You never know. Publishing information that is funded by the taxpayer probably isn’t the end of the world. If it is, then you’re probably doing something wrong.
In my slightly geeky way, I was looking through the Communities and Local Government website, trying to find the speech made by Grant Shapps describing Local Housing Trusts. I also found a speech he made at the Housing Design Awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago, which I thought I’d read as I assumed there would be some interesting stuff about the LHTs.
I have no idea if there was anything useful in the speech, because halfway through, there’s a square bracket and “political content removed” – so I can’t read the whole thing.
Why not? Aren’t we capable of distinguishing between blatant electioneering and fact? Or are we likely to be bamboozled by the politics?
If – as they should – departments are going to publish speeches and articles, they need to accept that a) we should have the full text and b) politicians are political as well as being managers.
Local councils are leading the way in publishing data – Eric Pickles has encouraged that all council spending over £500 be made public, and hurrah for him for his announcement that his government department will be doing the same (I’ve never understood the £25,000 lower limit for central government). Some councils will publish everything, there are some councils which publish proper detail about what the councillors are up to, and there is one (at least, possibly more) which publishes things like energy consumption as well. This is all great stuff.
I was at a Policy Exchange event on Tuesday (more on that later) where Greg Clark outlined some thoughts on his role as Minister for Decentralisation. His three requirements were a right to information, a right to challenge and a wholesale change in the attitude of central government.
Ministers and secretaries of state should start by making sure that all of their on the record utterances are accessible to all. Politics isn’t dangerous. Civil servants shouldn’t be so timid – ministers should be able to explain what they are doing and why. Governments ARE political – that is why we vote – and it is unquestionably a good thing that we know what they are up to.
No related posts.
Interesting snippet of info: I just had an email from someone who told me that council spending of under £1,000 accounts for more than half of transactions, but under 2 per cent of total value so it generally tends to make it harder and more expensive to publish the cheapest items.
Two points on your extra comment.
1) Any business should know what its spending its money on so Councils should be already collecting and processing this data in some format. If they are not I would be worried about their financial management! Publishing should not be overly expensive as the council can use the same format as they use for their internal systems.
2) If it transpires that the Council is spending a very high amount on publishing data transparency will allow the electorate to see this, thus they can suggest raising the amount where publishing should happen as a cost saving measure.
betapolitics: Yes I had assumed so… But I had another email with more information: the variety of bits of the council that spend money, often with different accounting procedures, and ‘internal transfers’ mean that in practical terms, it would cost £££ to process it all into the same format. Obviously then you need to decide whether the info is useful or not, and whether the format is the right one.
So perhaps it might be time to advise councils to streamline their procedures and just make sure it’s loaded up into a format that can auto-publish…