Social Mobility Transparency Board: terms of reference and list of members

Post: 1 August 2013

Regular readers of this blog will know that I try to keep track of the various official boards, panels and advisory groups that influence UK policy on transparency and open data.

I’m particularly interested in the “sector boards” that meet within individual Government departments. Sector boards are responsible for the formal open data strategies, and often have the final say on whether specific public data assets will be made available as open data.

Occasionally I submit Freedom of Information requests for information about these sector boards, and for minutes of their meetings when those have not been placed in the public domain. For example the recent release of minutes by the Tax Sector Transparency Board and the backfilling of minutes for the Local Public Data Panel both closely followed my FOI requests.

You can have a look at my tracking spreadsheet to see which sector boards have and have not released minutes so far. (Full disclosure: I’m a non-executive member of the Defra Network Transparency Panel, which is one of the sector boards that hasn’t yet released minutes.)

Today I received a response from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to my FOI request for information about the Social Mobility Transparency Board. The SMTB was announced by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in May 2012, but since then we have heard very little about it.

BIS has disclosed the terms of reference for the Social Mobility Transparency Board, along with a list of the members (see below, or download the full FOI response). However it has refused to disclose minutes of the three meetings held by the SMTB to date, based on the “formulation of Government policy” exemption under section 35 of the Freedom of Information Act.

I don’t think a challenge to this FOI refusal is likely to be successful. The SMTB is somewhat different from the other sector boards, in that it cuts across Government departments and is chaired by a minister, so the application of the exemption is probably sound in a technical sense.

That does not mean the refusal sits well, of course. Any board with transparency in its name should really make an effort to be as transparent as possible in its deliberations. Without these minutes we don’t know what, if anything, the board is doing to support release of datasets relevant to the social mobility agenda. (The Prime Minister’s Office has some material on social mobility in policy, but it’s pretty unenlightening on data sharing.)

The members of the Social Mobility Transparency Board are listed below, as disclosed in the BIS response. (I’ve added some links and Twitter names.)

Ministers and MPs:

David Willetts MP (Minister of State for Universities and Science, BIS)

David Laws MP (Minister of State for Schools, DfE)

Matthew Hancock MP (Parlimentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills, DfE and BIS) @matthancockmp

David Gauke MP (Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury)

Lead officials:

Professor Sir John O'Reilly, BIS

Heather Brown, BIS (Secretariat)

Nick Hillman, BIS (special advisor) @nickhillman

Jude Hillary, DfE

Dr Tim Leunig, DfE (also on faculty at LSE) @timleunig