My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his reply on Amendment 371, but I think he rather missed the point. In respect of school data, the Department for Education already publishes extensive information, under the heading of performance tables,
as open data. The level of information has grown substantially over the years and is free for anyone to reuse, as is the database on schools, EduBase. I am very sorry to say, as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide, that this has resulted in the emergence of a lot of competitors, which is thoroughly tiresome. While it would be convenient for me if the Government did not do it, it is very good for the economy and for students and pupils that they have, and it is the pattern I would like them to pursue with regard to university data.
The Department for Education also makes available the National Pupil Database, which is confidential, at various levels. The whole database is available to the “very serious” level of researchers, but anonymised information is also available at pupil level, which is immensely useful for understanding how schools are operating and how various examinations and other aspects of the school system are working. That is a precedent for really good practice that is, now, contained within the same department that will look after university data.
The practice for university data is different. It is either held by UCAS, in which case it is effectively not available to anybody, or by HESA. In the latter case, there is a long application process to determine whether it will let the data out because nothing is standardised and you have to ask permission from individual institutions. It then charges a hefty fee. This is a comfortable situation for me, as a user of HESA data, because it means I do not get a lot of competition, but it is not the way the market should be. The market should be open. The only reason that the use of the data is charged for is that HESA wants to make money out of it. If it is given the power to charge institutions then it is in the interests of the economy and the country that it makes it freely available whenever it can. It is much better for the country that HESA should make a little bit of money by making it available in a more restricted way and for a large fee, or a substantial fee—not an unreasonable fee; HESA is a good organisation. We should go open. The Government, as a whole, have made a lot of progress in making much bigger collections of data open, when they were formally charged for. There has been a lot of benefit from that. That is the practice we should follow with the university data.