If Britain ever sought to rejoin the European Union, public debate would focus on borders, courts and fish – not metadata. That would be a mistake. The quieter rules governing open data, the re-use of public-sector information and environmental information reveal more about what “rejoining” would mean in practice than another speech about sovereignty.
They also expose an unfashionable truth: on access to environmental information, Britain is already close to the European model. On the re-use of public data, however, it is a generation behind and drifting further away.
Access is not re-use
Start with the distinction Whitehall still blurs. The Environmental Information Regulations answer a citizen’s question: Can I see this? The RPSI rules answer another: Once it is public, can I use it? Access is a democratic right; re-use is an economic one. Confusing the two is how governments publish a PDF and congratulate themselves on having an industrial strategy.
Environmental information: close alignment, different enforcement
The 2004 EIR still follows the EU’s 2003 access directive almost clause for clause. Britain is also independently bound by the Aarhus Convention. The courts have confirmed that water companies can fall within the scope of the EIR when carrying out functions of public administration, meaning environmental information connected to those functions may be subject to disclosure. The Information Commissioner continues to oversee and enforce the regime.
Brexit removed the obligation to follow the evolving EU legal framework. Any future re-accession would be negotiated but would be likely to require the UK to align with the relevant EU rules and their agreed implementation timetable, including applicable future environmental-information measures.
Open data: a widening legal gap
The position on open data is very different. Britain’s legal floor remains the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015, which implemented the EU’s 2013 directive. Brussels recast the regime in 2019, requiring member states to transpose it by July 2021 - after the UK had left. Britain therefore never adopted the duties that now shape the European data market:
- a default right to re-use;
- coverage of public undertakings when they release data;
- repository access to publicly funded research;
- real-time access through APIs;
- tighter limits on exclusive licences; and
- from 2024, free, machine-readable, bulk access to designated high-value datasets.
What counts as high-value data
The list is concrete: geospatial and earth-observation data, weather, official statistics, company and company-ownership data, and mobility data. These are the raw materials of modern logistics, insurance, climate modelling and new businesses. Europe has made access to designated categories of high-value public data a legal obligation. Britain still governs many of the same assets through a mixture of policy, the Open Government Licence and trading-fund instinct.
Policy is not a legal floor
British policy has often been more liberal than the 2015 statute. The Open Government Licence is a sound instrument, and “open by default” is a respectable ambition. But a policy phrase is not a justiciable duty, and a licensing policy is not the same as a comprehensive statutory regime. Nor is London moving towards the European floor.
In July 2026, the Government launched a call for evidence on whether public bodies should in some cases be permitted to charge above marginal cost for re-use. Brussels chose the opposite course: for the high-value list, the price is zero.
Two competing models
This is the real fork. One model treats public data as infrastructure, like a road: taxpayers fund its maintenance, and users are free to travel on it. The other treats data as a balance-sheet asset: if a developer will pay, why release it for nothing? Both models have an internal logic, but only the first fits a single data market governed by the Open Data Directive, the Data Governance Act, the Data Act and a Commission proposal to fold the first into the last. Rejoining would not mean keeping the OGL and calling it alignment. It would mean accepting a European publication standard for relevant data sets held by Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, Companies House, the ONS, transport operators and research repositories - with infringement proceedings behind it.
The cost of alignment
I do not romanticise Brussels; you tend not to after a decade of lobbying within its bubble. European data law has become a cathedral of overlapping acts, and the Digital Omnibus is an admission that too many naves were built. Accession would mean accepting the cathedral as it stood on the day Britain signed, not the chapel it left in 2020. It would also require reversing domestic experiments that pull charging and data protection away from the European line. That is the part the rejoin campaign rarely puts on a leaflet.
Staying out still requires a choice
Nor should the leave side pretend that the status quo is a settled philosophy. A state that controls maps, weather, company ownership and traffic data, then wonders why its productivity puzzle remains unsolved, is not defending a principle. It is warehousing the raw material of other people’s products. If Britain is not returning to the Union, it must still decide whether high-value public data is a public good or a till. At present, it speaks the language of the first while edging towards the second.
A practical settlement
My view is simple enough to survive any select committee:
- Environmental information should remain easy to demand and hard to refuse. That is a civic minimum, with or without Aarhus.
- Public data already funded by taxpayers should be reusable by default, supplied in machine-readable form and priced at no more than the cost of delivery.
- Where the wider economic benefit is clear, access should be free.
- Trading funds that cannot meet that test should be redesigned rather than allowed to equate the national interest with their own invoices.
If that resembles the 2019 European directive, it is because the directive addressed a problem Britain still has. Rejoining would force the law to catch up; staying out does not remove the need to make the same choice. The only indefensible position is the present one: a 2015 legal chassis, a 2010s licensing culture, and a 2026 temptation to charge for the family silver while calling it modernisation.
Why the obscure rules matter
The politics of Europe will be settled, if they are settled at all, in public. The politics of data will be settled in regulations that most people will never read. That is precisely why those rules matter. A country is defined by what it allows its citizens to know and by what it allows them to build with that knowledge.
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