London Mayor pledges £500,000 for city's data economy

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced £500,000 in funding to support the capital's data economy, coincident with the first day of London Tech Week. The money will go into Data for London, a platform which will, according to a statement from the Mayor's office, be a "central library for the vast amount of data held across the capital, enabling Londoners to access both public and private data more easily". The new "library" is a development of the Greater London Authority's London Datastore, set up in 2010, which contains 6,000 datasets. It houses a Coronavirus Hub, which was accessed more than five million times in nine months during the pandemic. It also contains a Planning Datahub, which holds data on more than 450,000 planning proposals, as well as an Infrastructure Mapping Application, which is used by utility companies to try to reduce the congestion and disruption caused by roadworks.