United Kingdom / 2013 94% open

Companies House, the public body responsible for maintaining company registers in the UK, has since June 2012 made available a subset of the fields of the register for all companies for bulk download as monthly 'snapshot', at no charge and on an open basis. The subset of the information is documented at http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/toolsToHelp/pdf/freeDataProductDataset.pdf and meets the minimum requirements of the definition of this element of the OKFN Census 2013. Full information from individual company registers remains subject to payment.

Central Government departments are required to regularly publish lists of all financial transactions spending over £25,000; some departments publish transactions down to £500 or lower. The business rules and the format is described at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130129110402/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/psr_transparency_index.htm The data is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. In addition summarised spending information by month x department x type of goods/services is available quarterly from the Treasury (Ministry of Finance) COINS/OSCAR database - see for instance https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-oscar-publishing-from-the-database This is also available under the Open Government Licence

The Ordnance Survey's OpenData suite of digital products includes 1:250,000 scale raster mapping for all of Great Britain, and additional national mapping at higher resolution (OS StreetView and OS VectorMap District). These products are actively maintained. As Ordnance Survey is the national mapping agency for Great Britain only, the coverage excludes Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Open data mapping for those parts of the UK is not currently available at resolutions of 1:250,000 or better. The Ordnance Survey's OpenData product suite includes mapping with better than 1:250,000 resolution (OS Street View) and is released under the OS OpenData Licence, which complies with the Open Definition. The mapping is updated regularly (most recently in May 2012).

The UK's Office for National Statistics has primary responsibility for maintaining and publishing national economic and demographic information (including the Census). ONS material is re-usable under the terms of the Open Government Licence and UK Government Licensing Framework. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/datasets-and-tables/index.html lists (as of 14 Oct 2013) 13059 datasets and reference tables available under the OGL. Each of the datasets is downloadable in full, in machine-readable formats (mainly Excel, but some also available in CSV and XML). There are a variety of Census 2011 datasets including population by local authority (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-and-quick-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-the-united-kingdom---part-1/rft-ks101uk.xls), GDP dataset (2Q2013 at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/naa2/quarterly-national-accounts/q2-2013/tsd-quarterly-national-accounts--q2-2013.html with links to XML and CSV formats), and unemployment by age and duration (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/september-2013/table-unem01.xls) Some, but not all, of these datasets are fed onto data.gov.uk Statistics are released according to a published schedule.

Open postcode data which meets the specification here (postcodes and corresponding geospatial locations - lat/long or equivalent) is available via the Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open dataset, which contains the 1.4m GB post codes each with a UK national grid reference of the postcode's location in eastings and northings (convertable to lat/long by published formulae) and with the administrative area (country/county/district/ward, plus National Health Service Region and Authority) in which it is located. This is updated quarterly. Similar Postcode data for the devolved province of Northern Ireland is not available as Open Data. The main UK address database (~24m individual addresses) is confusing called the Postcode Address File. This is a subscription-only database privately owned by the Royal Mail. The Open Data User Group have been pressing for its release too - see http://data.gov.uk/blog/dont-sell-our-postcodes-odug-on-why-we-should-have-open-addressing-in-the-uk

Generally public transport in the UK is run by private companies, with some government or municipality regulation. Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) national passenger rail timetable information is available on http://data.atoc.org/rail-industry-data and updated weekly; registration is required but free, and once registered the data can be downloaded in bulk under CC-BY UK ported (checked 20 Oct 2013). Fares data is available from the same source under the same licence. Daily schedules of all trains and real-time running information (down to individual signalling events) is available on https://datafeeds.networkrail.co.uk under a licence based on UK OGL v1. There is a community working on the open rail data and helping to make it easier to use with documentation: http://nrodwiki.rockshore.net/ List of Open Data Releases: http://nrodwiki.rockshore.net/index.php/OpenDataReleases Public transport timetables for bus, light rail, tram and ferry services in Great Britain (but not national rail or coach services) is at http://data.gov.uk/dataset/traveline-national-dataset; this dataset is updated weekly, can be downloaded in bulk and is licensed under the UK OGL v2. An open data source for (privately operated) national coach services or for rail and bus services in the devolved province of Northern Ireland is not known.

