RSS feedsAfter years of steady but piecemeal change, public sector information in Britain at last seems to be experiencing its ‘Berlin Wall’ moment. Politicians from both left and right are enthusiastically wielding the sledgehammer, attacking barriers that seemed unassailable only a year ago.
Painstakingly, officials have done what they can to help things along. The Office of Public Sector Information is working on a replacement for its click-use licence, favouring a Creative Commons type solution for the reuse of Crown Copyright and other public sector data. And Information Commissioner Christopher Graham has reminded the public sector that it should release more information proactively instead of waiting to be asked.
But officials can’t do it all on their own. Since January 2009, for instance, public bodies have been required to adopt the new model publication scheme, setting out what information is routinely available to the public. One year on, however, research by the Information Commissioner’s Office shows that four major government bodies still haven’t adopted the scheme, and some are making it harder than necessary for citizens to find out how public money is spent.
Conviction politics
The Parliamentary expenses scandal may be what finally convinced politicians that being more open about what government did might be one way of clawing back some credibility and crawling back into public favour. Be that as it may, the amount of heavyweight political attention devoted to information in the scandal’s aftermath has certainly been striking.
It’s the Tories who seem to have kicked it off, with a pledge of a new ‘right to data’ plus promises to publish every item of expenditure above £25,000 and make the top 20 datasets freely available for mashing. But the Tories don’t run things yet – so it’s this government that’s actually been able to deliver, and it’s doing so on a spectacular scale.
Labour began by taking a sledgehammer to one of the most stoutly guarded bastions of public information: Ordnance Survey. Prime minister Gordon Brown himself promised last November to consult on making data on electoral and local authority boundaries and postcode areas, together with mid scale mapping information, freely available from April –shovelling aside years of argument that UK plc was better served by a mapping service sheltered behind a paywall.
But that merely prepared the ground for the much more comprehensive demolition job contained in Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government. Once again, it was the PM who fronted the launch, with more pledges to open up datasets and promote transparency. Public data of all kinds would be published in reusable, machine-readable form, increasingly under an open licence – and it would include data from another hitherto fiercely protective body: the Met Office.
Latest round to Labour – and the hammering from the Conservative side of the wall has since sounded a bit muted by comparison. But they have promised in a draft manifesto to ‘unleash health information to the public’ like never before. And in London the Tories’ colourfully tactless mayor Boris Johnson has launched the London Datastore, to ‘unleash valuable facts and figures that have been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall’, as he puts it.
Nationally, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to create a technology platform that will allow a future Conservative government to harness crowdsourcing to help it produce new policy ideas, and they’ll offer a £1 million prize for creating the platform if they win the election. Cabinet office minister Tessa Jowell has dismissed this as a ‘gimmick’ but – hang on – wasn’t it her former boss Tony Blair who created the equally gimmicky People’s Panel just after Labour was first elected?
Big guns
Which raises the question: Will all this sledgehammering amount to anything after the election, regardless of who wins? It’s impossible to tell at this stage – especially since there will be more pressing matters on the incoming government’s plate. But perhaps we can take some reassurance from the credibility of the information champions that each party has managed to recruit.
Labour has some really big guns: World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, lastminute.com founder Martha Lane Fox and artificial intelligence guru Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University. Meanwhile the Conservatives are being advised by Tom Steinberg, head of the social networking site mySociety and co-author of The Power of Information, the government-commissioned report that arguably kick-started the whole of the current data opening process.
Valuable integrity
In a rare lapse of judgement, the independent minded Labour information champion Tom Watson MP criticised Steinberg for accepting the Tory job, saying that it was incompatible with his position as boss of mySociety. But to their credit, several bloggers wisely pointed out that it was far better to have someone with Steinberg’s integrity advising the Tories than not.
What could go wrong? Well, cost for one thing. But with Google boasting on its European Public Policy blog that it’s only too happy to seize any opportunities offered by the further opening up of government data, perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much about that.
What really matters is that any one of these high profile advisers could resign publicly and very embarrassingly for the political party concerned if they felt their advice wasn’t being taken seriously. If that were to happen, it’s not too difficult to imagine where public sympathy would lie.
Tim Buckley Owen is a journalist
