Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what the (a) key datasets and (b) other deliverables are that will be obtained through the contract agreed by his Department with Telefonica on 14 September 2022 with procurement reference C2289; if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of that contract; and if he will publish the business case for that contract.

The datasets, deliverables and business justification for this contract will not be published, nor a separate assessment prepared, on security grounds. This procurement activity relates to the National Situation Centre, which is exempt from publishing Commercially Sensitive documents under National Security Exemptions. This procurement activity is exempt under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Sections 23 (Security Bodies) and 24 (National Security), and also under Public Contracts Regulations 2015, Section 15 (National Security).

The National Situation Centre’s business justification, which will not be published in full for the reasons listed above, included the following requirements for this contract:

1. Anonymised and aggregated people count estimates at low levels of geography

2. Data down to equally-sized geographic areas (for example grids or hexagons). These areas should be reasonably low levels of geography, such as having a radius of 500m or smaller.

3. Ideally, in addition to the above, data provided at MSOA (Middle Layer Super Output Area) level of detail or more geographically granular

4. Data anonymised and aggregated (no private/personal data to be collected or communicated from the supplier)

5. Minimum coverage of 30% of the UK population and data weighted/aggregated up to population level

6. No more than 15 minute latency period

7. Underlying data delivered through API and CSV file formats

8. Access to real-time data in front-end map format via a portal

9. Must cover the UK (including Scotland)

10. Total contract value to not exceed £803,500 (Ex VAT)

11. A reasonable baseline figure for people counts. This may be average hourly people counts in a given area for historic and current months.

12. Derived products must be shareable across resilience and operational partners