Transparency is the only way to improve public services

I was recently at a discussion about transparency in politics, and what that means for business (yes, my exciting life continues). It was all quite diverse and random but some themes did emerge.

Transparency in public data is inevitable – it is no longer sustainable for the government machine to keep it all secret, for two reasons. Firstly, that the rise of open information in other areas of our lives means that demand is increasing, and secondly that if you want to open up the delivery of public services, you have to allow those you open up to to see what they’re up against.

Transparency in public data is – in general – a Good Thing. It drives innovation, accountability, choice, lower costs and, in a rather convoluted way, confidence.

But transparency in public data can also be a Bad Thing. It means that we can see where hospitals have unreasonably high death or return rates; we can see where schools are failing; we can see which judges are failing to hand down proper sentences; we can see where our local police have failed to arrest the person who mugged us, and we can see where the government is wasting our money. Crucially it means we get to see all the little things that the government would rather we don’t see – the experiments, the arguments, the u-turns, the sausage-machine of how laws are passed and implemented.

One person I have spoken to recently was dead against even Freedom of Information legislation, arguing that it meant that discussions were carried out in person with no record taking and that innovative ideas were shelved before even being discussed.

But that is already one of the failings of FoI – we have to go and ask (in very specific terms) for information that, after all, we already paid for. If the presumption is that everything should be published (within reason – he tried to say that the plans for D-Day would have had to be published in advance if we had a presumption for publication; that is clearly nonsense…), then yes, there will be lots of things that any government would rather we didn’t see, but if it’s all published, we as citizens (and media) will just have to get used to the fact that if policy is to be successful, uncomfortable things must be discussed, trial and error must be allowed to go ahead, and we must understand that there will and should be differences in local provision.

The other thing that struck me is that transparent information coming out of government ought to be matched by a similar flow of information into government. The time may have come for the proper use of crowd-sourcing…

Related posts:

1. Winning the argument on public services
2. Outcome for the user becomes King: The Open Public Services White Paper
3. Restoring pride in our public services
4. Should CCHQ take some lessons on transparency from the government?
5. Why transparency is important