Some of Whitehall's most secret statistics are to be published and will be free to use by businesses and the public, the chancellor will announce on Tuesday in his autumn statement.

Personal health records, transport data, house prices and even the weather will be included in what promises to be the most dramatic release of public data since the 2010 election.

From this week the Met Office's lucrative Public Weather Service data will be largely free for use, and from next year a huge raft of public transport information and NHS data will be published.

"This is fantastic," Rufus Pollock, director of free data group the Open Knowledge Foundation, said. "It's particularly good to see this sustained ongoing release of data – this can really give confidence to the open data community and business that the process is here to stay."

The move follows the publication last week of 1.2m criminal court sentencing records by the Ministry of Justice and is part of a huge government transparency drive, which has included the publication of the Treasury's Coins spending database, senior civil service salaries and detailed spending records for local and central government.

"This is really good news," Labour MP Tom Watson said. "The sum of the parts is a really good milestone in the journey for open public data – we should welcome that."

The inventor of the worldwide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and Southampton University professor of artificial intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt, will be the directors of a new Open Data Institute.

The health data will be the most comprehensive available outside of US veterans' medical records in America, publishing anonymous records of medical treatment from GP to hospital – something proposed by the Wellcome Trust in its submission to the NHS Innovation review this year: "Integrated databases … would make England unique, globally, for such research." Medical researchers and big pharmaceutical companies will be able to use the data for free.

The release will include real-time transport data for trains and buses – the information that appears on bus shelter screens, for example – and it will be available in a nationally standard format.

Peter Miller, of transport mapping specialists ITO World, said the release was significant. "Our business requires access to data to innovate with – we will now have that. The UK is going to benefit big time from being early on this and releasing comprehensive national-level data."

The Met Office's Public Weather Service currently makes money – it had a revenue of £93.4m in 2010/11. But while it is understood it will still charge for bespoke weather services, the free data will include much more detailed information than is presently available for free.

The Land Registry will make price-paid information available showing all residential property sales in England and Wales at address level. The key part of this is it will be downloadable for reuse for free under the Open Government Licence.

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