Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:11 pm on 26 September 2017.
I’m grateful to the Member for taking this intervention. The fundamental point, of course, is that the purpose of having an open data policy is that the data should be useful, particularly to citizens. One of the examples that is quoted by the Government on its website in terms of the open data plan is those tables that summarise grants over £25,000 per annum. The problem is that they are only available month by month. They are available for years, but you do have to search on a month-by-month basis. You can’t do something as simple as inputting the name of one company to find out how much that company has received. You have to go through every single Excel file on a monthly basis. So, could I appeal to Government that something as simple as a summary of data in one file would assist people in making use of the information that is published?