Guidance

Measuring the Economic, Social and Environmental value of public sector location data - Executive Summary

Updated 22 August 2022

A note from the Geospatial Commission

Location data is fundamentally embedded into our daily lives yet its true value is not well understood. It delivers significant benefits for people, organisations and wider society through the location-hungry services and products that underpin our digital society such as live traffic updates on our phones, tracking construction of new infrastructure, and providing key information for emergency resilience planning.

Location data is used by a diverse range of sectors across the UK economy including the public sector. It is increasingly central to policy development and delivery of key government priorities, such as Net Zero and Levelling Up, following its crucial role in supporting management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite its clear importance as a strategic national asset, public sector projects to invest in the creation, improvement and sharing of location data have struggled to understand, assess and articulate the benefits of the investment – which is a necessity to unlock funding. Describing the value of location data is hard because:

• Value is often realised only when location data is combined with other datasets - Once a location dataset is linked with other subject-specific data, it provides new insights and opportunities that inform decisions and operations. This makes it difficult to fully value the location data at any given point in time, with a high likelihood of being underestimated.
• Value varies depending on the intended use – For example, mobile phone data could be considered more valuable for understanding total hourly footfall on high streets, but less valuable for understanding priority land preservation areas. There is also no one size fits all valuation method for data, which can make the decision about the best approach to estimating value difficult.
• Value can be difficult to foresee - Data may have limited use today but be very valuable in the future following changes in processing capability, technology and/or new needs unknown as of today. This makes it very challenging to predict future value with certainty. Furthermore, location data use can also spill over onto the rest of society and the economy, for example timely location data can provide better routing decisions that avoid congestion areas for drivers, resulting in faster journey times (direct impact).  Fewer cars on popular roads will ease congestion leading to a reduction in emissions and pollution improving health outcomes (spill over impact). Such value is not routinely captured.

Existing guidance can provide general frameworks for valuing government interventions, however for the reasons outlined above valuing geospatial data requires a more tailored approach. The Geospatial Commission committed to publishing guidance for measuring the economic, social and environmental value of public sector location data investments as part of Mission 1 of the UK Geospatial Strategy to ‘promote and safeguard the use of location data’, reiterated in our Annual Plan 22/23.

Many of the principles set out in this guidance are also relevant for data investments more generally and support commitments to improve the use of digital and data, as set out in the National Data Strategy and the Roadmap to Digital and Data 2022-2025.

The guidance comprises a practical and proportional seven-step framework providing public sector organisations with the tools necessary to consistently and coherently understand and assess the value of location data such as best practice approaches and tangible case studies. Built on a foundation of existing research information and experiences, the framework aims to empower public sector organisations to more effectively drive the investment case for location data. However, it does not assume that government intervention is the only way to achieve impact in the ecosystem.

We hope the structured approach to considering investments and impacts will also be relevant and beneficial for private sector investment decisions relating to the geospatial ecosystem.

We envision this guidance being used alongside the Commission’s published works - namely the Q-FAIR Assessment and the ABC’s of ethical location data use, collectively working in harmony to form the UK’s national location data framework.

We would like to thank Frontier Economics and the diverse range of organisations and individuals who have contributed to the development of the guidance. We see this guidance as a crucial component of addressing the challenges of valuing location data in an accurate and consistent manner and look forward to working with the community to put it into action.

Geospatial Commission

Executive Summary

Geospatial data, otherwise known as location data, plays a significant role for business success, individual convenience and public sector delivery. It tells us where people and objects are and underpins key services used by organisations and individuals daily. If used effectively, location data drives economic, social and environmental value.

Geospatial data (and data more generally) does not always have an established market price: its full value may only be determined after it has been used or applied. This in turn makes it challenging to understand and appraise the value of new or improved geospatial data and can lead to underinvestment in the geospatial data ecosystem. To support organisations in addressing this challenge, the Geospatial Commission commissioned Frontier Economics to develop a practical framework for appraising benefits in this context.

This guidance provides a methodical, logical and consistent framework for measuring the economic, social and environmental benefits associated with geospatial data investments in the public sector. It is a practical resource to value improvements in location data and/or the wider geospatial ecosystem particularly for public sector bodies when building a business case for investment. These investments include creation or acquisition of new data assets, improvements to or maintenance of existing geospatial data assets, or efforts to support the wider ecosystem.

This guidance focuses primarily on public sector appraisals and is guided by and consistent with wider best practice in the public sector, particularly HM Treasury’s Green Book.  This guidance tailors the key principles of the Green Book to geospatial data investments, providing a structured approach to understanding and more effectively articulating its benefits and value.

A number of complementary methods were deployed to build on existing work and address evidence gaps including a targeted evidence and literature review and semi-structured interviews with a range of key stakeholders.

The framework for appraising geospatial investments contains seven steps. These steps are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Step-By-Step Framework

1. Articulate rationale and strategic fit of investment

2. Classify type of investment

3. Set out how the investment will affect data characteristics

4. Identify data uses or applications

5. Identify potential benefits

6. Prioritise high impact benefits for further in-depth analysis

7. Assess benefits associated with known & unknown uses

The first five steps of this seven step framework involve development of a conceptual theory of change. This theory of change articulates the rationale behind the intervention, classifies the investment, links it to specific data characteristics (if relevant) and identifies use cases and their benefits. In doing so it enables the user to map out the expected pathways to impact and value.

Steps 6 and 7 relate to the empirical assessment, quantification and monetisation of the benefits included in the theory of change. In general, the user should estimate the value of each use case in full and then consider the specific impact of geospatial data. This approach is broadly applicable and can cover different types of benefits. ^{[footnote 1]}

This guidance is intended to be as practically useful as possible, acknowledging the resource constraints that public sector organisations face. Some of the steps cover best practice when developing a business case (e.g. Step 1) whereas others are more novel and are specific to geospatial investments (e.g. Steps 2 and 3). Other steps (e.g. Steps 4, 5, 6 and 7) can be thought of as cross-cutting advice that are key elements of an impactful business case. The guidance can support both decision makers and assessors to better understand and compare the benefits of geospatial data investments.

1. Economic, social, environmental; direct, indirect and spillover benefits. ↩