This government has made a lot of noise about its commitment to transparency. But Matt Ross hears key figures complaining that much of the public sector data published so far has been pretty much useless.
The transparency agenda attracts almost universal support across the political spectrum – but at CSL, some key individuals complained about the quality of much of the published data. “What will not create accountability is dumping masses of data on the internet and saying: ‘That’s it, our job’s over, we’ve put it all into the public domain’,” said Bernard Jenkin, the public administration select committee chair. Data has little value unless people understand its context and provenance, he argued: “The role of government is to provide intelligible data, as well as raw data.”
Amyas Morse, the head of the National Audit Office, agreed. Data should be timely, good quality, and published along with information on how it was gathered, he said. What’s more, it should be “well-aligned, comparable, reusable for a number of different purposes, and as far as possible standardised – because there’s no point having people describe information in different ways, different categories. That means it can’t be reused and aggregated; it’s not meaningful.”
Richard Waite, managing director of geographical information specialist ESRI, made similar arguments. “To think that [data] can simply be published and will automatically be of value, I think, is potentially naïve,” he said. “We cannot just think that if we put it out there that is transparency: that is publication of raw data.”
Even the Cabinet Office’s director of transparency, Tim Kelsey, joined in. “There’s no doubt that the quality of data that’s so far been published in relation to the existing commitments around spending is lamentably poor, and data.gov itself is not particularly accessible,” he said. With the loss of the Audit Commission, he added, “we’ve lost a big swathe of crucial, in my view, indicators relating to the national indicator set. We’ve got to find ways around that, and we will.”
Kelsey’s solution is for the government to set rules governing how data is collected, providing certainty over how it can be used to compare different services or areas. “The centre has a fundamental role in setting standards for the collection of data so that it can be comparable,” he said. “That isn’t contradictory to the notion that there should be flexibility in local presentation or metrics development”, he added: individuals would be able to process this data as they wish, but their conclusions would rest on a firm base.
While there was widespread concern over the ‘dumping’ of unprocessed data, however, speakers at CSL disagreed over how to address the problem.
Amyas Morse warned that many policies fail due to rushed development and implementation. “I really would say: ‘not too precipitate’,” he said. “We’ve probably got a certain amount of time before the public is deeply cynical about this.” He warned that if published data is “not particularly useful and informative, and low-to-rubbish grade”, people will lose faith in the agenda. Officials should proceed carefully, he said, ensuring that published data is good quality.
However, Kelsey took a very different line. “We haven’t got time,” he said. “We won’t havelarge swathes of public services unless we get to a different kind of arrangement between users and services – and the key to that is data.” When his website, ‘Dr Foster’, first used the existing “rubbish” data to compare hospital mortality rates, he recalled, there was uproar. “But within three years the data was really quite useful, because the doctors went down the corridors for the first time in their lives and met the coding clerks,” he explained; they knew that “if they didn’t, the data published in the Sunday Timeswould be completely wrong – and that was a big incentive to get on with data quality. We need to get the data out there as quickly as possible, particularlyso that we can improve it.”