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Access to Public Sector Information:
What’s changing?
Trevor Fenwick, Euromonitor
International, UK
I will give a commercial and legislative take on access to public sector information and explain why it is of massive importance to us as an industry. I will also give you an idea of where I see tensions. My position is informed by my work in the UK, where I am a member of the advisory panel on public sector information, one of the bodies set up to ensure that legislation works at a national level.
The Public Sector Information Directive was adopted by the Council of Ministers in December 2003 and is now going through transposition and implementation. I will give you some idea on how we have traditionally used public sector information and why it is important to us. I will offer some words on what the directive actually says and what it requires of public sector information holders. I will then talk about its progress in transposition and implementation. Finally, I will address some of the tension and issues that I believe are critical for the public sector information holders and the governments that regulate them.
a. Background
The European Commission have decided, for economic and policy reasons, that an emerging economic block in Europe has to have pan-European information sources. There are very few pan-European databases. My company, Euromonitor International, is one of the few producers of pan-European products. Secondly, the small amount of data that exists suggests that we are way behind the US in producing databases. Thus, there are economic and policy reasons why the Commission has tried to bring in liberalisation and harmonisation measures to stimulate our sector. They want to see a move away from national-focused, legacy‑based information products to pan-European company and information databases that support their policy aims. In doing so, they hope to encourage new entrants and new products.
b. Who will benefit?
The companies in the sector will benefit. We are a very divergent industry – some of us think we are White Pages publishers, others think we are market researchers – but we all use public sector information to a greater or lesser extent. Public sector information is much wider than many think.
c. Euromonitor
All of Euromonitor’s products are now global. We do this by adding value to core public sector information. This is essentially an editorial process. We do not licence a large amount of data. This directive should encourage us to get nearer to the data sources, and in doing so, create more interesting products. In many ways, it is foolish of me to make this presentation because if the policy aims of the Commission are successful, then there will be less need for companies like mine, because there will be less need to add value to the data provided. However, I do not think this will be the case.
d. The Directive
Public sector information is very diverse. Governments or government agencies collect the data for a number of reasons: strategy, mapping, car registration, economic and social, statistical, public expenditure, taxation and so on. All of this is legitimate public sector information. It is collected at regional, national, European and international levels. The Directive will cover all of this data, including data produced by, for example, parish councils.
a. Our data
This is our data. It is paid for by us through our taxes. We are not asking for any favours in wanting to see the data. This has been dealt within the Directive, but not as robustly as we in the industry would have liked. We must always remember that we have a right to this data.
b. Unique source
The data is from original or unique sources. For example, company data collected by statute is unique. There are very few other sources to that data. It would be very difficult for anyone in the private sector to undertake this.
c. Quality
Interestingly, it is not always quality data. For example, a major Asian company approached my company a few years ago concerned that their official statistics were being held to be not as reliable as they should be. This country was trying to stimulate inward investment. Knowing that its data was held in disrepute, it needed to approach an outside agency to enable the entry of reliable data into the market place. The project did not succeed because it could not compete with the original source of data. People still believe the original and official source.
d. Adding value
There are three ways of adding value to public sector information. The first example is when you have a high volume of public sector information from a single source or registrar. Company information and land transactions are examples of this. The second example is when you have a high volume of public sector information from many sources, including property information databases which contain transactional and environmental data. This is probably the area where the database sector has the biggest opportunity. The third example is the high volume of information from many sources. My company work in this sphere. It requires almost an analytical or editorial process.
The key is adding value which differentiates what we do from the original source. We can add value in many ways: sales and distribution, innovation, additional content, reworking the information to make new content and aggregating information at regional and national levels.
It does not matter what the original public sector information holders can do, it is not in their remit to create international products, such as those created by Euromonitor.
e. The situation as it is now
In some cases the registrar for public information is a national body. This is the case in the UK and Denmark, for example. Germany and Austria work at a regional and federal level. In Germany, some companies register with one or both authorities. This causes problems of access. These difficulties are a boon to us. We can make sense of the information where official bodies cannot.
Access is the issue that the Commission is trying to tackle. For example, the issue of access to telephone numbers has changed because many telcos are no longer public sector. As public sector information becomes more available, investing in it becomes less important to the governments. The data quality may suffer as a result of this.
f. Progress of Directive
The Directive was adopted in December 2003 and was immediately implemented by the European Union. One of the first information services to benefit form this process was Eurostat. Eurostat was notoriously difficult to access. It had a terrible interface and ridiculous levels of pricing. Their website launched at the end of 2004 is a significant improvement. Eurostat is a good exemplar of what can be done. The EU is to be congratulated for at least making a start on this.
The Directive required that implementation be completed by July this year.
It is an important primary material for digital material, content and services. We in this industry are intended to be prime beneficiaries of this. However, there is no obligation to allow re-use of public sector information documents. We have the right to ask but there is no obligation to give it to us.
a. Exclusions
Certain exclusions give the opportunity to recalcitrant public sector information holders not to make things available. Anything falling outside the public task of the public sector body is excluded. If your public task is to receive the registration of company information, you do not have the right to documents outside this task. It may be that the public sector information holder has intellectual property rights in the data they are presenting. The Directive does not give you rights over that data.
It could be argued that certain documents are critical for national security or confidentiality. In the UK, there have already been discussions about access to taxation databases. The problem is that the company registrar only collects certain information. Taxation databases tend to be more authoritative and better sources of information. In the UK, customs and excise argue that they do not have to disclose this data on confidentiality or data protection grounds.
