Our final recommendation seeks to address the challenge of missed opportunities in leveraging Government held data sets. Whilst we see (relatively) clear ownership, currently residing within DCMS, for national data policy (covering topics such as privacy, security, ethics, and innovation), ownership for the question of how Government should best seek to create value from the data sets. it owns or controls has only recently been clarified. Given the complexity of this topic5 and the relatively (global) scarcity of top talent in this field we recommend creating a central team under the GCDO to develop best practice thinking and guidelines in this area to support the work of individual Government Departments. It is worth saying at this point that we do not recommend the approach that is sometime advocated of creating universal “data lakes” in which all data is somehow brought together in a single universal location. The better approach is to put the energy into clearly mapping the location of the canonical Government data sets and building the appropriate technical standards, security protocols, and APIs to enable services to make calls to these data sets when particular information is required. A related question is whether the Government should invest in creating and enforcing a common set of technologies that all Departments should use. Whilst desirable in some ways we do not think the centre needs to (or should) enforce a common set of technologies. We absolutely see a role for the centre is defining the architecture and standards that will be critical for enabling different services to operate effectively together and make the relevant data / service calls. We also see a role for the centre in maintaining the catalogue of which data sets and which services sit where. But the whole point of defining clear data structures and APIs is that you do not then have to move to the (very hard) point of standardising the technologies used to deliver each service. All that matters is that an API call can say: “if I give you x,y,z data in the correct format, return me a,b,c response in a reasonable time”. The internal structure and underlying technology needed to define how the service translates x,y,z into a,b,c is irrelevant provided it meets minimum engineering standards of uptime, security, response time and so forth.