Implementing Transparency Report from the NAO

Data are of course massively important to business clients  making commercial decisions, and of course to the lawyers advising them. Data management is also a huge aspect of the academic and practitioner work in intellectual property.

According to the National Audit Office, “In some sectors, data that would better inform accountability or choice is either not held or not yet made available. For example, in social care, neither the Department of Health nor its funded bodies collect appropriate information on comparative costs and performance of providers of home care for adults. For local government services, the Government has discontinued established performance frameworks and the Local Government Association is developing a new approach to performance reporting.”

According to the aforementioned press release, Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said:

“Opening up access to public information has the potential to improve accountability and support public service improvement and economic growth. What the Government is lacking at the moment is a firm grasp of whether that potential is being realised. If transparency initiatives are to be more than aspirations, then Government needs to measure and monitor both their costs and benefits. This is vital for tracking success and learning what works.”

The Guardian has reported on the following aspects:

“Read between the lines of its report out today, Implementing Transparency, and you will see a government which has been chucking out tonnes of data, that no-one looks at and without a complete strategy. Oh and it’s cost an awful lot of money.”

Specifically, their recent article provides the following:

• Government departments reckon on spending from £53,000 to £500,000 each year on just providing and publishing open data
• data.gov.uk was originally run by the Central Office of Information and received funding of £1.2m in 2010-11 from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In 2011-12, the project was brought inside the Cabinet Office, and what the report calls “further engagement activity with stakeholders” increased the annual running costs to £2m
• The police crime maps cost £300,000 to set up and have annual running costs of more than £150,000. The National Policing Improvement Agency has budgeted £216,000 in 2011-12 to further develop the site, including linking crime data to police and justice outcomes

This does not seem to be matched by public interest. For example, also according to that Guardian report:

“While data.gov.uk has had more than 1.75m visits since it was launched in January 2010 (which is pretty much what the Datablog gets in a good month) most of its visitors leave from either the home page or the data page on the website. Page views for transparency data on the Ministry of Justice website represented just 0.02% of the overall site traffic from April to September 2011″