Public policy that isn’t public anymore

Public policies and strategies, such as economic development ones, shape where investment flows, which places are prioritised, and how opportunity is defined. For local authorities, practitioners, and communities, policies such as the Industrial Strategy and Pride in Place are not abstract frameworks; they influence funding decisions, local plans, and long-term economic outcomes, impacting communities.

For these strategies to command confidence, the evidence on which they are based must be open to scrutiny. Increasingly, however, government policy is being informed by data sources that are not fully publicly accessible, raising important questions about transparency, accountability, and fairness.

Public policy relies on evidence not only to inform decisions, but to justify them. When the government publishes a strategy or allocates funding, stakeholders should be able to understand what data has been used, how it has been analysed and whether the conclusions can be independently verified.

This matters particularly in economic development, where decisions affect places unevenly. If some areas are deemed priorities and others are not, the legitimacy of those decisions depends on the openness of the evidence base.

A clear example can be seen in the Industrial Strategy, where the government has sought to move beyond traditional industrial classifications to better capture emerging and innovative sectors. A key part of the approaches to identifying and mapping these sectors has drawn on data produced by The Data City, which uses alternative information and machine-learning techniques to classify businesses in ways that standard SIC codes cannot.

While this represents a methodological advance, it also introduces a challenge. The Data City’s datasets and classifications are not open access. Councils, analysts, and local partners must subscribe in order to view or interrogate the underlying data.

As a result, many organisations are asked to align their local strategies, investment priorities, and bids for funding with a national evidence base that they cannot fully examine unless they have the resources to pay for access. This limits the ability of smaller councils and community organisations to test assumptions, fully understand sector definitions, or challenge how their local economies are being represented.

The implications are even more significant when funding is involved. The Pride in Place programme allocates resources based on assessments of local need, using a composite of deprivation and community indicators.

While parts of this assessment draw on well-established public datasets, a key component of the calculation incorporates paid-for data developed by Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI). OCSI’s indices and analytical products are used across the public sector, but they are not fully publicly available. Access to the complete datasets, particularly in this case their Local Insights platform, requires a licence.

This means that eligibility for public funding, and the relative ranking of places, can be influenced by data that is not openly accessible to all those affected by the decision. Smaller councils and community groups may be unable to replicate the analysis that has shaped the allocation of resources to their area, even though the financial consequences can be substantial.

The use of non-open data introduces a quiet but important inequality into the policy system. Well-resourced organisations can purchase access to proprietary datasets, while others must rely on high-level summaries or technical notes. This creates uneven capacity to engage with national policy, limited scope to challenge or refine government assessments and reduced transparency for the public.

Over time, proprietary datasets risk becoming embedded as de facto standards in public policy, without the level of scrutiny normally expected for evidence that underpins democratic decision-making.

None of this is an argument against innovation in data or analysis. Alternative data sources, advanced analytics, and new classification methods can add real value. However, when such approaches are used to define national priorities or allocate public funding, they should be fully transparent, reproducible using open data and clearly documented so that assumptions and limitations are understood.

Open access data is central to trust in economic development policy. When strategies and funding programmes are shaped by evidence that cannot be freely examined, the ability of places to understand, engage with, and respond to national priorities is weakened.

The use of paid data could help advance the UK’s policy making landscape but, to make it part of public policy, the data could:

● Be provided as a time-limited complete datasets
● Made accessible to all layers of Government and Local Government with the option to allow limited third party access
● Be provided to relevant stakeholders on request free of charge

We should be advocating for open access data across all public policy and especially for economic development related data. As the government continues to refine its approaches to public policy and place-based investment, ensuring that the underlying evidence is open, transparent, and verifiable will be essential — not only for better policy outcomes, but for maintaining confidence in the decisions that shape local economies and communities.

Notes
Information about the methodologies used for the above mentioned policies are below:
Pride in Place: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pride-in-place-programme-place-selection-methodology-note/pride-in-place-programme-phase-2-methodology-note

Industrial Strategy IS-8:
https://lab.productivity.ac.uk/insights/unlocking-the-future-mapping-the-uks-industrial-strategy-to-data-driven-classifications/

Tom Jenkins is Economic Development Manager Ashford Borough Council and an iED member.

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