Publicly Available UK Datasets

Question

With no disrespect to our fellow data scientists over "the pond", one major problem from the rest of the world's point of view with questions like Publicly Available Datasets is the American focus of the answers. They are great answers, and great sources of data, but lack a lot relevance to others not in the US due to geographic, demographic, social or other factors.

This question I have is particularly focused on public data sites for the UK.

Are there sites that have a large variety of data collected? I suspect at the moment the UK isn't as progressive as the USA in terms of meta-data repositories, so I would be happy for sites that are quite rich in content and interesting in terms of their data science or analytical possibilities!

Answer 1

Try https://geovation.uk/data-sources/ for a pretty comprehensive list of links to sources with crime data, retail data, consumer data, transport data and government data.

You can also refer to this list to fill in the gaps on English Heritage data, environment data and Ordnance Survey data.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

In Scotland specifically, I would suggest that you have a look at:

• Statistics.gov.scot - a very decent repository of publicly available data in Scotland, a lot of spatially aggregated.

UK

• NOMIS - spatially aggregated labour market data
• UK Data Service - vast catalogue of research / survey data
• Neigbhourhood Statistics - ONS product with neighbourhood statistics.

Answer 3

Just to add, Northern Ireland now has its own Open Data Portal: https://www.opendatani.gov.uk/

Answer 4

The UK has an open data portal: https://data.gov.uk/

London has one of the most comprehensive open data portals: http://data.london.gov.uk/

Additionally, you'll find regions and cities have their own open data portals: for example: http://open.manchester.gov.uk/

There is the uk tag on this site which brings up 25 questions. In particular, the Q&A about London Tube locations has a nice resource.

For an overview of open data in the UK - check out the Wikipedia page.

Answer 5

Some interesting UK sites with data not yet mentioned are:

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (soon to be renamed NHS Digital) which make a wide range of health-related data available on various terms. data can sometimes be hard to find but there is a lot there including vast quantities of data about England's NHS (e.g. everything prescribed by each GP practice every month, vast quantities of different indicators about health outcomes and population health).

The Land Registry. They have a dataset of all property transactions since about 1995 (i.e. the record of prices paid for domestic housing) which is fascinating.

The Office for National Statistics has a lot of data but has a reputation for being fabulously difficult to navigate (but is getting better).

Answer 6

The Royal Economic Society has a list of data links: http://www.res.org.uk/view/dataResources.html

The American Economic Association lists the Bank of England, HM Treasury, and National Statistics

In the ReplicationWiki (that I work on) you can see data sources used for publications in economic journals here