If you've ever tried to find out what support is available in your local area, whether that's a food bank, a carer's service or a housing advice line, you'll have run into the same problem councils, health and other public sector bodies have been wrestling with for years.
The information exists, somewhere. But it's scattered across different systems, described in different ways, and often out of date by the time you find it.
It's a problem we're seeing first-hand. In our own work exploring how to bring a number of separate, cross-sector service directories into a single, coherent view, we've identified exactly these issues in the current landscape. So the parallels discussed at a techUK briefing last week felt very familiar.
At that briefing, on the public sector data standards landscape, iStandUK set out where things currently stand with Open Referral UK (ORUK), a data standard for describing community services in a consistent, shareable format. If your organisation publishes or consumes service directory data and you're not yet familiar with it, it's well worth a look.
ORUK is an open, government-endorsed data standard for describing services: what they are, who they're for, how to access them, and where. It is endorsed by the Central Digital and Data Office, encouraged in local government and required where appropriate in central government.
It provides a shared data model, published JSON schemas and API standards, so a service described once can be understood, shared and reused by any other system that speaks ORUK. Around that sit implementation guides, case studies and open GitHub repositories.
The case for it was made starkly in the early days of the pandemic, when local authorities faced an urgent challenge in matching an influx of willing volunteers to the people who needed support. That exposed a deeper problem. Data on who needed help and what was available was fragmented and hard to link. People fell through gaps not through lack of will, but because the underlying data infrastructure wasn't there.
Funded by MHCLG's local digital programme and now stewarded by iStandUK, ORUK has grown from that emergency response into a maturing national standard, with a clear ambition to scale adoption among councils over the coming months.
The most useful idea to come out of iStandUK's recent thinking isn't the data model itself, but the component architecture around it.
Rather than one organisation building a single monolithic system, they suggest a minimum stack of interoperable parts:
For places wanting to go further, there's room for an aggregator layer that joins up data across multiple published feeds, and for republishing so services surface through mainstream search engines.
There is also scope for insight and analysis. Because searches are structured, queries that return no results become evidence of unmet need, which is valuable intelligence for commissioners in its own right.
This maps closely onto our own experienceS and needs expressed by our clients. Rather than one big build, it's about being clear on which systems can stay as they are, where a thin publishing layer is enough, and where genuinely new capability is needed. That reframes the procurement question from “which single product solves this” to “which components do we already have, and where do we need something new.”
For councils and health bodies relying on multiple disconnected directories, ORUK offers a credible, government-backed, vendor-neutral route to joining them up without committing to a single supplier's format.
For anyone partway through a directory of services project, it's worth checking whether the current technical direction aligns with ORUK. Building to the standard now is likely to be notably cheaper than retrofitting it later, which is something we've already had to consider in our own work in this space.
If you're weighing up how shared service data standards might improve your own service offerings, we'd be glad to talk it through. Get in touch with the team at Marvell Consulting at hello@marvell-consulting.com.
Whether you’re ready to start your project now or you just want to talk things through, we’d love to hear from you.
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