Conservative leader David Cameron has turned to free data to boost his party's campaign in the local government elections in England this May.

In a speech last Friday (tinyurl.com/2l9jlv), he promised that a future Conservative government would require councils to make basic information about their performance and spending available electronically in standard format for re-use in external websites.

The idea is to give citizens' groups access to information to hold councillors to account, in the same way that MPs now come under the scrutiny of websites such as TheyWorkForYou and PublicWhip.

Speaking to the Conservative Councillors' Association last week, Cameron compared UK local authorities' attitudes to data with that of their counterparts in the US. "In cities all over America, police forces regularly publish information about crimes in their area. Anyone can take this information and overlay it on an online map. This gives the public unprecedented information about crimes in their local area."

By contrast, the British government is "still bureaucratic, still top-down and still old-world. It still thinks it knows best and that it should keep all the information." A Conservative government, he said, would require local authorities to publish information about the services they provide, council meetings and how councillors vote - "online and in a standardised format".

He did not, however, give details of exactly what information should be made available, or how councils would be required to do it. "It will take time to implement all the standardisation and bring everything online."

Local government IT experts reacted with cautious enthusiasm. Martin Greenwood, of the Society of IT Management, which publishes the annual Better Connected review of local government websites, said that some councils are already moving in this direction: "in principle it's a good idea." However, he warned against central government being too prescriptive.

Local authorities vary widely in the amount of data they make available, and many charge for access. By launching the plan as one of his party's two big ideas for the local government elections on May 1, Cameron has stolen a march on the government's own programme. The idea of making council management data freely available was implicit in the Power of Information review published by the Cabinet Office last summer.

But while the government accepted most of the report's proposals for a web 2.0-type revolution in government, it has so far adopted only one - the rapid launch of Ordnance Survey's free mapping product OpenSpace. Any further dithering by Whitehall could give the Conservatives more opportunities to grab the clear moral high ground offered by the free data campaign.

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