Government to government data sharing at scale

Our team bring experience from:

Data sharing is so broken that...

230,000 children go to school hungry because we don’t use data to auto-enrol them

Councils, police & the NHS share less data for child protection in 2025 than in 2010

“Tell Us Once” is a service only available to the dead, not the living

UK police lose 770,000 hours annually to redacting data from prosecutors

How is this acceptable?

And we're not the only ones saying it...

The Review concludes that the UKSA’s efficacy is hampered by the systemic and cultural barriers to responsible data sharing between government departments.

Independent Review of the UK Statistics Authority by Professor Denise Lievesley CBE, 2024

“The Cabinet Office’s existing initiatives for improving data sharing are self-evidently insufficient”

Transforming the UK’s Evidence Base, House of Commons Committee report, 2023

Today, a siloed approach to data is slowing the state down. Patients are put through the same tests again and again, and prescription errors mean that they get the wrong medication. This is simply unacceptable.

The Rt Hon Peter Kyle, House of Commons, 2025

Siloed data continues to hinder collaboration. Data sharing between and within organisations, even after recent legislative changes and sustained effort, is high friction, with agreements taking months or even years to negotiate.

A blueprint for modern digital government, 2025

Our diagnosis: Data sharing is legally, culturally, and procedurally hard in the UK.

Poor data sharing jeopardises the £45bn p.a. digital & data opportunity and worsens our public services including the police, NHS, and children’s safeguarding.

This is not a new phenomenon, as the National review into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson found:

Problems with information sharing have been raised by every national child protection review and inquiry going back to 1973. Time and again different agencies hold pieces of the puzzle but no one holds all of the pieces or is seeking to put them together.

National review into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson

Most efforts to improve data sharing fail because they start from a faulty assumption that data sharing is illegal and so the solution is a new legal gateway. This is wrong.

Data sharing is not impossible. What it is is extremely slow, expensive & hard.

This is because our laws have created a system where:

  • Each new data share is a unique snowflake
  • It’s conservative
  • It’s especially hard for proactive, preventative, and prototype use cases

How many more scandals like the “Afghan kill list” will it take before things change?

Our solution: Unpick the multiple barriers to data sharing.

Solving data sharing is easy, if we solve the right problem. Data sharing is not illegal, so a new legal gateway won’t help. It is just procedurally difficult and slow, so we must remove the impediments to speed it up.

Building on the lessons from other countries efforts to tackle inter-departmental data sharing, we call for:

  1. Shared data infrastructures
  2. Departments to balance the cost of withholding with risk of sharing
  3. Lowered compliance costs, without reducing protection

We’ve set out the 10 practical steps the government could take to deliver these 3 principles and fix data sharing in short order – all without leaving GDPR.

Read our manifesto
I would urge policy makers to read this 10 point plan from Data Alliance to address issues in government data sharing. Without a stronger, well-implemented data strategy, including a move away from data protectionism by creating a "duty to share", it will be impossible to unlock the value in government data to improve public services for the taxpayer.
Dr Laura Gilbert CBE
Senior Director of AI, Tony Blair Instiute for Global Change

Tell us your stories

If you have experience with broken data sharing, or you’re interested in trying to solve it, please reach out to us.

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