Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government written question – answered at on 21 July 2025.
Sarah Hall
Labour/Co-operative, Warrington South
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.
Matthew Pennycook
Minister of State (Housing, Communities and Local Government)
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.
Yes1 person thinks so
No1 person thinks not
Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.
Secretary of State was originally the title given to the two officials who conducted the Royal Correspondence under Elizabeth I. Now it is the title held by some of the more important Government Ministers, for example the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
