Is the London Borough of Newham the Silicon Valley for data?

When you think about the cen­tre of the uni­verse for tech­nol­o­gy, you prob­a­bly think of Sil­i­con Val­ley. But where is the same HQ for data? The answer is that there isn’t one – yet. But Lon­don is embrac­ing the chal­lenge with an ambi­tious goal to become the heart of the bur­geon­ing data econ­o­my, glob­al­ly.

The good news for Lon­don is that it is still ear­ly days for data; the full eco­nom­ic poten­tial of the data econ­o­my is yet to be realised. But that poten­tial is enor­mous.

The Lon­don Bor­ough of Newham recent­ly released a report with Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege London’s (UCL) Insti­tute of Glob­al Pros­per­i­ty. Its con­ser­v­a­tive fore­cast is that the UK open data mar­ket will be worth £42bn in 2025, £46bn in 2030 and £5bn in 2035.

In the UK, there is the poten­tial for around 3.2 mil­lion jobs relat­ed to data by the end of the decade. This would be worth around £28bn to the UK econ­o­my by 2030, of which London’s share is around £5.5bn. In Lon­don alone, around 140,000 jobs in open data will be need­ed in the next 10 years. As such, sev­er­al local bor­oughs are spear­head­ing efforts to make the cap­i­tal the ‘cen­tre of the data uni­verse’.

In Lon­don, Newham is lead­ing this charge. Newham Sparks is an ini­tia­tive that posi­tions the bor­ough as a hub in terms of data jobs, skills, busi­ness­es, edu­ca­tion, and the appli­ca­tion of data to solve prob­lems. It is an ambi­tious plan to accel­er­ate the growth of the data econ­o­my in Newham and Lon­don as a whole.

Omid Shi­ra­ji is a con­sul­tant CIO who works for sev­er­al author­i­ties, includ­ing Newham, and a mem­ber of the May­or of London’s Smart Lon­don Board, which helps shape the capital’s smart cities agen­da and invest­ment in dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture in the cap­i­tal. He says there is “an amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for Lon­don to be the cen­tre of the uni­verse when it comes to data as a sec­tor. And Newham has spot­ted that and has grabbed hold of it”. 

Although the com­par­isons to Sil­i­con Val­ley may not be imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous, there are sev­er­al rea­sons why Newham is well-placed as a loca­tion for data scale­up and star­tups, he explains.

“Newham has the Roy­al Docks as an Enter­prise Zone, and the bor­ough offers busi­ness rates and oth­er incen­tives that make it a great place for busi­ness­es to locate.”

Shi­ra­ji also notes that it was its prox­im­i­ty to inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions that helped estab­lish Sil­i­con Val­ley as a tech hub. Newham, he says, has UCL East, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of East Lon­don (UEL) in the bor­ough. Anoth­er pos­i­tive for Newham is that it has the youngest and most diverse pop­u­la­tion in Lon­don. “That’s pow­er­ful on so many lev­els,” he says. “Ear­ly adopters, mould­able pro­files of peo­ple, plus that diver­si­ty of thought, cul­ture and back­ground.”

Crit­i­cal­ly too, Newham’s coun­cil lead­ers are a dri­ving force behind the plans, along­side big hit­ters like Microsoft and Ama­zon, and small­er organ­i­sa­tions and local edu­ca­tors all back­ing the launch of Newham Sparks.

“Pri­ma­ry schools, fur­ther and high­er edu­ca­tion providers are all respond­ing to this agen­da. Busi­ness­es have con­tact­ed the May­or to say, ‘I work in data. How can we get involved?’ You’ve got big respons­es to the calls to action. There is a melt­ing pot of peo­ple com­ing togeth­er to har­ness this agen­da,” he says.

What can oth­er local author­i­ties, in Lon­don and beyond, learn from Newham’s exam­ple and apply it them­selves? 

The most suc­cess­ful author­i­ties are the ones that care most about link­ing dig­i­tal and data to the cit­i­zen, and not just doing data for the sake of it, says Jason Fos­ter, who is CEO of Cynozure, a data and ana­lyt­ics strat­e­gy con­sul­tan­cy based in Lon­don, which has sev­er­al local gov­ern­ment clients.

“The local authority’s super­pow­er is that they do care about the end prod­uct, which is the ser­vice and the cit­i­zen who receives that ser­vice. Con­nect­ing those dots between the ser­vices they offer as a coun­cil, and how data can play a part in unpick­ing where their prob­lems are and solv­ing them in a cross-depart­ment way, is where they win.”

Newham and UCL make sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions for cre­at­ing a roadmap for a data soci­ety. At the heart of the strat­e­gy is data cit­i­zen­ship. This trans­lates to equip­ping res­i­dents with the tools and skills they need to under­stand the val­ue of data for the pub­lic good; the skills to read and analyse data in their every­day lives; and the con­fi­dence to share their data.

While Newham is lead­ing the pack in its efforts to unlock the val­ue of the data econ­o­my, oth­er bor­oughs are look­ing to fol­low suit.

“If I look to the west at West­min­ster, it wants to be recog­nised as the smart city, glob­al­ly. If you look to the south­west of Lon­don there’s a part­ner­ship between three or four bor­oughs where they want to dri­ve the IoT agen­da, in areas like social care. And if you look at Cam­den across and down to Newham, there’s a mix of pri­vate equi­ty, ven­ture and angel invest­ment in data star­tups and scale­ups. So, you can see these data econ­o­my nodes are pop­ping up.

“When I put my Lon­don hat on, con­nect­ing those parts is real­ly excit­ing,” he says.