Hull City Council Open Data



Hull City Council Open Data

The experience of Hull City Council with Open Data shows how opening data can liberate public sector bodies data for their own use.

Hull City Council, going beyond government commitments to publish all spending data above £500, publishes monthly reports listing all items of spend with trade creditors and voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations. The reports are drawn from the council’s accounting system, Oracle. This information is published for each accounting month from November 2010 onwards and the data is freely reusable.

Although the council doesn’t currently provide any API’s or visualisation tools, it has added serious value to Hull City Council. Drawing on the code underlying Armchair Auditor, leading to the creation of UpNorthAuditor.

During an investigation into cross-cutting value for money measures, Hull City Council officers have identified the potential of UpNorthAuditor to allow managers to access spend and contract information in ways they needed, recognising its value as a potential internal tool by drawing upon the Open Data Hull publishes to process data and produce reports showing how many contracts were awarded to a given supplier across different directorates and spending programmes − which could be used to identify efficiency savings through consolidating orders − and the need for a more functional contracts register. Early work with UpNorthAuditor has been undertaken, showing some flaws in data quality, showing the number of directorates and service areas to be larger than in reality which need to be rectified before further use can be made of the tool.

Hull City Council is in the process of agreeing to the use of an identified Open Data  platform and are working with a list of data sets based on areas subject to high volumes of FOI requests. They believe that this work will reduce FoI requests and realise savings. Meanwhile, work to publish the register of contracts is ongoing.

The case of Hull City Council shows the power that Open Data has as a tool for liberating data for more intelligent internal use to generate efficiency savings and as a way to identify where data quality may be improved.

Website: http://www.hullcc.gov.uk/opendata