Ofwat to develop an open data licence condition after industry progress found to be slow

Ofwat is developing a new licence condition that will endow it with powers to take action against water companies that don’t make sufficient progress on open data.

In a new report, following up from its 2021 H2Open case for change document, Ofwat said water companies had made little progress in opening their datasets, despite public appetite for the data.

The regulator set out “urgent actions” it expects of companies, including:

• Identifying priority data sets for release;

• reviewing datasets that have so far only been shared with limited groups and take steps to make them openly available;

• proactive leadership to develop and publish a clear roadmap by October this year for open data delivery for the industry; and

• releasing data sets with an open licence to encourage information to be freely used.

Ofwat said: “These steps will enable data to be publicly shared with innovators, citizen scientists and the public, allowing the benefits of open data to be fully explored and for the water sector to keep pace with the wider digital economy. To ensure that customers and the environment benefit from the potential of open data, Ofwat is also developing a new licence condition that will provide new powers to ensure companies deliver on the challenge.”

• Ofwat, the Environment Agency and Drinking Water Inspectorate have secured funding from the Regulators Pioneer Fund for a project commencing in September 2023 to collaboratively explore whether and how the data they each collect and hold can be proactively shared and potentially made publicly available.

--