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??
Some good questions Jon, and as you might expect there are no consistent answers yet, however these issues are not being ignored.Certainly the transparency is not just financial. Look at the FOIA publication schemes and definition documents to see what we should be publishing although many just scratch the surface.On decision making there are some good examples out there already - check Leeds Council website for example. http://tinyurl.com/2w9ujcpIn terms of procurement perhaps very limited effect - this stuff has been available for 5 years now under FOIA.Personal data payments are exempt from the requirement - so we will not be tellling you the Council paid Fred £750 to install a stairlift as part of his care package. Small businesses will not be, but they already know they are fair game under FOIA.Misvaluation will be a problem. But again we are already living with that. See for example the TPA attacks on website costs. We all know it is incerdible VFM compared to the alternatives but also know the press will not publish that side of the story as it does not fit their agenda.Yes there is a cost but once up and running most will be automated. Hopefully some measure of comparison will be possible as the aim should be to have a standard data definition in machine readble format which could include budget codes.
ReplyDeletePhillipThanks for that information - I am particularly pleased to hear that Fred's stairlift won't get a mention. That would be an extraordinary infringement on someone's privacy. I am interested in why you italicised 'should'...? Please can you explain further?The Leeds site is positive - but I would be interested to know whether the employees to citizens feel any more informed as a result - has this been tested, would you know?For me so much of this comes back to 'value' - and how that is measured and declared - and not just the cost of everything...
ReplyDeleteThose are great questions, most without any definitive answers, yet. I do think we are learning together. The simple answer to ‘transparency for what?’ is that it is our money, the work is done out our behalf, so it's reasonable to expect we should know what's going on. It need not/should not be more complicated than that."Will all this data empower local people?" That's what interests me. It's part of the reason we run social media surgeries (you have a brilliant one in Cardiff).Helping people understand how to use the web to tell stories, collaborate and organise is important. It is also seeds skills for helping them towards using open local data for new purposes. Soon you will be able to tell the world "this information tells us this ..." and the world will be able to reply " interesting, it tells us another story - lets talk".It will strengthen democracy.At the moment show someone who's never heard the term rss feed data mashing and you might get a frown. Take them on a journey towards that and you might get a smile.This is a journey towards digital literacy (the journey towards analogues literacy took us hundreds of years). 10 years ago had I claimed (and I wasn't) that anyone can create a webite in two minutes and it'll be easy to use I would have been ridiculed. That's true today though and we are travelling in the same dircetion when it comes to government transparency.
ReplyDeleteHi Jon,Yet another thought provoking set of questions, hopefully some that will resonate before we have sanction, as the FOI Act has caused huge issues but has created few benefits.Having worked not only in AVDC, but many districts, unitaries and counties, I'm fairly sure that positional based accounting is a far from easy perspective. Just consider refuse collection... in urban areas a team of three would be collecting from 1500 properties a day, while in very rural areas a team of two may collect from as few as 400. Sparcity, congestion, trunk roads, distance from depot, distance from tip, all affect the cost per parish, ward, household.... the same would apply for virtually any location based service.Then look at a swimming pool, it exists in one location, and will have a reducing value as distance, time and access are considered. Affluence for the user may impact on percieved value...As to being aware of costs, yes, the stairlift for Fred Bloggs shouldn't be public, but the generality of the cost pressures of an aging society are often cited as a major pressure on future budgets, and yet councils now pay several thousand a week to ensure children with issues are kept hundreds of miles from home. Those growing costs may have far more impact, and yet the decision makers themselves seem blind of that knowledge.Consider also how information is held, not only council to council but also by department and section .... there is so much variation it's scary. I recall when doing a stores stock check at year end, we had the same commodity stored in three locations with four different names, as the carpenters called them by different names.... (and they were at different resale prices!Look within these communities, most entries are oldest at the top, most recent at the bottom.... unless it's a blog... most irritating!
ReplyDeleteEveryone tends to agree with the proposition that "more data about what is going on is a good thing". Fraudsters tend to agree with it too. Initial releases of supplier data have already netted them good returns. Our Purchase to Pay team no longer accepts instructions for changing supplier bank details (irrespective of how they have been sent to us) without a confirming telephone call with an executive of the supplier concerned. We haven't been caught yet but it may be only a matter of time. http://www.sopo.org/cgi-bin/news.cgi?action=full_story_SOPO&id=354024&unpub=false&strt=&act=search_SOPO&term=&keyword_bool=&websiteId=2
ReplyDeleteTechnology don’t just embrace it use it.I am sure everyone has in their organisation computers, not good on them or claim to understand them but, if you can barcode 25000 people running past a finish line in London with out physical contact that same approach can be provided for people leaving a stock yard with stock, general rules for consistent procedure and practice should always be in place. Demands for service should always be assessed with social responsibility for community “you, me, we” always on your mind.FOI and data protection, I don’t see as a choice for a public organisations to consider I see it as your obligation. I don’t expect to see bank account details, but do expect to see banks used and capital or asset transfer up or down. As council tax shareholder.It makes sense and would prevent fraud as much as provide opportunity, but consider it democracy.I think you either accept in a community that economies’ of scale will be attached to everything eg the geography of refuse up lift, or reconsider and justify the existence of the organisation.If its not clear this is my first time in these discussion forums.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the effectiveness of transparency. From all the above comments, although it supposedly exists, people find it hard to follow, ands there is no rationale behind the figures. I look on it rather cynically - for as long as there is no real explanation of figures and events, it is similar to an AGM where the Treasurer refuses to speak to the accounts. Questions that are important are not asked. We are confronted with a decision, and we are told how much it costs.I don't know that there is the evidence that the public wants or needs it.I think the newspapers do for their quiet days - so there can be a revelation.We've been told that it is a "good thing"and that it will be beneficial. We like to believe what we're told. However, it depends on what you're looking at. There is a world of difference between the Emperor's new clothes and a vague,cloudy shape in the far distance.Or, put another way - you can have clear as crystal or clear as mud.Does anyone here believe that transparency is crystal clear to everybody?
