The UK Government plan for a National Data Library (NDL) is of great interest to anyone who cares about how the government collects, uses and shares data, even while its details remain unclear. One part of the plan that interests Jeni Tennison is how they will answer the question of what private companies should provide in return for their access to public data. In this post she describes her new policy brief on this question of fair exchange.
The vision for a National Data Library
Reading the Government’s documents, and talking with people, about the National Data Library (NDL), it’s clear that there are diverse perspectives on its underlying purpose. The Labour Manifesto (2024) mentions both data-driven public services and research in the public interest. The AI Opportunities Action Plan (2025) focuses on supporting innovation by making high-impact public datasets available to the private sector. A blueprint for a modern digital government (2025) mentions both facilitating data reuse across the public sector and opening up data to third parties to accelerate AI-driven innovation and boost growth.
These goals fall into three general categories, all of which are also reflected in the Tony Blair Institute’s recent report, Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library:
- Delivering data-driven public services by building the public data infrastructure that underpins them.
- Enabling researchers and statisticians in research and evidence-based policymaking.
- Supporting AI development by providing large training datasets.
Whether it does all of these or just one, the NDL will need to address how to share data with private sector organisations. This is most obvious when public data is being used to support AI development – which is mostly carried out in the private sector – but also applies to commercial research, such as pharma companies using health data, and when third party providers support public services, as in the “Government as a Platform” vision in 2015.
There are good reasons to share public data with the private sector. The public sector alone cannot fully exploit the data it holds. For the government, it is also attractive both because private sector access can lead to innovation and economic growth, and because some of this innovation may help enhance public sector productivity and efficiency. The recent £4m investment to create a dataset for training AI systems that can mark children’s schoolwork – the thinking being that schools can use commercial AI services to reduce their teaching costs and improve retention – illustrates government’s belief in this theory.
However, public attitudes research reveals concerns about private sector use of public data, which can be broadly categorised as:
- Privacy: concerns about personal data falling into the wrong hands, including companies such as insurance providers, credit reference agencies and potential employers who then use it to set prices, curtail access to services, or make hiring and firing decisions without an individual’s knowledge or consent.
- Ethics: concerns about public data being used in ways that are not seen as delivering public good, or actively undermine societal progress, such as to support race science research.
- Exploitation: concerns that the private sector (and particularly companies based outside the UK) will make excessive or unfair profits from public data without returning some of that value to the public.
While concerns about privacy and ethics speak to the need for strong data governance frameworks, concerns about exploitation require a value-sharing framework that ensures society gets a fair return in exchange for providing access to public data.
Value-sharing approaches
The most obvious approach to get companies to share value back to the public sector in return for access to data is to charge them. However, there are a number of challenges with a “pay to access” approach: it’s hard to set the right price; it creates access barriers, particularly for cash-poor start-ups; and it creates a public perception that the government is willing to sell their data, and might be tempted to loosen privacy-protecting governance controls in exchange for cash.
Are there other options? The policy brief explores a range of other approaches and assesses these against five goals that a value-sharing framework should ideally meet, to:
- Encourage use of public data, including by being easy for organisations to understand and administer.
- Provide a return on investment for the public sector, offsetting at least some of the costs of supporting the NDL infrastructure and minimising administrative costs.
- Promote equitable innovation and economic growth in the UK, which might mean particularly encouraging smaller, home-grown businesses.
- Create social value, particularly towards this Government’s other missions, such as achieving Net Zero or unlocking opportunity for all.
- Build public trust by being easily explainable, avoiding misaligned incentives that encourage the breaking of governance guardrails, and feeling like a fair exchange.
In brief, alternatives to a pay-to-access model that still provide direct financial returns include:
- Discounts: the public sector could secure discounts on products and services created using public data. However, this could be difficult to administer and enforce.
- Royalties: taking a percentage of charges for products and services created using public data might be similarly hard to administer and enforce, but applies to more companies.
- Equity: taking equity in startups can provide long-term returns and align with public investment goals.
- Levies: targeted taxes on businesses that use public data can provide predictable revenue and encourage data use.
- General taxation: general taxation can fund data infrastructure, but it may lack the targeted approach and public visibility of other methods.
It’s also useful to consider non-financial conditions that could be put on organisations accessing public data. In her paper Rethinking the social contract between the state and business, Mariana Mazzucato recommends introducing conditionalities when governments invest in businesses, such as ensuring they provide equitable and affordable access to the services they create; contribute towards net zero goals; and provide good labour conditions for their workers. Providing access to public data can be seen as such an investment.
There are also some data-specific conditionalities that could be placed on companies accessing public data:
- Data quality improvements: companies could be required to share back the results of data cleansing, improving the quality of public data.
- Private sector data sharing: access to public data can be exchanged for access to privately held data, though this could present challenges around enforcement, monitoring, and potential misuse of personal data.
- Access to compute: tech companies could be required to provide public compute resources in return for public data access, benefiting public sector organizations, academics, civil society, and start-ups.
Conclusion
The sharing of public data with the private sector should benefit the public, and we should think expansively about what this might look like, as there are other possible mechanisms apart from charging for access. Finding the right balance in a value-exchange framework is crucial: it has to be transparent and easy to understand, but not so direct that it incentivises over-sharing and raises suspicions about the breaking of governance controls. Different approaches suit different types of data, and organisations of different capabilities and maturity. This all means that the NDL’s value-exchange framework will need to be flexible and tailored, but steer public sector data holders away from counterproductive approaches.
Ultimately, the success of the National Data Library – at least in terms of public acceptability – will hinge on early and effective communication, and on strong public accountability and oversight. Alongside good governance controls, demonstrating how access to public data by the private sector translates into public value is essential to avoid backlashes and build confidence in how the government shares data.
This blog is based on the policy brief, The National Data Library and public benefit, by Dr Jeni Tennison.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
