In the light of this it’s fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service’s archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?)
Tory plans seem to require that eventually, with full implementation of free schools and any-qualified-provider, the entire health and education sectors be excluded from either the Freedom of Information Act or any requirement to gather standard statistics. At the same time, presumably, we are all expected to exercise “choice” among ’em.
It ought to be obvious that the purpose of this is that your local community school, or “school school” as I think of them, will still have to be listed in league tables and whatnot while your local twat-madrassa will be able to bullshit without limit about its results. It is worth remembering that, years later, Kenneth Baker admitted to the Grauniad‘s Nick Davies that he deliberately tried to make the state schools awful so people would go private.
Another thought: what happens to that funny “Dr Foster” thing that sort-of privately mined NHS data to provide doctors with best-practice recommendations if they’re not going to bother with boring data an stuff and just hack away?