Diolch, Llywydd. I’m very pleased to be opening this debate today to focus on how and why we should be increasing the openness and availability of data. I just wanted to start off by clarifying that by that I mean data that relates to non-personal and non-sensitive issues.

Our involvement in the Open Government Partnership initiative demonstrates that we are committed to being a more open, accountable and responsible-to-citizens Government. As with other areas of the UK, open data plays a key role in our Government’s ability to be a more open and responsive Government.

We all know that data is an extremely valuable resource in today’s world that, if made accessible, can provide numerous benefits and opportunities to both Governments and to our citizens. It’s becoming a critical part of the national infrastructure, and the benefits of a robust, open data ecosystem include improved openness, transparency and accountability, in that it provides a much better understanding of how Welsh Government and public services are performing, and how their budgets are being utilised. It can enable better planning and targeting of services, which in turn leads to increased efficiency, efficacy and savings. It can drive innovation and economic growth with the development of applications and enhance people’s daily lives, and consequently their economic ability to join in our society. It improves public empowerment and participation. It helps people make informed decisions and empowers them to participate much more actively in our society. It can also reduce the burden on Government of freedom of information requests, and help reduce the amount of data and reporting requirements that we’ve imposed on public authorities by making the information publicly and accessibly available to all of our citizens.

We’ve made good progress to date. We published our first ever open data plan in March 2016, and we’re improving our statistical and spatial open data platforms, StatsWales and Lle. Indeed, our well-being of Wales report, which was published yesterday, made direct use of the StatsWales open data, leading to a significant efficiency in development and future maintenance of that site. And more recently, we’ve been focusing on openly publishing management information.

However, whilst we’ve made good progress, there is still more that can be done, not only in opening up Welsh Government’s data but encouraging others to open up their data as well. For example, there is more for us to do on opening up access to management information. One area we are currently exploring is openly publishing public sector workforce data in terms of how many people are employed, at what level and so on. We’re also going to continue our implementation of the open data plan commitments.

A key factor in realising the associated benefits of all of this data is to ensure that our data is actually actively being used and reused, and that’s why it’s important that we identify ways in which we can encourage innovation in use. We are starting to some reuse of our data. More recently, the Wales Audit Office used our open data in a project to provide insight for their auditors, for example. We’d very much like to see more of this and would like to encourage those with the capability and skills to fully utilise our open data sets.

I want to give Members an example of what I mean by this. We, for example, publish food hygiene ratings for all of the restaurants in a particular area. At the moment, you might wander around and you might see those food hygiene ratings usefully placed on the doorways or prominently placed in the restaurants. But if you were a stranger to the area, you might not want to wander around all of the streets looking for different hygiene ratings. Because we publish the information in an open and accessible format, if you look up on an app store ‘food hygiene rating apps’, you can now get many apps—there is quite a long list of them—that will tell you where the highest and lowest food rating restaurants in the area you’re standing in are. And that’s a use—a commercial, innovative use—useful to the citizen, of open data published by the Government. It’s just a very good use of our data that’s useful to citizens. It’s not of any particular benefit to us, but it shows how you can drive improvement in citizen services by something as simple as somebody reordering it. Now, that data would have been available before, but it would have been a hugely difficult exercise for a person to actually align all of that, but you can see that a number of people have already picked up on that. So, that’s the sort of thing were trying to encourage. We’re very keen to see more of this, and we want to encourage those with the capability and skills to fully utilise our open datasets to make full use of them.

We are really keen that we work with others to arrange open data challenge events, bringing together people from various backgrounds, to highlight to them the real success that they can make in their venture of using our datasets to develop this sort of citizen service.

We are also developing other examples of how Welsh open data can have a positive impact and will help persuade others of the benefits of increasing the openness and availability of data. So, in conjunction with introducing guidance and adapting our processes for acquiring goods and services, we should have a real impact on the open data agenda in Wales by publishing all of that information.

So, I will be supporting the first amendment. We’re committed to reducing the burden associated with collecting data and, where possible, will support this through encouraging greater publication of open data. We’re very keen to improve data sharing in Wales, and we’re looking at how we can best make use of the data sharing provisions in the new Digital Economy Act 2017. We’ll also be supporting the second amendment. The Welsh Government recognises the importance of ensuring that the data we collect meets our users’ needs. We already regularly review our statistical data collections, consulting with a full range of stakeholders. We should also ensure information we capture from public authorities for other purposes is proportionate and minimised.

Unfortunately, we will not be supporting the third amendment. Whilst we aim to encourage local authorities to increase the amount of data they publish openly, we need to be mindful of the resource implications this would place on them. We are, however, working very hard with local authorities to identify what data should be published openly, including determining, for example, the feasibility of publishing expenditure over a minimum threshold.

We’ll also be supporting the fourth amendment. We agree in principle that we should seek to be able to compare our performance with the rest of the UK and, indeed, with other countries as well. However, this is not always currently possible due to policy divergence. And, first and foremost, our priority must be to monitor data relevant to the Welsh policy context.

So Llywydd, I'm very much looking forward to welcoming Members’ support of the principles of open data during this debate and embracing it across Welsh public life, and I also look forward to listening to your views on how we can encourage and drive forward the open data agenda to improve both the delivery of our public services and, of course, ultimately, the lives of our citizens. Diolch.