A comprehensive national map of the pipes, cables and ducts under Britain’s streets – long wished-for but thwarted for decades by utilities’ unwillingness to share data – could finally become reality under proposed legislation unveiled by the government today. The Data Use and Access Bill aims to unlock the value of data held by different parts of the public sector – including, most controversially, by the National Health Service. The measure would also simplify the sharing of information by police forces – and enable births and deaths to be registered online.
The National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) has been long in the making. The 1991 New Roads and Street Works Act requires owners of assets such as water pipes to make location data available free of charge to ‘statutory undertakers’. However a consultation document published in 2022 under the Conservative government found that, of the 4 million holes dug annually in Britain’s streets, some 60,000 cause an accidental asset strike. A programme to create a central register has been under way since 2019; from next year it will be run by Ordnance Survey. The new bill will put the register on a statutory footing, requiring owners of underground infrastructure to register their assets on the NUAR.
Other measures in the bill will make patients’ data more easily transferable across the NHS and create trusted ways to verify identity online, the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology said. Identity services will be accredited by a new Office for Digital Identities and Attributes within the department.
The bill will also pave the way towards modernising the registration of deaths in England and Wales from a paper-based system to an electronic birth and death register. The new law will enable registrations, which are required by local authorities, to be carried out over the phone, removing the need for face-to-face registration.
