The new network of "public health observatories", billed as an independent voice on health and inequality, has flexed its muscles for the first time and forced the release of official data.

The government-funded network, which operates in each of the eight NHS regions in England, was set up with ministerial approval last year. Observatories will provide the public with an accurate picture of the health and well-being of their area, flag up inequalities, provide early warning of potential problems and draw together information on new ways to improve health.

Alison Hill, who chairs the Association of Public Health Observatories and is director of the south-west observatory, has disclosed that the Office for National Statistics was refusing to hand over detailed birth and death data, citing commercial confidentiality. "This is a wonderful data set that is available to everyone in the NHS," she says. "It's a database of public health information that is not available to the general public because they [the ONS] told us that if they made it available, they would lose a lot of revenue. We went back to the chief medical officer to explain how we wanted to make this information freely available to the public. The CMO contacted them and asked them to release it. This is only information that has come from the public in the first place in terms of data about births and deaths. The public do have a right to this sort of information."

Hill guarantees that the data - which is anonymous for data protection purposes - will be available to the public. "It will be going on to our observatory websites and we are trying to think of other ways of dissemination. It's data at local authority level at the moment, but we want to get it down to electoral ward level because that is just the kind of thing people need to know."

There has been criticism that the observatories will duplicate the work of local health authorities, local government and universities. But advocates of the network counter that it is filling a gap created by the demise of the regional health authorities in 1994.

Mark Bellis, director of the north-west observatory, describes the network as a child of the information revolution. He believes that access to information will drive a 21st century public health revolution, just as sewer engineering drove the sanitation revolution of the 19th century. "It shouldn't be inferred that we are reinventing the wheel," he says. "There is an awful lot of information out there, but it's not exploited in the way that it should be at the moment."

Bellis is coordinator of a project to map the sexual health of teenagers across England. His observatory is attempting to plot levels of class A drug use and it is providing health information to private companies, local authorities, fire, police and the judiciary. "We can do health impact assessments for new firms if they want to build a new office or factory," he says. "We will help minimise pollution and disruption and tell them what they can and can't do. But we also want to maximise jobs and community benefits because, as we know, there are health gains from these sorts of things."

In London, meanwhile, observatory director Bobbie Jacobson aims to set up an ethnic minority health surveillance unit to end what she calls "the disgrace of ignorance" about progress on ethnic minority health issues across the capital.