The collection and retention of data has been a core function of the modern state since its inception. From the aggregation of mortality records kept by the church in the seventeenth century, to the patchy registers of slaveowners held in its colonial offices – which most often did not also include the names of the enslaved – the nature of information gathered by the British government has always been historically contingent. That is to say, decisions about what is worth collecting, how it is analysed, who gets access to it and for what purpose have emerged in particular political economic contexts.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the UK government embarked on a process of neoliberal reform, ushering in the increased involvement of commercial interests in the public sector and policies to deregulate finance. The sale of various publicly-owned companies under Margaret Thatcher, such as the railways and the steel industry, are perhaps the best-known examples of radical neoliberal economic policy change from this earlier period, though measures to outsource public services and commercialise public assets were also introduced under the 1997-2010 Labour government, and have continued under the various Conservative coalitions since then.

The expansive data produced by the public sector, which includes health, meteorological and fiscal information, has not been immune to the transformation of the state over the past few decades. But the opening up of government datasets to commercial actors and the implications of this for the public sector and society more widely have been largely overlooked. Government, industry and civil society bodies, often under the banner of “open government data” (OGD) campaigns, have long advocated unrestricted and free access to public sector information, hailing it as indispensable for government accountability and digital innovation, among other causes. And while the democratic claims of certain groups advocating OGD are unquestionably important, the political economies of the public sector and of digital infrastructure over recent decades require us to consider whether the existing structures for accessing publicly-held data are the most appropriate for harnessing common wealth, collective ownership and public good.

This paper introduces “digital public assets” as a concept for rethinking how we value the data created in society that is held by the public sector. In today’s economy, characterised concomitantly by growth crises and the ascendancy of big data in global markets, questions of who decides how publicly-held data is used and for what ends have perhaps never been more important.