Communities could be ‘ghettoised’ by official data website

A new website - data.gov.uk - allows people to access 2,500 sets of official data, some of it never released before, from across Government departments. They include everything from crime rates, house prices and tidal predictions, to the numbers of people issued with antisocial behaviour orders living in people’s areas. Its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with founding the internet 20 years ago, admitted the scale of the information available, which will eventually be searchable by postcode, will mean that social inequalities between different areas will quickly become apparent. There was a risk that some areas would seem like ‘ghettoes’ compared to others, he said, although this was not necessarily a bad thing as it would create pressure on politicians to spend money on improving the worse-off areas.