OGL.
I am publishing the correspondence in case anyone else wants to rely on it as a basis for treating the LRR tables as open data.
I have urged VOA to remove the re-use restriction from the GOV.UK page. If they are prepared to permit my re-use under the OGL there’s no obvious reason why other users should need to seek specific permission.
The correspondence raised an additional issue with potential wider implications. VOA took the position that re-use requests for the older LRR tables should be directed to National Archives, because the material is publicly available in NA’s UK Government Web Archive rather than on GOV.UK.
I have questioned that; it seems to me that the older LRR tables are still “held” by VOA for licensing purposes. I hope I am correct on that point. If on the other hand VOA is correct that suggests public bodies can avoid re-use requests by the simple expedient of removing the information from GOV.UK, which seems contrary to the intention of the PSI regulations.
In any case there is in my view now sufficient basis to treat both sets of LRR tables as open data.
Image credit: Hackney London September 29 2015 087 Social Housing by David Holt (CC BY 2.0)