Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps she is taking to help ensure that local government bodies adopt (a) common data standards and (b) open Application Programming Interfaces.

MHCLG are supporting data standards initiatives to ensure that local government bodies can effectively adopt common data standards and open APIs, to enhance service delivery and interoperability. This includes the Open Referral UK and SAVVI data standards for community services and vulnerable people.

MHCLG’s Digital Planning Programme is working with local planning authorities to adopt common data standards; to provide better access to planning data, improve data quality and to make more data open, to achieve our digital ambitions and make the planning system more efficient. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 includes planning data powers, and MHCLG will be introducing data standards for planning data via secondary legislation.

MHCLG are supported by the Government Digital Service on the API programme, which publishes API technical and data standards for all public sector organisations to follow, including local authorities.