Sharing more widely: data at the heart of evidence, policy and transformation at Defra
Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and its network of arm's length bodies – the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Marine Management Organisation, Kew Gardens, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquatic Science and the Animal and Plant Health Agency – produce large amounts of data. This has been instrumental in providing evidence to support the development and delivery of key policies. Historically, expertise has been embedded in subjectspecific areas, resulting in data existing in silos with varying degrees of accessibility for those within the department, wider government and wider society. In 2015, Defra's Secretary of State declared that more than 8000 of Defra's datasets would be made freely available for anyone to access, use and share. Doing so creates opportunities for everyone – not just those making their living in food, farming and the environment. Opening access to Defra's data is intended to both provide opportunities to those who wish to use it to exploit its business potential, and to improve policy delivery by engaging a wider community in solving problems. The Department has been focused on making datasets available as open data; ensuring future data collection and publication approaches are open by default, taking a transparent approach from the outset. This will make it easier to work more collaboratively with other government bodies, external partners and the public. Alongside growing support for citizen science activities, new technologies are changing the way in which data flows. This presents opportunities for government as much as for others. Today's smartphones, for example, have the computing power of the supercomputers of 30 years ago. When coupled with a growing range of accurate sensors, smartphones potentially allow the move away from environmental monitoring depending on sparse, fixed, high-accuracy, expensive monitoring stations, replacing them with mobile, cheap, lower accuracy but more densely populated networks, which could be ...