The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, offers reassurance for local authorities feeling swamped by requests for the data they hold.
W
hat a difference a decade makes when it comes to Freedom of
Information. The 2000 Act and its first few years of operation were all about re- acting to requests for information, all too often slowly and reluctantly. A lot of time, effort and money has gone into resisting the publication of official information. Then came the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009 and a major turning point. Suddenly, it was no longer acceptable for politicians and decision makers to keep private how public money is spent.
The expenses scandal and the development of online tools such as
whatdotheyknow.com encouraged a sort of citizen insurgency which has put a lot of public authorities under pressure. The expectation now is that citizens should be able to find out ex- actly how public authorities are run. The public authorities are finding it difficult to respond to the flood of FOI requests, par- ticularly in a time of budget cuts imposed by a government determined to cut the deficit – budget cuts which generate their own slew of FOI requests. But part of the problem remains an all too common of- ficial mindset: it’s our business, and none of yours.
The new government’s wider agenda has proved to be even more challenging: transparency and accountability alongside the austerity. The Coalition is using the openness agenda as a way of making pub- lic bodies more accountable, driving out waste and exposing double spending. The same approach is intended to ‘let a thou- sand flowers bloom’ by putting usable data into the public domain.
In early 2010 the Government launched a new website –
www.data.gov.uk – bring- ing Whitehall’s open data together in one place for the first time, making all gov- ernment spending over £25,000 avail- able at the click of a mouse. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg marked the start of the New Year by announcing that even more public bodies will be covered by free- dom of information law. And January 2011 saw the launch of the latest transparency tool – the Home Office’s crime mapping website.
64 | national health executive Mar/Apr 11
Taken together, these latest developments herald an exciting new chapter for informa- tion rights - or what we at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are calling FOI 2.0. But it has to be acknowledged that all this amounts to a double whammy squared for public authorities: handling requests, gearing up for routine transpar- ency, open data – and fewer resources to cope with it all.
So how are hard-pressed public authori- ties to respond?
My answer is: don’t fight it, embrace it. Public authorities should work on the as- sumption that the much of the informa- tion they hold could be made public in due course anyway and would be better pub- lished upfront. Proactive publication is the cost effective response and could even mean that individual FoI requests will fall away.
But there are challenges to government too – and not just Whitehall departments. I’m thinking about how the transparency and accountability policy plays into another government priority; the Big Society.
Many of the ‘willing providers’ of alter- native models of service delivery are not subject to FoI laws. It would be perverse to find that in coming up with new and in- novative ways of delivering public services, the Government inadvertently frustrated its own drive to improve accountability. Of course, some information about organisa- tions that deliver contracted out services could be accessed via an FoI request to the public authority that commissioned them, but this would only cover certain aspects of their running of a particular service.
I don’t want us to suddenly find ourselves in a situation where information that once was publicly available is now off-limits.
There are also considerable risks around the Big Society and data protection, but that’s another story; albeit of equal con- cern to the ICO, which is charged with up- holding information rights in the round, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.
Once public authorities have stopped dragging their feet and have learned to love freedom of information, they’ll un- derstand that making information publicly available isn’t just about tick-box compli- ance. It could be their key to citizen en- gagement and reputation management.
In a survey the ICO commissioned in 2010, 83% of people surveyed agreed that being able to access information held by public authorities promotes their accountability and transparency.
The fact that the Crimemapper website crashed after millions of hits on its first day shows the appetite for transparency.
The public’s assertion of their information rights in the online age is not going to go away. We all need to understand this and make proactive open- ness and accountabil- ity help us to deliver the ‘better for less’ that is required of all of us – the ICO included.
Christopher Graham
FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit
www.ico.gov.uk
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