The Single Data List has been updated for 2026 to 2027, giving councils another carefully arranged way to discover what central government would like them to write down. The spreadsheet is delighted to report that every new request must clear at least one sensible test. It has framed the six principles and is now waiting for someone to ask whether the frame counts as administration.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government updated the list, its guide and its record of changes on 8 May. The list covers the datasets local government must submit to central government. If a requirement is not on it, councils should not have to collect and provide the information without extra funding.
This is an unusually clear bargain for public administration. The state may ask for data to fulfil international obligations, administer funding, support accountability, hold services to account, evaluate trends or provide comparable local performance information. The spreadsheet has taken this as a personal compliment and now introduces itself as a framework rather than a document.
Before a new requirement can join the list, the guidance says it must be necessary, place a minimal burden on councils, be fully funded under new burdens procedures and meet at least one of the six principles. Somewhere, a form is being asked to prove that filling in forms is not itself the problem.
The arrangement also contains the radical suggestion that information should have a purpose. Data may help explain where public money goes, assess national policy or compare local performance where comparable information does not already exist. This has left several numbers staring into the middle distance, wondering whether they were collected for a reason or because an empty cell looked lonely.
The update does not promise a world without requests, returns or spreadsheets. It offers something more modest and more useful, rules for deciding which requests belong in the system, plus a reminder that councils are not bottomless cupboards with Wi Fi.
That distinction matters. A data collection can support accountability without becoming an annual ritual in which everyone reports the same figure in three formats and then attends a meeting to discuss the difference. The fictional spreadsheet has proposed a compromise. It will accept one figure, provided nobody asks it to explain its feelings about rounding.
The Single Data List has therefore achieved a rare administrative feat. It has made bureaucracy write down what bureaucracy is for. The next update will presumably ask whether the document can be submitted to itself. At last, the spreadsheet will be the only body in government required to prove that it has a purpose before demanding another number.
Source: GOV.UK.