ReplyDeleteI don't see how transparency will have much impact on purchasing / procurement processes. Those processes are mainly driven by legislation which requires that all suppliers are treated in the same way which effectively encourages arms-length treatment of all by the contracting organisation. That environment, enhanced by the new Remedies rules which took effect last December, coupled with an increasingly litigious group of losing tenderers (more cases in the first half of 2010 than in the whole of 2009) and it can be no surprise that contracting organisations are treating the process as more rather than less important.We have had private correspondence in the past Jon, and you are aware that not all contracting organisations require PQQs of encyclopaedia length to be completed in quill pen. There is a balance to be struck and you're right - different contracting organisations do apply different standards, some asking questions which are redundant from the standpoint of the SME. What I am confident about is that the current raft of cases will help drive greater consistency - but possibly not in the direction you are seeking.
ReplyDeleteLinda information your right, can be as clear as mud or Crystal clear, but it depends how information is communicated, and how user friendly and layperson understandable it is, when its layperson understandable it transparent otherwise its arrogant and detached.The question of does the public want to know or have right to know or do the public care, is not one, the servants of the public need concern themselves with, or even carry out market research on. It is the public servants obligation to ensure the masters, the public are fully aware and understand about why and what they do, should a member of public choose to take an interest.In terms of procurement, there are legal rules of engagement but do they work? Only if without qualification those rules are followed and applied across all business public and private. Thats not happening, that why there’s litigation, not because of transparency but the culture change in approach that transparency has and will dictate because of a legacy of a lack of transparency. I understand Jez Hall points.
ReplyDeleteIt is the public servants obligation to ensure the masters, the public are fully aware and understand about why and what they do, should a member of public choose to take an interest.One problem with this theory is "who pays for it". Some of the things the public appear to be interested in are actually of no interest to the servants. Do we then design ever more complex and expensive systems to record everything we do just on the off chance that at some time in the future a member of the public may "take an interest".A simple example. We have in the last couple of years been asked for our expenditure on "foreign travel". Foreign travel as a concept was of no interest to us whatsoever. Our interest was value for money. We had no code for FT. So when someone asks for a breakdown of FT we have to go item by item through thousands of invoices.There is an FOI request doing the rounds at the moment about expenditure on items made of wood.... Yes I know we have environmental duties and sustainability duties but does anyone seriously think we have spent the last six years assiduously recording agains each procurement whether it included something wooden ?
ReplyDeleteYou ask about the transparency impacts in procurement - there is already significant court support for transparency:See Croft House Care Ltd & Others v Durham County Council.The Council had tried to limit the disclosure of tender documents, on the basis of third party confidentiality. The Council also thought that full disclosure would make it difficult to re-run the procurement process if necessary.The Court said that other bidders' documents can be disclosed even if they are confidential as these can be redacted. The Court also said that the Council's own documents should be disclosed, subject to limited redaction, as these were important to Croft House's case.No question there then of commercial confidentiality so tenderers need to be mindful of that when deciding whether or not to create a tender document which may become a (lightly redacted) public document.
ReplyDelete@Martin,As Jon noted in the original post - he was interested in the law of unintended consequences. You feel that all tender documents should be public documents as soon as they are lodged. Very few private companies agree with you. Where Councils have gone to Court to protect suppliers' information they have often done so with the full cooperation and support of those suppliers. There is already some evidence that there are companies with a low cost base that do not take part in tenders for public business precisely because the current management feel that the potential public disclosures are not in their interest. Like it or not, that may have the effect of putting up the costs for some procurements because it limits competition.That isn't to say that the situation is fixed. Managements change and so do strategies. The question you need to ask yourself, is whether you would be happy to accept public contracting bodies paying higher prices for some products and services because of restricted competition brought about by disclosure rules. Perhaps you feel it is a price worth paying to ensure transparency.
