Policy 18: Revolutionise the way government collects, stores and shares data

In collaboration with The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), we have produced a manifesto to make Britain the best place in the world to start and grow a business. It features 21 policies across three key policy areas: access to talent, access to investment, and regulation. We’re sharing the policies on our blog. To read the full manifesto, click here.

At the extreme, governments’ failure to properly collect, store and share data can destroy individuals’ lives – just ask British citizens caught up in the Windrush scandal. But on a sustained basis, business owners are stymied in their interactions with government, monopolising time that could otherwise be spent focused on running their business.

At present, there is a lack of standards across government leading to inconsistent ways of recording the same data. The National Audit Office has found that more than 20 ways of identifying individuals and businesses across 10 departments and agencies, with no standard format for recording data such as name, address and date of birth.

Tinkering may help, but the next government could and should be more ambitious. Estonia’s X-Road is the model we should shamelessly imitate. The keystone of Estonian digital society since 2001, is “allows the nation’s various public and private sector e-service information systems to link up and function in harmony.” It is estimated that the general savings is around 12 million hours every year.

Since 2016, X-Road has been available as open source under an MIT License. In fact, the UK was considering using it back in 2013. Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands have already adopted the platform. With it’s e-residency card, Estonia even allows entrepreneurs outside the country to start and run a company – which embarrassingly the Mayor of London’s entrepreneurs of the year 2017, Ellenor McIntosh and Alborz Bozorgi, founders of eco-friendly wet wipe brand Twipes, did to avoid Brexit complications.

Estonia’s experiment was a gamble. It could have failed – but it didn’t. We aren’t asking for the next government to take a leap in the dark; they just need to copy what already works elsewhere so Britain’s businesses – and perhaps even those located overseas – can flourish.