Cultural information, information held by academic establishments, libraries and museums – the National Archive in the UK – is excluded from this type of legislation. However, they already have fairly liberal access regimes.
b. Requirements of public sector information holders
The Directive aims for transparency. It says that it is critical that public sector information holders need to be open in how they deal with people. They need to publish any licence, conditions and charges. They need to act quickly. There is an obligation to make data available in the pre-existing format or language. They are not required to remodel or reformat it. Finally, they should not charge more than that to cover the production, collection, reproduction and dissemination together with a reasonable return on investment. We feel that this could justify any charge whatsoever.
It is important to read the recitals in the Directive, which go beyond the letter of the law and give the spirit of the legislation. In the UK transposition, the recitals are called guidance to best practice and it goes out of its way to encourage public sector information holders to charge no more than the marginal cost and, where possible, the marginal cost of delivering the data. However, the law does not require this. In many countries, this continues to be a way to discriminate against access to public sector information.
It is required to indicate a means of redress when documents are refused. Under existing law, the only redress we have is through competition law. We have examples of this in the UK. If you were denied access or the licence terms were anti-competitive, you had to make a case to the competition authorities. The Directive asks for an alternative cheaper, faster, less burdensome way of seeking redress to be set up. In the UK, the panel I am a member of has been enabled to set up a tribunal to consider cases. It does not prevent people who feel that this is not acceptable going to the law at any point.
c. Transposition progress
11 countries had transposed by July of this year, as they were required. There is draft legislation in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. There is a very good website call ePSINet, a monitoring body set up by the European Commission to give access to this type of information. On this website are updates on transposition and case studies and examples of disputes and presentations made.
a. Dis‑intermediation
The Directive is good in trying to make progress. It will only work if we can overcome some of the tensions within the operation of accessing public sector information.
In the pre-Internet days, companies could make a very good business out of distributing public sector documents. E-government has enabled the citizen to go directly to the public sector information holder. For example, in the UK, companies can go directly to the land registry to get details of property transactions. Companies House, the UK companies registrar, has been very aggressive, some would argue, in making the data available. In doing this, they have removed those who traditionally made a good business out of distributing public sector documents.
b. Competing with source data
If, as a citizen, you can go straight to the holder of the data, why would you go to a third party? The key for the private sector here is added value.
c. E-government
In the UK, the Government, in an effort to improve access to its information, distribute data themselves. This may include advertising data. Government producing their own information sources is held to be beneficial for the citizen. In doing so, they may be competing with media directories, local newspapers and magazines that have traditionally carried that information and may be an important part of their economic model. A specific example in the UK is education and the heath service. In an effort to save resources, the Government have set up a jobs website. The advertising revenues that traditionally went to specialist medical journals and local newspapers, are now being diverted to a Government website. In fact, the revenues do not exist because it is a free service for the advertisers. However, the media that traditionally relied on that data for an important part of their business no longer have this.
d. Changing the culture of public sector information holders
A key problem, particularly at the European level where there are different national information and administrative cultures, is changing the culture of those who hold the information. The information holders are civil servants, not entrepreneurs or publishers. They may feel that approaching them for data may put their job under threat, particularly if they are offering the data in a less imaginative way. Sources of tension include exclusive contracts and restricted tenders. In the UK, there are issues in the difference between a public body, a public undertaking and a public task. A public undertaking is a body set up to remove itself from the ownership of public sector information. It could be that the owners of telephone data subscriber sets are in this situation.
e. Amount of information
A massive amount of public sector information is available, we just do not know what or where it is. The recitals call for asset registers. The EU have sponsored a number of activities, such as PSI Navigator, which one of our member companies was involved in.
f. Pricing
What is a reasonable return on capital? How do we know if it is being subsidised or not? There are often subsidies between government departments. You have no idea what is being charged for information here.
g. Lack of harmonisation
In Europe, we need a more harmonious transposition of the Directive and a more harmonious data set with minimum levels of data.
h. Redress
In the UK, redress is pursued through competition law. There have been a couple of cases, one between business information providers and Companies House and another between a property search database and the land registry. In Italy, there was a case between the chambers of commerce, who have their own electronic distribution, and a company, Cerbed, which had an exclusive licence to distribute company information. This is how it was done in the past. We hope the Directive will, at national level, offer a less contentious way of dealing with these issues.
The publishing community supports the aims of this legislation. It should be beneficial for us. The challenge for national governments is to reconcile the benefits for us in the private sector with what they may see as short-term losses in their own sector. The Commission need to convince national governments of the benefits. Public sector information holders need to be open and transparent. They may, as a result, start to become more competitive. Finally, the Commission has to ensure that there is consistency across Europe by reviewing and monitoring regularly. Reviewing the Directive will require better communication between us in the industry and the Commission to ensure the review is based on the right facts and figures.
Are the short-term benefits of the liberalisation of public sector information hard to quantify? Nothing happens quickly. It will be a slow process. The publishing community has been described as being against the knowledge economy. By making investments and relying on copyrights and licences, we are seen as holding back development. There is a tension between greater access to public sector information and more protection for data. The difference is we are taking the risk of investment. The public sector information is there because we have paid our taxes.
Is there a hidden cost? Possibly. We need to really work on this to maximise the benefits of liberalisation and draw the distinction between public and private sector activities.