In 2023, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, then the Mayor of Greater Manchester, told a Lords Select Committee that the purpose of integration in government “is to better serve the public.” “The silos created by Whitehall departments often get in the way of serving the public or create conflicting pressures or tensions that are unhelpful,” he explained.

I could not agree more.

For years, the modus operandi across public services has been separate teams with disparate objectives and siloed information, despite sharing the same goals. Fixing how data is shared across government can help all layers of government work together and deliver.

You would be forgiven for assuming that Burnham’s Digital ID reversal means he is a data-sceptic. He is not. He has appointed the Minister for AI into his cabinet. His approach to devolution — the “largest transfer for Whitehall capacity to local leaders yet” — includes a programme to unlock digital and data capability in mayoral authorities, as the Government Digital Service writes.

Data sharing might seem like a meta-tweak at most, but it has a real impact. When the US-Iran conflict kicked off, for example, local authorities were able to link datasets to identify low-income households reliant upon heating oil to better target the £56 million of funding made available to them from central government.

Policy in Practice has shown how data can be used to get support to people who need it even more widely. Over seven million low-income families are missing out on £24 billion of support each year. This includes pensioners missing out on Pension Credit or targeted support for NEETs. Or accurately identifying and enrolling eligible residents onto social tariffs using local authority data, so that they do not have to spend their own time filling in endless forms. Tens of thousands of customers struggling to pay their bills will receive a £400 discount with no forms, no photos of bank statements, just a discount on their next bill, thanks to a Policy in Practice & Thames Water programme.

Data also means you can track impact and evaluate which programmes are working and which are not. Earlier this year, Policy in Practice also used administrative data to robustly evaluate the impact of early legal assistance on outcomes. This administrative data approach delivered greater insight than the Ministry of Justice’s £5 million Early Legal Advice Pilot for less than 5% of the cost. Nor is this a one-off, with administrative data powering studies for the Nuffield Foundation, the Health Foundation and the National Institute for Health Research among others.

All in all, breaking down data silos and making it easier to access and use data delivers a Holy Trinity of public service delivery: better results, at a lower cost, with greater convenience.

The topic does not get much attention because data sharing involves technology, risk and legal and cultural barriers where it takes real leadership and commitment to drive a change. Andy Burnham explained it well to the Lords: “The barriers, as I have experienced them, tend to be in IT systems, but, more than that, data and data sharing. The control of data remains a really frustrating issue. There is often a cautiousness in people’s minds, which I understand, but there is always a much greater benefit to be had from the sharing of data.”

Building a full picture of a household’s real-world circumstances is technically possible, and has been for some time — platforms like LIFT do just that. The real barriers are legal and governance blockers, driven by an unnecessarily complicated and inherently risk-averse approach to using data. To name just two, officials see data as a risk to be managed, not a valuable resource to be tapped; and, at the same time, the legal framework is excessively restrictive, fragmented and complex for data access to seem worth it.

The reason for some of this is that many are worried about new data on us being collected, but government organisations, from HMRC to the NHS, already hold excellent data on all of us. The government has already paid to collect this data and trusts it to deliver public services every day. Yet, outside of very specific uses, it keeps this data locked away. This means that, when policy teams think about the impact of their policies, instead of seeing the combined impact of all policies plus theirs, they only think about the impact of their one policy as though in a vacuum.

As one of the architects of Universal Credit (UC), I have seen first-hand what happens when a narrow policy objective collides with wider policy shifts. When Council Tax was localised during the rollout of the UC and the benefit cap, one local leader put it to me: “I can’t see if the people I’m clobbering with cuts to Council Tax support are the same people being clobbered by cuts in national support.”

Just a few changes to how we can share and use data would mean policy teams did not just see a benefit recipient, a part-time worker, a homelessness risk or a patient. They would see a person, trying to get through the day, and could design a faster, fairer support system for everyone.

A simple but fundamental shift would turn today’s situation on its head. The missing ingredient is trust that other public sector organisations will use shared data legally and responsibly. In my experience, public sector organisations take their data responsibilities under GDPR seriously: data protection impact assessments and related processes offer sufficient protection for data sharing to be the default, rather than the exception.

Government data should be shared once and used often. To facilitate this, the Digital Devolution programme ought to embed three principles.

First, data parity. All government departments and local and combined authorities should be able to access the same data about their service users and residents.

Second, reuse. Teams of officials at all levels should be trusted to reuse data for all their public tasks, provided they follow existing governance approaches.

And third, infrastructure. Local and combined authorities should be backed to build modern, secure and robust shared data infrastructure, not a mess of one-off tech shares.

This practical approach would dramatically accelerate and improve public services, and I am optimistic that this time we will see meaningful change. Andy Burnham has already said that “we believed very strongly, and still do, that all professionals have to have visibility of important data.”

Devolution cannot happen without this. It will lead to far more direct, tangible benefit than the lightning rod of the Digital ID programme or shiny AI overhauls. As simple as it sounds, we just need to make better, smarter use of the data we already have.

Original photo by Annie Spratt.