The Public Charge Point regulations and other examples of open data and standards in UK legislation

This week the UK published some new draft legislation: The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023.

You can read a summary of what the legislation covers elsewhere, but what caught my attention was that it purports to require that operators of electric vehicle charging points must publish open data about their charging points.

But I was disappointed to discover that it doesn’t mandate open data at all.

The data reporting requirements

Summarising the draft legislation we can see that operators must:

Section 8.1 – annually report to government about the number of charge points operated each year, information about their reliability
Section 10.1, 10.2 – provide the data described in Sections 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 of version 2.2.1 of the Open Charge Point Interface specification on request to government and some key organisations in the UK energy system. That data covers the location, power and connectivity of the charge points and must be available electronically. It’s not 100% clear whether the intention is that the data is provided in JSON specifically as outlined in OCPI or whether the reference is to be read as an indication as an indication of the fields/data of interest
Section 10.5 – provide “reference data” and “availability data” to the public “free of charge and in a machine readable format without any requirement to agree to terms and conditions regarding the use of that data“. Availability data means whether the charge point is working, and reference data means its location, connectivity, payment options, etc.

I think that covers all of it.

The issues with the draft legislation

There’s a couple of things to note there:

the information about performance is not public or open. There’s no requirement for transparency on how well the operators are running their network.
the requirement to make data available to the public falls far short of any definition of open data. The requirement to make the data available “without any requirement to agree to terms and conditions regarding the use of that data” could be met with a notice on a website that says “this information is for personal use only, all rights reserved”. Or by choosing to use a Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives licence
while the regulations reference a specific version of the standard for reporting data to government, it doesn’t clearly state how or whether that standard must be used
there is no requirement to publish data for the public in a consistent or standardised form, it just has to be machine-readable. That is good, but still leaves rooms for lots of different formats

Without clear licensing requirements it means that the data cannot be aggregated to create useful maps or other services for car users.

Without transparency of performance we can’t tell whether we’re getting good value from that infrastructure.

I also wonder about the merits of linking the legislation to a very specific version (2.2.1) of the OCPI standard. What happens if the standard evolves based on industry feedback and adoption?

The reporting requirements will remain stuck with an historical definition of what constitutes the most useful data to be shared.

This legislation is still in draft. I don’t know whether there’s still scope to change it, but it would be nice to see the “open data” parts clarified.

What does other legislation do?

Is the wording a symptom of a distinctly “British Way” of drafting legislation, as Terence suggested?

Is the lack of clarity due to a misunderstanding about what open data means?

Or perhaps the wording is a result of lobbying to water down transparency and open data requirements?

This made me wonder about what other legislation or regulations does with respect to specifying open data and standards. I’ve not made an exhaustive review, but here’s a couple of data points that sprung to mind.

Open Banking

When the CMA completed its investigation and published its reforms to UK retail banking that lead to “Open Banking” it laid out a requirement for banks to:

work together to define and then adopt a shared set of data standards which could cover publishing and access of “product and reference information”, “service quality indicators”, and “transaction data sets”
the product and reference data would include brand locations as well as information on banking products and came with a requirement that providers would “make continuously available without charge and without any restriction as to its use, in accordance with the Read-only Data Standard“
The service quality indicators came with a requirement that they would be made “continuously available without charge, in accordance with the Read-only Data Standard“
The transaction data sets had essentially the same provisions

In effect, the CMA required publishing of standardised machine-readable data, with the (non-personal) product and reference data being available openly.

The banks created a data standard, but decided to adopt a non-open data licence.

Despite pressure that has never been addressed.

Ofgem Data Best Practices

While not law, the Ofgem Data Best Practices are actually binding for some organisations in the UK energy sector. They need to apply the principles within their role as a licensee in the sector, so they do have some legal basis I believe.

The Best Practices set out principles for improving access to data that includes a “Presumed Open” requirement for data assets.

The principles do not require use of an open data licence or any specific data standards. But they clearly define open data as “Data Assets that are made available for anyone to use, modify and distribute without restrictions.“

A recent consultation proposes amendments that companies must use either the Open Government a Creative Commons Attribution licenses, but not new requirements around standards.

Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) Regulations 2020

The Bus Open Data Service (BODS) remains one of the best examples of UK government open data publishing. It’s backed by the Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) Regulations 2020.

The regulations spell out a wide range of data publishing requirements, including:

Section 4 – route, operator, stops and time table information, which must conform to the TransXChange standard (“information to be provided in the form of a file in TransXChange standard format“)
Section 6 – fare and ticket information, which must conform to the Netex standard. The explanatory notes include that they refer to the “Netex standard format that accords with the version of that standard used by the United Kingdom bus industry.“
Section 16 – a requirement that data provided to government — who then re-publishes it for others to use via BODS — must be free from any usage restrictions. Specifically, data must be available “publicly; in electronic form; free of charge; and without any restriction on its use and further disclosure“.
Section 16 also includes some requirements around how that data might be reused. These include a requirement to register for access to data and some requirements around attribution, disclaimers, etc. For the most part I think these conform to the Open Government Licence, but I believe its possible there may be some discrepancies between the regulations and how the Bus Open Data service is actually implemented?

This last example is most relevant to the Open Charge Point legislation I discussed at the start of this post: it’s clearly possible to draft legislation that has more clarity around what constitutes open data, and clearly references standards in a way that drives adoption but won’t potentially limit evolution.

If you know of other good examples. And in particular legislation that sets out open or public data reporting requirements for businesses or the third-sector, then leave a comment and I’ll update my examples.