A new report from a prominent British think tank has suggested that the UK government could be saving up to £33 billion ($51.6 billion) a year without cutting any of the services, if only it were to make better use of publicly available ‘big data’ about its citizens – which includes everything from passport and driving licence applications to tax returns and even their social media accounts.

The report, created by Policy Exchange, says that the possible savings could amount to an equivalent of almost £500 for every person in the UK.

This of course is a huge amount of money – and a significant chunk of the £83 billion ($129.8 billion) that the UK government has pledged to save by 2015, through the greatest public spending cuts made in living memory.

Chris Yiu, author of The Big Data Opportunity, explained that an extraordinary quantity of data was amassed across the public sector in the course of running public services.

“If we can find ways to link or share this data together, well there is a huge potential to save money for taxpayers and time for citizens. In order to do so, the government will need to develop the capability to effectively conduct analytics, not to mention the courage to pursue this agenda with integrity.”

See the entire Big Brother’s Big Data Series on Pinterest and Springpad!

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One of the most dramatic suggestions put forward by Policy Exchange is that the government should do away with the National Census and instead gather this data from sources such as council tax registers and the electoral roll in order to estimate the U.K.’s total population, and how it breaks down according to sizes and types of household religion, occupations and other factors. Although highly ambitious, by doing so Policy Exchange estimates the government could save as much as £500 million ($782 million) on each census, and points out that the information it gathers would probably be more accurate

Policy Exchange believes that big data could be put to use by the government for a whole variety of purposes. One example of this is being able to anticipate bottlenecks at UK airports by observing data from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as real-time flight information from airlines. Such a warning would enable airport managers to take action to prevent calamities such as what happened earlier this year at Heathrow.

Big data could also be used to catch tax evaders. Tax officers could very easily cross-reference company accounts with the amount of tax employees are paying in order to highlight those paying less tax than expected.

The Big Data Opportunity advocates the creation of a data force, whose task it would be to access data from various sources and identify how it can be used to save money. Meanwhile, in order to allay the concerns of those worried about privacy, the think tank recommends the government adopt a code of conduct, or what it calls a “Code For Responsible Analytics”.

There are some great recommendations in the report, but the government would do well to remember that with cutting-edge data science skills comes a very big responsibility.

This kind of profiling of its citizens has inherent risks for civil liberties. Government integrity remains a big question mark in the eyes of many, and so the state will have to maintain a very careful balancing act between efficient use of available data to secure cost-effective services, and intrusion into its citizens’ private lives.