Sir Jeremy Heywood is Cabinet Secretary and Britain's most senior civil servant. The Cabinet Secretary is the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister’s most senior policy advisor, acting as Secretary to the Cabinet, responsible to all Ministers for the running of the Cabinet Governments. As Cabinet Secret, Heywood reports directly to the UK Prime Minister, with the Head of the Civil Service also reporting to the Minister for the Cabinet Office.
The UK’s Cabinet Secretary was originally writing in The Independent about the motivation behind Whitehall’s data crusade. For as many years as Britain has had a centralised civil service we have been rather good at collecting information. From the first censuses in 1801 to the creation of the Central Statistical Office by Winston Churchill, the
This guest blog post was originally posted on the Guardian’s Transparency Hub, which is hosting a Live Q&A with Jeremy Heywood at 12-1pm GMT on 4 December 2012 At the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bitly, the URL redirection service, said open data was just a buzzword. The launch of