Mr. Ed Hammond:

On policing, there are 43 police forces in England and Wales, all of which produce crime mapping data which allow people to interrogate information about crimes in their areas, including crime response and clear-up rates. The issue with this is also one of context. It is interesting that 18 months ago, when crime mapping were first published in England and Wales, there was an initial flurry of interest in it, in terms of people inquiring about crimes committed in their areas and so on. However, public interest has dropped off dramatically since then because the information provided gives only a limited picture of services in local areas. This comes back again to the issue of context and ensuring that the information provided is linked to other data which tell more about issues around crime across the whole public sector landscape, including community safety, crime prevention, probation and the justice system. That is a complex issue.

In terms of wider policing performance, it has been usual for some time for policing performance issues to be discussed in public. Up to recently, policing in England and Wales was controlled by police authorities, which were bodies on which local authority members sat. They met in public to examine issues such as police performance and published findings and reports. They also scrutinised the police service and priorities. That system has since changed to one of elected police and crime commissioners, the purpose of which is to improve accountability and transparency. This highlights the issue that many of the transparency and open data issues in policing sit outside of the FOI regime. I am not aware in detail of the particular ways in which police forces respond to and deal with FOI requests. While they are subject in general terms to FOI, in many instances freedom of information requests on specific issues are not responded to, including on operational policing in respect of which the release of information would result in individuals being identified, which information is protected by the data protection regime. FOI requests to the police forces are limited to strategic and tactical information about policing rather than specific or operational issues.

On the question of freedom of information and commercial sensitivity-confidentiality, this is a significant issue which has been raised in this country in the past few years as more and more services hitherto delivered by local authorities or other public institutions and have been contracted out to private companies. The question that arises is whether those firms should be subject to FOI. The conclusion is that they should not be. There was a proposal that revisions would be made to the FOI regime to make such organisations subject to FOI in this country. However, the perception is that the Government is pulling back from this approach. It tends to be the case that contracts between public bodies and private sector companies include provisions around transparency, openness and accountability. By definition, and because there is no nationally accepted scheme for doing this, those arrangements end up being quite ad hoc. This means one must rely on the contract management of those regimes and systems to ensure that information gets out, which sometimes happens and other times does not. It is a challenge. The argument being made about commercial confidentiality being an enormous barrier to FOI is not well made. There are ways and means of preserving commercial confidentiality around procurement and tendering processes, where confidentiality is required. The issue that arises is separating that from service delivery, where there is no justification for commercial confidentiality other than in very limited circumstances. There should be an expectation from private sector organisations providing a public service that they should be held to the standards of transparency and accountability demanded of public services which historically would have delivered those services.

The third point concerned the role of regulatory bodies. In this country we deal with that in a slightly formal way as, in part, Departments produce what are called accountability system statements. They have been produced for a time. The permanent secretary, or senior civil servant, in each Department is required to produce a statement setting out where accountability sits within that Department, with the different regulatory bodies and quangos or quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations and executive agencies that sit under the Department. It is identifying where accountability and responsibilities lie while ensuring there is a system of exerting control over those bodies. The Government has been quite aggressively seeking to take much more control of the work which hitherto was carried out by regulatory bodies and executive agencies, which continue to have in some instances a significant amount of freedom. In many cases those responsibilities have been taken back into parent Departments, whereas in some instances the body has been abolished entirely, and the responsibilities simply are not carried out any more.

In more general terms, there is a certain reliance on those regulatory bodies adopting a transparent and open approach. There has been much flux in the past couple of years in what regulatory bodies are responsible for, how they work, who sits on boards and how they publish information. The British Government has been pushing for regulators and inspectors to be much more open about the way in which they operate, and we are beginning to see that happen more now through the likes of Ministers exerting direct control, agreements around funding and political influence. We are still in a state of flux but those issues highlighted have been identified as a concern, particularly bodies not having effective oversight. The systems I mentioned have been implemented and strengthened in trying to make this oversight more effective.