News

Developments on the AppGov website and in the general use of public sector open data:

28 April 2024 - In the news: Local elections May 2024

29 April 2020 - In the news: Coronavirus - COVID-19

4 September 2019 - In the news: HS2 review

5 June 2019 - In the news: Kier Group

24 January 2019 - In the news: Kingdom Services Group

16 November 2018 - In the news: Interserve

1 August 2018 - In the news: Northamptonshire County Council

23 April 2018 - In the news: Allied Healthcare and local government home care

15 January 2018 - In the news - Carillion

31 August 2017 - AppGov database now contains over 50 million spend records for local government and 5 million for central government.

25-26 February 2017 - Open Data Camp UK and on Twitter at @ODcamp.

30 January 2017 - Institute for Government Whitehall Monitor 2017 report criticises poor transparency (including spending) data.

8 November 2016 - Political control (courtesy of Wikipedia) added to LA pages and the LA specified criteria search.

30 October 2016 - Links to relevant Spend Network pages added to LA and CG Dept pages and the LA specified criteria search.

20 July 2016 - EU Referendum Leave/Remain results added to Local Authority records and the specified search criteria listing. Data is not reported by English counties or NI districts.

5 March 2016 - Today is International Open Data Day. OKFN event in London. Comments on opportunities for open data in the EU from Paul MacDonell.

14 February 2016 - AppGov data now up-to-date for all London Boroughs and a new Redactions summary page.

30 December 2015 - Central Gov data on the AppGov website has a new format page and is now up to date with all published central gov spend data - over 4m records.

6 September 2015 - Open Budget Data report about the current state of fiscal transparency by Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge.

27 August 2015 - Guardian article on why Mike Bracken and other senior staff have suddenly resigned from GDS and ComputerworldUK article about the state of open data in Whitehall.

28 May 2015 - 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada. #iodc15 on Twitter.

28 March 2015 - Open standards progress in UK government and the move towards ODF to replace proprietary formats. Photo caption recognises "Microsoft's work on open standards"!

24 March 2015 - 16 local & regional authorities recognised as Open Data Champions - see case studies pdf; and Mike Bracken appointed inaugural Government Chief Data Officer.

21 February 2015 - This was International Open Data Day. In the UK Open Data Camp 2015 took place - #odcamp on Twitter.

28 January 2015 - ODUG has released a paper on their review of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

15 January 2015 - Open Addresses launches their alpha website to start creating a real open UK address database.

12 December 2014 - Francis Maude's speech on open data & transparency. The UK is #1 again in the Global Open Data Index.

1 November 2014 - New overview of Central government spend reporting from data.gov.uk.

3 October 2014 - DCLG announcement that the publication of Spend and Contracts open data by Local Government is to become mandatory. Details at Transparency Code 2014 and Transparency Code 2015. Detailed guidance is available from the LGA.

1 January 2014 - Congratulations to Jeni Tennison receiving an OBE for services to Technology and Open Data and to Mike Bracken receiving a CBE for services to Digital Public Services in New Year Honours.

20 December 2013 - The government has published its response to the earlier consultation on the local government Transparency Code and is proposing to make most of it mandatory. Spend data should be published at least quarterly and be consistent with the LGA guidance. Discussion is on the LGA Knowledge Hub.

30 October 2013 - UK is top of the 2013 Open Data Census (in a very attractive presentation from OKFN).

4 September 2013 - Changes to the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act come into force which will improve the availability of reusable open data. There is now a right to request data from public authorities in a machine readable format and the right to reuse the data if the Open Government Licence is used. The ICO blog post by Steve Wood gives a good overview.

19 August 2013 - The Open Data Breakthrough programme provides funding for local government open data projects. The Open Rights Group has a useful summary of various consultations on UK open data which are currently in progress.

1 August 2013 - AppGov spending data now available for 20 London Boroughs.

1 July 2013 - AppGov spending data is now available for 4 central government departments and 15 local authorities.

18 June 2013 - G8 agrees Open Data Charter with actions plans to be published by October 2013.

14 June 2013 - Government publishes its response to the Shakespeare review of public sector information (PSI).

1 June 2013 - AppGov beta website opens with full sales data from G-Cloud and initial spending data for 2011-13 for selected UK central government departments and local authorities. The supplier database will gradually be extended to allow queries by supplier across central and local government.