The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published our evaluation of the impact of the market study into the commercial use of public information undertaken by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in 2006. This is one of the two evaluations of past work by UK competition authorities that the CMA has committed to undertake each year.
The OFT study had identified shortcomings in how public sector information (PSI) was made available for re-use and the extent to which this allowed businesses to compete with public service information holders (PSIHs) in the supply of value-added products and services. Our evaluation found that there has been substantial growth in the re-use of PSI, driven by a number of factor including technological change and the government’s Open Data agenda. Whilst the OFT’s work can be seen as a catalyst, implementation of the OFT’s recommendations had been mixed for a number of reasons.
For more details and the report see the CMA’s website. The report is also available here.