Public Sector Transparency Board - June 2013 Meeting

Post: 18 August 2013

Last week the UK’s Cabinet Office rather belatedly placed online the minutes of the three most recent meetings of the Public Sector Transparency Board. (I submitted a Freedom of Information request for these minutes last month.)

Then a couple of days ago Cabinet Office swapped out the first version of the June 2013 minutes with a new “final” version containing quite a few revisions.

Some of these revisions are simple corrections or rhetorical flourishes. However there are also some changes of substance that I think provide insight into the fragile state of UK transparency policy.

Presentations from ODI Start-ups

The minutes kick off with notes of presentations from two startups linked to the Open Data Institute. Ian Makgill of Ticon, a management consultancy with particular interest in government procurement, spoke on the subject of how startups use Government data. Jonathan Raper of Placr, a firm that develops with transport data, urged the Government to release several key datasets.

Raper’s recommendations are sensible and will resonate with anyone in the open data community who works with transport data. Makgill’s are more likely to divide opinion; he wants to remove the minimum threshold for reporting of spending data, wants to discourage Government from developing its own data, and thinks “personal information” is used to block the release of too much data.

(I can’t be sure which of these two presenters is more likely to have the ear of Francis Maude. However Ian Makgill is the 14th Viscount of Oxfuird.)

Both versions of the minutes contain a list of “observations and objectives” set by the Transparency Board following the presentations. This is the list from the original version:

Ongoing efforts to extend requirements to publish data to data.gov.uk to local authorities should be completed as soon as possible. Greater concentration of effort towards local authorities.
Follow up HMT lowering of minimum threshold from £25,000 to £10,000 although Ian does not consider that this goes far enough
Standards need to be communicated, understood and implemented more effectively across government departments.
DfT and other data holders should be pushed harder to open up significant data sets. This would drive competition into the market place. He also argued that many of the problems set out in the two presentations would be resolved through more effective engagement with local government.
Necessary to break relationship between departments and preferred developers. We need to release all data and leave it to private developers to work with.

and this is what remains in the final version:

Standards need to be communicated, understood and implemented more effectively across government departments.
Departments should be pushed harder to open up significant data sets. This would drive competition into the market place.

The more specific or potentially tricky objectives have been removed. That could mean the Transparency Board lacked consensus on those objectives, or that Cabinet Office lacks confidence in their achievability, or that the Government doesn’t want to draw attention while it works toward them.

Both presentations seem to have identified engagement with local government as a key issue, but that is likely to confound Cabinet Office unless there is a sea change in attitudes at DCLG.

Release of Foreign & Commonwealth Office Data

The following has been removed from the discussion of FCO data: “Andrew Stott argued that we need to track the use of travel advice further.” This may have been prompted by developer reaction to the retirement of FCO’s RSS feed for travel advisories (as well as of the LOCATE service). However FCO has subsequently launched a new Atom feed for travel advice.

Shakespeare Review, Domestic Strategy and National Action Plan

The final version of the minutes confirms that a member of Cabinet Office’s Transparency Team will sit on each departmental Sector Panel, as part of “renewed engagement” with departments. In the earlier version this was only an “aspiration”.

This initiative may reflect a recognition that there is a wide variation in practice and output from the Sector Panels. (I’ve made an attempt at tracking them, but it would help if Cabinet Office actually released an official list of all the Sector Panels and their members.)

European Amendment to the directive on the re-use of Public Sector Information

The Transparency Board’s summary of the final text of the revised PSI Directive is rather partial and glosses over the carve-outs for trading funds and other commercial ventures that the UK negotiated in committee. Member states have until summer 2015 to implement the Directive, and it’s doubtful whether it will make any material difference to the UK open data agenda.

The earlier version of the minutes records that Francis Maude “commented that it is likely that the UK will have gone beyond the scope of the directive by the time it is published.” The final version only records that he “commented on the direction of UK policy and encouraged consideration of options for earlier transposition in the UK.”

Postcode Address File

Paul Maltby discussed the Postcode Address File. Both versions of the minutes try to put a brave face on things by presenting Royal Mail’s sop to the open data argument as some kind of agreement. However the final version does further note that these measures “have not delivered the result needed to promote growth/innovation or to underpin the National Information Infrastructure.”

The earlier statement that “local authorities hold 80% of the relevant data and we may be able to release this data” has been rowed back somewhat, and the minutes now clarify: “it is important to note that Local Authorities hold 80% of the relevant data in the PAF and the majority of Regional Gazetteer Representatives have expressed the view that they will not be prepared to offer this data to the privatised Royal Mail for free, but that they would exchange it for an Open PAF commitment from the Royal Mail.”