Andrew Trigg
Chief Geographic Information Officer
HM Land Registry of England and Wales
UK

Biography
Dr. Andrew Trigg is the Head of Land Registry’s Data Programme and their Chief Geographic Information Officer. He is a past Chairman of the Association for Geographic Information and member of the UK Location Council. He is a member of the steering group for the Public Sector Mapping Agreement. His career has been spent entirely within the fields of surveying, GIS and data, including time as Head of Product Management and Consultancy at Ordnance Survey GB and similar roles within the public, private and academic sector.

Abstract


Land Registry has considerable data assets which derive from our function as registrars and providers of state guarantee of title. Providing access to this data has not traditionally been seen as an important part of our role. However, as part of the UK’s firm commitment under the Open Government Partnership to the transparent provision of government data to drive economic growth, we have a clear strategic intent to release as many of our data assets as feasible, within certain constraints. We were the first government department to publish a Data Inventory identifying all of our data, whether published or not. We have a key performance target to publish all releasable data on the inventory, by March 2018. We have already published several key data sets, including property extents, price information and transaction volumes. This paper describes our strategy for the public release of land information and the challenges that we have encountered. We discuss the challenges of releasing large volumes of data whilst ensuring the privacy of personal information is maintained and that the likelihood of fraud is not increased. We provide examples of our data being used, whilst highlighting the difficulties in measuring the overall benefit to the economy.