**This blog post was written by Nicholas Oughtibridge, Standards Specialist at Open Referral UK
The Problem We Need to Solve
Public services need to share information across organisational boundaries more than ever before. Local authorities, NHS organisations, combined authorities and central government increasingly need to collaborate across boundaries. Yet they all face the same challenge of describing similar services, needs and outcomes in different ways. As each organisation describes needs and services differently, critical reference data remains trapped in siloed systems or insecure spreadsheets, leading to duplication and poor visibility. We therefore need a Common Way to Share Public Sector Reference Data Without Sacrificing Local Flexibility.
While our colleagues in the health and care sector have long benefited from a standards-based infrastructure for maintaining and sharing vocabularies (via HL7 FHIR APIs), the wider public sector has lacked a comparable framework.
Our Proposal
To address this structural gap, iStandUK has formally raised a collaborative vocabulary “Challenge” through the GDS Open Standards process. This submission establishes a clear, business-led requirement for a consistent, standardised way of sharing reference data and vocabularies across government.
Our proposed approach, based on the health and care model, is elegant because it does not demand top-down uniformity. Instead, it respects local context while building a bridge to interoperability:
- Preserves Local Flexibility: our approach maintains the autonomy of local, regional and national code lists, lifting the rest of public service to the mature standards seen in healthcare.
- Standardises the Architecture: it introduces a consistent set of standardised APIs to seamlessly share code lists, the mappings between them and specific subsets of codes tailored for precise use cases.
What Does This Look Like in Practice?
As data standards professionals, we have already seen the immense value of this approach in practice through the SAVVI (Scalable Approach to Vulnerability Information) data standards.
SAVVI provides a vital foundation for defining needs, vulnerabilities and outcomes across multi-agency ecosystems. Rather than forcing every council to adopt an identical lexicon, SAVVI enables authorities to retain their local terminology while mapping it to common, agreed-upon groupings such as financial vulnerability, housing instability, or environmental risk. This ensures that consistent, actionable cohorts can be built across council boundaries, emergency services and national agencies.
We see the exact same challenge manifest in social prescribing and signposting. While authorities are increasingly publishing directory data via the Open Referral UK standard, individual directories often utilise disparate structures and eligibility descriptions. Consolidating these into a single, cohesive view for a resident crossing the border is difficult.
We need a common data-sharing standard. Once that exists by creating a shared reference data API through the GDS Challenge, projects like SAVVI and Open Referral UK can automatically connect, share and maintain service information at much larger scale, instead of relying on manual effort. This will make it easier to manage, update and expand service mappings across many organisations and systems.
Why This Matters
Implementing a standard reference data API yields profound advantages for the entire public sector ecosystem:
- Autonomy Maintained: Local needs continue to be articulated in precise, local terms without forced homogenisation.
- Consistent Insights: Analysts and policymakers can pull from local, regional, or national code lists to build a reliable, aggregate view of complex societal issues.
- Reduced Vendor Lock-In & Dev Time: Software vendors gain a single, predictable set of APIs to consume every code list they require, dramatically lowering integration costs and accelerating software deployment.
- True Place-Based Reporting: Local leadership can build robust, real-time dashboards based on local vocabularies that still align perfectly with national reporting mandates.
Standards are only as strong as the communities that build, challenge and adopt them. The launch of this GDS Challenge represents a vital opportunity to establish a robust, peer-reviewed reference data API standard that will support public sector innovation for years to come.
An Opportunity to Shape the Standard
To move this from a proposal to an active, adopted standard, we need your expertise. The formal GDS Challenge has been registered on GitHub and we are actively seeking input from data architects, engineers, local authority leaders and system vendors.
How you can participate:
- Review the challenge and business requirements.
- Share your use cases, critique the proposed API approach and contribute to the governance framework.
- Help us ensure this standard meets the practical demands of frontline delivery.
Join the conversation and contribute to the GDS GitHub Issue at: https://github.com/co-cddo/open-standards/issues/82