Mr. Ed Hammond:

Thank you and good afternoon. I will begin by explaining what the Centre of Public Scrutiny is before going on to talk about some of the research I have been doing in the past few months on transparency in Britain and particularly England.

The Centre for Public Scrutiny is a charity whose principal role is to promote the idea of good governance by considering accountability, transparency and the involvement of the public in decision-making. Our main focus is on local government and we receive funding from the English Local Government Association to provide support and advice on governance to councils. We also have a broader role and that is why I have been carrying out research on transparency in the light of recent changes in government policy on transparency and open data, which principally affect England.

I will briefly provide a context for the policy environment on the other side of the Irish Sea. The Freedom of Information Act applying in the UK was passed in 2000 and commenced in 2005. The Government is considering making changes to that regime. As part of that process the House of Commons justice committee carried out post-legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year. Part of my presentation today derives from the evidence I gave that committee.

The main areas of change reflect the keenness of our current Government to move to increased openness through the proactive publication of more official data setting freedom of information within a broader regime of openness and government transparency. Freedom of information is a reactive means of achieving that by providing information to members of the public when they ask for it. The Government is trying to promote a more proactive approach whereby public institutions publish information as a matter of course. New technology forms a principal means of making this work. Open data and transparency do not necessarily lead to accountability. We carried out research earlier this year to tackle that central issue and principle.

I will go through some of the principal findings from that research. I started by studying the stream of information and how the freedom of information provisions have been embedded in UK law and culture over the past five or ten years, and the wider context of transparency. The first thing that needs to be done is to establish some aims and objectives for transparency. Policy-makers often forget this on the assumption that transparency is inherently a good thing. In light of the need for open-space policy-making more generally, we need to think about why transparency is a good thing in order to be able to judge whether the measures we put in place to promote and develop it are working.

The constitution unit, which is part of University College London, took this approach when it carried out a very deep exercise in freedom of information in 2009. I fed off that to establish some principles on transparency across the board. I came up with four principal objectives, the first being to mitigate risk by opening up policy making. The idea is that by opening up the policy-making process the assumptions of decision-makers about the impact and development of policy can be constructively challenged and potential risks can be reflected more accurately, and that by bringing different perspectives into policy-making one makes law and policy more accurately. The second objective is increasingly important in the English and British contexts - that is, facilitating choice. Increasingly in the UK we talk about using data to make it easier for the public to exercise choice in public services. One of the principal areas in which this happening is the National Health Service. We now have a system whereby when general practitioners refer people for treatment, they can choose the hospitals at which they will be treated. The use of official information is important in ensuring that those people can exercise choice in an informed way. The third objective is one of the more traditional reasons for regarding transparency as a good thing - that is, control of expenditure. The idea is that publishing information adds value by coupling the publication of information with mechanisms for accountability, thereby minimising corruption. Measuring value may have an impact on decisions. Publication of financial and expenditure data can be used to establish whether a policy is generally achieving the ends it aims to achieve. The fourth objective is the most obvious one - that is, promoting democracy through easy access to data and information and encouraging participation. This is based on the idea that the public has a right to information about services provided on its behalf and about decisions made for it and by its elected representatives. Those are the four principal objectives.

The central point that I want to highlight from the research is the importance of culture, behaviour and values in making transparency work. Consideration of freedom of information in England focuses mainly on response rates and the amount of time and resources involved in responding to FOI requests, because they are free, as are data protection requests. There are two separate regimes in the UK, covered by separate Acts - one for official information and one for personal information. The focus has always been on the process. Consequently, many have viewed FOI as a compliance issue in respect of timescales, without thinking about why FOI and transparency are important. I am trying to get to the bottom of the culture of transparency, encouraging the idea that we should be publishing more information because by doing so we achieve some of the objectives that I have set out, making policies and decisions better, and recognising that the publication of official information is not necessarily a one-way street by encouraging the public to respond with its interpretation of that data and additional data of its own, some of which is anecdotal. By making the information fuller we make it more useful and effective. People need to recognise the value they can bring to decision-making more generally. That cultural and attitudinal aspect of transparency is often forgotten.

I want to make a couple of points about issues that have come up in England with regard to criticisms of open data and the FOI regime. The first involves context. Often there are criticisms of FOI and measures to increase transparency more generally because it is felt that information is released without context and therefore people cannot effectively understand what data means. In certain circumstances, that is quite correct.

The issue is understanding that context is not just about requiring public servants to provide reams of explanatory data around official information, which of course is an additional resource requirement for them, it is about understanding that the public at large and official institutions can and should link data together to provide that context. An increasing trend around the open data movement in the UK is the idea that data from a range of institutions can and should be linked together to provide an accurate and comprehensive picture of how service is delivered in an area. Context can be dealt with in a way that is resource-neutral for public servants.

The second issue is the fact that publishing information is perceived to have a chilling effect on policy development, in particular at national level. The justice committee inquiring into this took evidence from a number of people who felt that freedom of information had had a chilling effect on the willingness of civil servants to provide accurate information to Ministers to allow them make decisions. The idea was that poor decisions were being produced because civil servants might not, for some reason, want to produce frank advice which they felt if published later might embarrass Ministers. Although this opinion has been expressed by many on this side of the water, it is not supported by the evidence and was not an argument accepted by the justice committee. I am not sure if this is a concern or issue in Ireland but it is an issue that reflects the cultural challenge of transparency rather than structural issues around risks of transparency hindering effective policy developments. This is not to suggest that there should not be a safe space for policy development that can happen in private, but that space should be quite small. Perhaps I should pause as this point.