Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to Government grants statistics 2020 to 2021, published on 31 March 2022, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the Valuing Ocean Observations (NOC) Grant.

The Valuing Ocean Observations Grant was awarded to the National Oceanography Centre with a value of £14,600 in December 2020. The grant funded the contributions of the Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Global Ocean Observing Systems project to develop an improved understanding of the socio-economic benefits of publicly available marine data.

Marine data underpin key activities in the public, private, and third sectors. Prior to this project there was limited knowledge of the socio-economic benefits for publicly available marine data. Developing this knowledge is important to inform the prioritisation of future investment in national marine data infrastructure. The project investigated the use of publicly available marine data stored in the UK’s MEDIN Data Archive Centres. It identified a wide range of users including academia and research centres, consultancies, industry, non-governmental organisations, and government. The project found different groups utilise publicly available marine data for different purposes, including professional marine science services, informing operations in the marine environment, and marine planning decisions. Socio-economic benefits of publicly available marine data included contributing of efficient operations, avoiding duplication of data collection effort, and providing essential information to support decision making and planning. The project led to the OECD publication ‘Value chains in public marine data: A UK case study’ (Jolly et al. 2021)[1]. No dedicated evaluation was conducted for this grant.

[1] Jolly, C., et al. (2021), "Value chains in public marine data: A UK case study", OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 2021/11, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/d8bbdcfa-en.