Country Commitments
Enhancing Public Service Delivery through Open Government
“We want to be the most open and transparent government in the world.”– Prime Minister David Cameron (2010)
Open Data and Transparency may be the most powerful levers of 21st century public policy. They present multiple opportunities offering benefit to the public sector, individuals, businesses and the UK as a whole. Open Data enables accountability; it improves outcomes and productivity in key services through informed comparison; it transforms social relationships – empowering individuals and communities; and it drives dynamic economic growth.
One story indicates how open data and transparency can help to transform a service: Five years ago, Sir Bruce Keogh, then a cardiac surgeon in Birmingham, convinced his fellow cardiac surgeons to publish their individual patient mortality rates. Five years later, death rates have fallen. Sir Keogh’s work demonstrates how transparency compliments the work of our public service professionals, improves public service quality and performance, and saves lives.
But making data open is not enough, we will also establish mechanisms to promote and collate feedback from those actually using the data. And we will use this feedback to improve our services and ensure they respond to real needs.
The UK Government new Transparency Strategy: “Making Open Data Real” was published on 4th August and is open for public consultation until 27 October 2011 at www.data.gov.uk/opendataconsultation. This, together with the UK’s existing strong record on Transparency and Open Data, means that our focus will fall on the Open Government Partnership grand challenges of:
- Improving Public Services; and
- More Effectively Managing Public Resources.
We will consult publicly on this country action plan primarily via existing fora, including the Public Sector Transparency Board; the Local Public Data Panel and the Transparency Sector Boards that are currently being established. These bodies already advise the Government on wider transparency and Open Data issues. In addition, we will also convene and consult with a wider group of stakeholders to consider the country plan specifically.
Open Government Efforts to date
The Government’s strong focus on increasing public sector accountability, improving public services and more effectively managing public resources, has been reflected in two open letters from the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to his Cabinet. In the first,1 published in May 2010, the Prime Minister set out a series of specific areas for release of data. All data published is made available in an open format so that it can be re-used by third parties. From July 2010, government departments and agencies must ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.
In his second letter on Transparency, published on 7 July 2011,2 the Prime Minister announced a series of unprecedented commitments to be delivered over the coming year. These are focussed on releasing data that would drive the improvement of public services, in particular: health, education, criminal justice, transport and government financial information.
The UK is determined to have the most ambitious Open Data agenda of any other government and these commitments demonstrate our ambition to make public services more transparent and accountable. A list of new datasets to be released as a result of these commitments is attached at Annex A (at the end of the text under the Commitments tab).
In addition to the specific dataset commitments made in these letters, the following actions have also been taken:
- The establishment of the Public Sector Transparency Board to drive forward the Government’s agenda. It is chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, and its members are a mix of data specialists, who challenge public sector bodies in the implementation of transparency and open data standards. One of the Transparency Board’s first achievements was the publication of the Public Data Principles, which provide behavioural guidance for public bodies on how they need to do business.
- The establishment of Data.gov.uk, which was conceived as a core channel to find data. The number of datasets now stands in excess of 6000 and the site is being made easier for the general public to use. Improvements are also being made to make the site more accessible for people who publish data and for developers.
- The creation of the Open Government Licence, a licensing model which facilitates the use and re-use of a broad range of public sector information. The licence covers any information that an Information Provider and/or rights owner offers for re-use under its terms and conditions. It is intended to be interoperable, with widely-used models such as Creative Commons and Open Data Commons. It supports the inclusion of machine-readable descriptions and semantic web properties.
- E-petitions - in August 2011 the Government launched a new site that gives all citizens the power to influence government policy in the UK. Anybody can create an e-petition about anything that the Government is responsible for and if it gets at least 100,000 signatures, it will be eligible for debate in the House of Commons.
- In January 2011, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude commissioned an independent review of the impact of Transparency on privacy. The review, published on 13 September 2011, serves to ensure that as the Government develops its transparency agenda, it continues to uphold high standards of personal privacy. In addition, it will support officials and Ministers in ensuring that on-going releases of data are done in a way that provides maximum transparency as well as appropriate protection safeguards.
There is still far more to be done – at present the reality for citizens is that getting access to meaningful data about their public services can still be difficult and is sometimes impossible. Equally for enterprise, particularly start-ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), getting access to data that helps grow businesses may be difficult or close to impossible. The quality of data that is currently published is often poor, and publication may be intermittent, which is unhelpful for business in particular. Standards do not exist across departments or wider public bodies, so it is difficult to make comparisons. Data may be published without clear explanations of context, meaning that in reality it is difficult to use. Fundamentally, the right to continued access to a dataset, once released, does not exist. The culture within the public sector and with public service providers is not currently focused on making data available.
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