ReplyDeleteSo, from John post, does Society benefit, in every case? If I used one word to sum up transparency, I think it would be cavalier.Restriction of competition cannot be beneficial. Yet how would we be certain what deterred those from tendering, unless the question is asked? If transparency exists to instil a feeling of accountability in managers - it is possibly effective, but I believe that this effect will be relatively short lived. There are ways round everything - people being people will find a way round this too.And, in turn, they may become cavalier.As there are reams of decisions and budgets that the ordinary person has very little interest in, and day follows uneventful day, when will the public notice that "transparency" is perhaps the wrong word?
ReplyDelete@MartinTo say it can all be done electronically is somewhat simplistic IMO. Take the coding of travel for example. The organisation’s primary requirements for managing and delivering the service would probably be little more than cost, type of travel (bus/train/air/taxi/mileage etc), the travel provider, the team of the person travelling, and possibly, systems permitting, the person travelling and even the time spent travelling. Whether it is foreign travel is largely immaterial, and will rarely be required. But let’s say we do capture that, why would you stop there, why not identify the continent, or whether in the EU, in fact why not just set up a country code, with relational attributes for EU etc? Someone will ask about the class of travel so add a field for that, also identify the level of the staff travelling. Then of course someone will want to know the number of air miles, so maybe the airports have to be input so the distance can be read from a table. And hey, we better identify whether onboard refreshments were purchased. Maybe then we need to record whether the chicken in the airline meal was free range (OK, I jest). And of course that sort of microscopic analysis could be repeated across all expenditure and income heads. Before you know it you’ve spent thousands on developing, maintaining and running an IT system which way exceeds the prime operational requirements of the service actually being delivered. And do you know what, even then it might not work, because staff, alongside their job of delivering their element of service, will be expected to correctly classify a dozen or so elements of every transaction for input. My experience of over twenty years tells me that in some quarters getting a correct cost centre and a single appropriate subjective account code is an achievement.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you fear giving the public knowledge. Linda, I say you have restriction of completion know. robust statutory audit would back up public by view audit. Jon, David, Why do you fear giving the public knowledge, some people might even understand the information you provide, they may even be able to help you be more effective or efficient, from the knowledge transferred from your transparent and layperson readable democratically accountable information.Why some organisation feels the need to take a defensive position a public body especially is beyond me, the facts should always speak for themselves.If a private company doesn’t agree then don’t take advantage of the tendering process that’s democracy and market reality and not detrimental to completion law. Why would a council be spending my money to protect the interests of a supplier, the supplier can take that position, why the council could on its behalf is beyond me.Transparency is never a cost because it underpins democracy, and you cant put a price on that honesty.Market forces affect all forms of business, I am sure disclosure would stimulate more business engagement than less, possibly from a more diverse group, even community based business start-ups. David put the system you mention and have designed to a computer programmer excellent, a central IT system so even your local staff can impute local car an travel details, including exceeding meal allowances or Euro travel.Economies of scale could kick in, contact all local authorities and say you want to talk the same language, think of the money you will save by using the same system and instead of your council paying for it alone, extend its success to Europe, because you in Europe, and that integration will continue to accelerate as commonality is established. It is simplistic, because it simple and makes sense, supermarkets and airlines do it Europe wide now, the DWP do it nation wide, there could be public access to public spend.Why cant you do that also, as to the issue of IT expense, if we relate the truck vs. the horse, the businesses that survived that industrial change where the ones who seen, the benefit long-term of the truck. Are Local Authorities standing still in a field of horses, because of the short term cost to long term gain with systems no longer fit for purpose, how will that help me, and make your job less complicated. Martin
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteWow - you go away to do some work for a little bit and this happens!I feel the need to respond to some of the comments - particularly the ones where I am indicted!I am most definitely FOR transparency - the more that citizens can get to hear about what their government agencies are achieving, how much it is all costing etc etc. - the better! I remain an advocate of the Freedom of Information Act - and I am heartily glad that this government appears to be taking things even further.I am most definitely FOR good procurement and if this transparency helps all this that will be a good thing. But I am AGAINST procurement processes that have not been properly evaluated for fairness, effectiveness and efficiency. I fear that procurement is still drifting towards greater and greater bureaucracy which favours larger rather than smaller organisations. (See my article which features on 'Conservative Home' just yesterday: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localgovernment/2010/10/the-bureaucrats-guide-to-procurement.html)I am FOR government initiatives where there is a clear statement of purpose and AGAINST ones which are fuzzy in their purpose. As I said originally, we need to be clear about what is transparency seeking to achieve so that we (as citizens and taxpayers) can assess whether it is VFM and indeed achieving its stated purpose.As it happens I am FOR councils and other purchasers making their budgets clear when they go out to tender: there are distinct advantages to both supplier and purchaser in making this information transparent, I believe.There is a danger of unintended consequences - there always is. Which is why I am FOR treating all this as a big experiment that deserves proper evaluation for outcomes and other consequences. Has anyone engaged the public in seeking to understand how they will use the data?And finally I wholly FOR debating this further!Thanks for everyone's contributions - I am learning lots!
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.
ReplyDelete