Clean, easy-to-access government data seems like an obviously good thing, offering value (in some cases significant) to multiple industries.
In insurance it should offer significant additional insight for many types of policy - with resulting decreases and increases in the technical rate. But if the cost of integrating this data is not low then what are the incentives for passing premium decreases along to the insurers? Will competition be enough or will we simply see yet more cherry picking?
If the UK wants to maintain its lead in the open data world along with all the benefits that brings (commercially and locally) then two things need to happen.