Open data sets

Open data can be the missing piece of the puzzle for organisations looking for additional information to inform their own.

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Aggregated UK data

• Data.gov.uk

  All data published by central government, local authorities, and public bodies, and can be explored by APIs.

  Useful data sets - more included under the categories below.

  • Companies House

  • Contracts Finder

  • Ethnicity facts and figures

  • Indices of Deprivation (IMD) - The English Indices of Deprivation covers seven domains:

  1. Income Deprivation;

  2. Employment Deprivation;

  3. Education, Skills and Training Deprivation;

  4. Health Deprivation and Disability;

  5. Crime;

  6. Barriers to Housing and Services; and 

  7. Living Environment Deprivation.

  Visit Data.gov.uk

• House of Commons Library

  Interactive data dashboards and datasets on a range of topics such as economic growth, housing supply, and benefit claimants.

  Useful data sets

  • Constituency data: health conditions

  • Constituency data: School funding in England

  Visit the House of Commons Library

• London Datastore

  A free and open data-sharing portal where anyone can access data relating to the capital.

  Visit the London Datastore

• Office for National Statistics (ONS)

  A treasure trove of UK stats with built-in tools that allow you to Explore Local Statistics.

  Useful data sets

  • Health Index: England

  • Census 2021

  • Estimates of the population for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland National and subnational mid-year population estimates for the UK and its constituent countries by administrative area, age and sex.

  • Living Costs and Food Survey

  • Labour market in the regions of the UK

  • Lower and upper Local Authority Boundaries.

  Visit the ONS website

• Open Data Communities

  200+ datasets published under open licences covering the Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Government’s priorities.

  Useful data sets

  • Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) - measures the proportion of all children aged 0 to 15 living in income-deprived families.

  Visit Open Data Communities

• UK Data Service

  The UK's largest collection of economic, population and social research data for teaching, learning, and public benefit.

  Visit UK Data Service

Other data sets

• Crime

  data.police.uk - Open data about crime and policing in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. CSV files provide street-level crime, outcome, and stop and search information, broken down by police force and lower layer super output area (LSOA).

• Education

  • Constituency data: School funding in England 

  • Explore education statistics - Homepage for exploring the English Department for Education statistics and data, such as Schools, Pupils and their Characteristics.

  • HESA - data about higher education (HE) in the UK.

  • Pupils Eligible for Free School Meals - London pupils eligible for free school meals.

• Employment

  • Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - Stat-Xplore provides a guided way to explore DWP benefit statistics. Haringey council used it to develop their own Welfare benefits dashboard.

  • NOMIS - Official census and labour market statistics.

• Environment

  • Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES)

  • MET Office

  • DEFRA UK Air

• Health

  • Active Places Power - England's National sport facility database and tools.

  • Constituency data: health conditions 

  • Fingertips - A large public health data collection, including mental health. Includes api access.

  • Food and You - data about the prevalence of different attitudes, reported behaviour and knowledge about ways in which food is purchased, stored, prepared and eaten.

  • NHS Digital Data

  • OpenActive

  • What Works Wellbeing - An independent UK body for wellbeing evidence, policy and practice, that operated from 2014-2024 to accelerate research and democratise access to wellbeing evidence.

• Housing

  • English Housing Survey

  • Fuel poverty statistics

  • Shelter housing databank - brings together government data on housing need, supply, affordability and other issues at a local, regional and national level. 

• Geographic data

  • Land registration

  • Population estimates by output areas - National population estimates for Super Output Areas and experimental statistics for health geographies, electoral wards, Parliamentary constituencies, and National Parks in England and Wales.

  For more on localised data use, see our resource on mapping and geospatial data.

• International data

  • Eurostat - statistics and data on Europe.

  • OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) - a worldwide forum and knowledge hub for data, analysis, and best practices in public policy.

  • The Humanitarian Data Exchange - Find, share and use international humanitarian data.

• Third sector

  • 360Giving - Open grants data that can be downloaded or explored with their embedded search engine, GrantNav.

  • The Charity Commission

  • Data about the Voluntary, Community & Social Enterprise sector (VCSE Dashboard) - A dashboard by Datawise London, with some ideas about use cases.

  • CharityBase - Charity Commission alternative.

  • Local Needs Databank - Developed by New Philanthropy Capital and Data for Action. Dashboards on health and social care, advice and support services, contextualised by poverty and deprivation, as well as grant availability.

  • National Centre for Social Research

Data standards and guidance

• Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) is a partnership from the UKRI focused on linking administrative datasets for academic research.

• Open Data Maturity Model, maintained by the Open Data Institute.

• openvcs - A data standard for the VCS sector.

With huge thanks to Open Data Manchester for their Wall of Data work.

If you have suggestions for other data sets, please share them using the form below!