I have been reflecting on what all this spending transparency might mean for local Councils. Here are some of my rambling questions:
- Has anyone answered the question ‘transparency for what?’ In other words is transparency an end itself or is the ambition of the Government to achieve something else? And in particular what? How will a local authority be able to judge whether the processes it puts in place to be more transparent are a success or not? What will success look like? How should and will all these efforts be evaluated?
- Is this / should this only be about financial transparency – what about transparency of decision making. Will this public facing transparency make the organisation itself more transparent? What will be the impacts on the leaders and decision makers of all this transparency? Will leadership have to change to match this new environment?
- What impact will this transparency have on purchasing / procurement? How will suppliers be affected? Will procurement processes become more transparent? (From a supplier perspective, these processes often appear Byzantine and closed – you can see my thoughts about this here: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/13-ways-to-ensure-that-procurement.html) Will tenders now go out with a ‘health warning’? How much will this transparency affect commercial confidentiality, prices and the marketplace? Will this evaluated? How?
- How will personal confidentiality be protected? I am thinking here not just of ‘say’ the costs of caring for people with multiple & complex needs for example – but also small businesses who may not want all their payments exposed for a variety of reasons. (Will this data be used by divorce lawyers in the future for example!?) How much room is there for misinterpretation? I am reminded of the case of a paediatrician who was hounded by local people who thought she was a paedophile etc...
- Broadly – what are the unintended consequences of this policy? What are the risks, what can be done to mitigate those risks?
- What do the public want or need? Where is the market research to find out the kinds of information the public want? Why £500 – why not £1000 – or £300? Will this threshold be index linked?
- How will the value of the services and products provided be represented in all this data? Is this a policy of ‘cost of everything, value of nothing’? As a citizen I want my council to be spending my money wisely – how will this data answer my concerns? How will the use of this data be tracked – if my council spends £80K on assembling all this data just so a couple of researchers from the Tax Payers Alliance can get a couple of questions answered, I might not be very pleased.
- How much will all this cost – what will be the transaction costs? Is it merely a question of uploading the budget spreadsheets to the net for all to see? Will the raw date be enough? Will it need to be cross referenced with other data to make it useful? For example, I live in Buckingham in the Aylesbury Vale District. One of the local concerns is that the Council spends disproportionately more money on Aylesbury than on the two conurbations in the North of its area (Buckingham and Winslow). Will the data allow me to investigate this? Will the date be cross referenced with budget heads or procurement tenders and so forth?
- Will all this data empower local people? How will this be measured? How will society be better as a consequence?
Any more rambling thoughts - or better still answers??
I won't try and answer all the questions, but a couple. I have no doubt that some suppliers will analyse the data to work out how much our budgets are likely to be and so use this for pitching pricing, but I guess the governemtn have weighed this up. I think transparency is good, but I agree the question is for who. My view is residents (of Surrey in our case). The government guidlines on how to present the data makes me think they have missed the point. The amount of data a columns will put the general public off - it becomes data NOT information OR knowledge. It needs to be easily digestible. The audience shouldn't be tax payers alliance or data cruncers, accountants etc. Therefore it should be the local authority which decides how things should be presented for its residents and react to their feedback. Isn't that the idea of localism? Accept some commonality is good, but shouldn't be too restrictive. Finally, when data cleansing is required, which tends to be the case when names of people can slip through, monthly data seams excessive.
ReplyDeleteThere is no doubt that the FOIA has already increased transparency enormously. I don't distinguish between FOI and non FOI requests except that a formal FOI request gets a written response. So if a company rings up and says that they supply a particular product or service as often as not I will provide details of when our existing contract terminates (providing I have the contract database open when the call comes in). That saves them the effort of compiling a formal request and it certainly saves me time in providing my answer.One problem is that we are getting requests for increasingly granular information in the apparent belief that it can be answered accurately. We are aware that errors increase sharply as the data is refined into smaller and smaller categories. In a formal response I normally provide a health warning depending on the data that is being provided but I fear that the data may be re-used in another context and the health warning may be lost. That does no-one any favours.
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