Our team bring experience from:
Problem
Data sharing is legally, culturally, and procedurally hard in the UK.
Why do councils, police & the NHS share less data for child protection in 2025 than in 2010?
Poor data sharing jeopardises the £45bn p.a. digital & data opportunity and worsens services including police, NHS, children’s safeguarding. It keeps happening:
Problems with information sharing have been raised by every national child protection review and inquiry going back to 1973.Time and again different agencies hold pieces of the puzzle but no one holds all of the pieces or is seeking to put them together.National review into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson
Data sharing is not impossible but it is slow, expensive & hard because:
Each new data share is a unique snowflake
It's conservative
Especially hard for proactive, preventative, and prototype use cases
How many more scandals like the "Afghan kill list" will it take before things change?
Solution
Unpick the multiple barriers to data sharing.
Solving data sharing is easy, if we solve the right problem. Data sharing is not illegal, so a new legal gateway won't help, it is just procedurally difficult and slow.
Unfortunately, there is no ‘magic bullet’ -- however, data sharing is not illegal. Therefore, we call for measures to speed it up.
Other countries have solved inter-departmental data sharing. Following their example, we are calling for:
Shared data infrastructure
Departments to balance the cost of withholding with risk of sharing
Lowered compliance costs, without reducing protection
Founder
Fabian Chessell
Experience
Motivation
I first saw the power of data in public services when I built algorithms that spotted unsafe hospital wards. I’m motivated to change this because I can see how much avoidable suffering our current system leads to.
Founder
Mor Rubinstein
Experience
Motivation
Too often, outdated bureaucratic processes originally designed to safeguard privacy are failing in practice. They sometimes hinder our ability to share information in ways that could genuinely improve lives.
Senior Advisor
Neil McIvor
Experience
Motivation
Government wastes millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money through not sharing data that help us understand what policies work. Those responsible for safeguarding often do not have all the information they need, putting lives at risk.
Designer
Ben Dunn Flores
Experience
Motivation
People should be able to interact with their public services, no matter their capabilities or time. The data government already has is a resource that it should use to make citizens' lives better, and could use to improve the state of the UK.