The position seems to be as follows. There is an annual "Budget speech" and documents are published online by HM Treasury and are re-useable under the terms of the UK's Open Government Licence. Main documents are in PDF but some raw data is also provided in Excel format. However this does not usually include detailed departmental budgets. Departmental level budgets are in a number of places, but the two collections available regularly free of charge under the UK Open Government Licence are: (1) the annual "Estimates" published each April for the financial year commencing that April. These are published in PDF format department by department and are at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-main-estimates for the last three years 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. This dataset is "up to date" (2) the same, and some more detailed, data is contained in the "Plans" part of the COINS/OSCAR dataset http://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins (this also contains matching expenditure information). Although the expenditure information is published quarterly, the "plans" are not currently published in COINS data until the end of the financial year to which they relate. Once Plans information is available on COINS it is available for bulk download in machine readable format (CSV). In assessing the ratings fairly it was necessary to choose between the "Estimates" and "COINS" versions - the COINS version seemed closer to the ideal, even though it was not as up to date, and that is assessed here.

A comprehensive database of UK legislation is maintained online by The National Archives, an agency of the Ministry of Justice. The information is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. -- update after asking National Archives and checking online --- A variety of machine readable formats are available through the API - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats (amended machine-readable to yes and updated formats). Currently the database is not downloadable in bulk. The target is to provide this by end-March 2014

Realtime and recent historical data about observed levels of air pollutants and particulates at 128 automatic observing stations across the UK are at http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk. Pollutants covered include Ozone, Nitric oxide, Nitrogen dioxide, Nitrogen oxides as nitrogen dioxide, Sulphur dioxide, Carbon monoxide, PM10 particulate matter, Non-volatile PM10, Volatile PM10, PM2.5 particulate matter, Non-volatile PM2.5, and Volatile PM2.5. All this data is under the Open Government Licence. An RSS feed of latest data is available at http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/rss/current_site_levels.xml , although this points to HTML pages such as http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/site-data?f_site_id=ACTH&view=last_hour . The Data Selector http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/data_selector allows a custom table to be constructed and either viewed or sent to the requestor as a CSV file. However there is a limit on the extent of the query (one test-drive for the Census gave "The selection you requested will return 1176 rows of data in 770 columns. This exceeds our limit of 256 columns."). This meets the Census requirement, apart from bulk download. In addition national estimates of annual emissions of 36 air pollutants from 1971-2011 are downloadable in CSV format under the Open Government Licence from http://naei.defra.gov.uk/data/data-selector, but again this is in the form of a table-builder and it does not seem possible to download all the data in bulk. Further public environmental data for the UK is maintained by several public bodies (mainly the Environment Agency for England and Wales, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, plus Defra and DECC). Broadly speaking, data on major sources of pollutants is readily available via Government websites and public mapping applications. Some complete datasets are available as open data, notably from Defra: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs/series/air-quality-and-emissions-statistics. Some environmental data is subject to additional licensing arrangements - see for instance http://www.geostore.com/environment-agency/WebStore?xml=environment-agency/xml/ogcDataDownload.xml

An authoritative collection of general election results is published by the UK's Electoral Commission. The results are collected from local returning officers by a third party on behalf of the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission makes the data available for download in spreadsheet format but without an explicit statement allowing open re-use. Although some of the reports on the link given are in PDF, the critical links for the definition of this dataset are results by constituency for national elections, and these for the last UK General Election in 2010 are in XLS at http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/excel_doc/0020/105725/GE2010-constituency-results-website.xls A dataset for the whole of a nation-wide General Election is available, meeting the bulk download criterion. However the website claims copyright for the Electoral Commission; there are no terms of use on the main site, and some pages point to a page http://ec-build02.squiz.co.uk/publications-and-research/?a=11995 (in Electoral Commission branding) which says: "The information here is protected by copyright. You must not copy or reproduce any graphics or substantial amounts of text without our written permission.". So this is a fail on Open Licence by the criteria given.