Transparency Board Minutes - 19th May 2011

TRANSPARENCY BOARD

Minutes of the meeting held on 19 May at the Cabinet Office:

Welcome and Introductions

The note of the previous meeting was agreed. There were no comments on the actions TB(6)1.ii.

Lessons learnt from release of street level crime data

The Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice provided an overview of the website www.police.uk since its launch in January 2011 (see: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/press-releases/street-level). The user statistics for Police.uk confirm it has been a consistently popular site, with over 420 million hits since launch, and currently estimated 400,000 visits each month. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Crimestoppers organisation has had significantly more calls since Police.uk launched. One key finding has been that the information released is deemed by individuals to be more relevant and useful to them personally because the data is broken down to street level. This has enabled citizens to do their own analysis, and create their own journey mapping.

The Police.uk site would continue to be refined and developed:

• the Home Office team and National Police Improvement Agency (NPIA) plan to integrate British Transport Police data later in the year.

• they are also in discussions with the Devolved Administrations: Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

• two police forces - West Yorkshire and Lincolnshire – were undertaking a Trailblazer project to look at linking crime data to court data so that citizens could see whether a crime had led to a prosecution and a conviction.

• there would be future pilots to develop the content on the site, but these will be progressed carefully and cautiously to balance transparency with the rights to privacy.

In discussion the Transparency Board:

• thanked the Home Office and NPIA for the initiative and observed that Police.uk does ‘what it says on the tin’ for citizens; and for both citizens and the developer community, it provides data, and the ability to use this data immediately.

• noted that Police.uk had also created an important feedback loop from citizens to the police.

• noted that different categories of crime required different degrees of privacy – for instance offences against people compared to anti-social behaviour in the street.

Action:  Home Office and NPIA team to share the Police.uk site analytics with the Transparency Board.

Due: June.

Action:  Transparency Board and MCO to convene a meeting with the Information Commissioner and the Home Office minister to understand the key challenges of offender level information.

Due: June

The Minister for the Cabinet Office thanked the Minister and team for the success of Police.uk. It represented a major project undertaken at breathtaking speed and had been a great success. It provided an exemplar to other initiatives.

Open Business Platforms

The lead Cabinet Office official set out the rationale for Government supporting the business information market through sponsorship of a unique identifier for UK businesses – both limited companies and other businesses. The initiative was expected to benefit businesses in a range of ways, for example, promoting safety standards or credit worthiness, or identifying potential suppliers or customers (including Government). The ability to more quickly access information about businesses in the community would also benefit social entrepreneurs and the general public.

The Companies House official confirmed the initiative aligned well with Companies House's overall role, to make company information available, and that creating a unique reference identifier for registered limited companies was a relatively simple process to implement. They plan to have them in place by October 2011. They had concerns about the Open Government Licence but data would be available under similar terms.

The HMRC official described the process by which non-registered businesses would acquire a unique identifier, noting this would be via an opt-in service hosted on its new customer-facing Registration Wizard and My Tax Dashboard services. Taxpayer confidentiality would be maintained through the opt-in service, with only those businesses wishing to acquire a unique identifier able to do so.

In discussion the Transparency Board:

• noted that the same approach could be applied to non-business corporate entities such as charities.

• suggested that use of the URI should become part of the conditions for government procurement and the giving of government grants to charities and the URI should link to the information available in Contract Finder.

• noted that it should be possible to use the URI to establish whether the business was an SME.

• it was essential that the identifier and basic information about the business was freely available and re-usable. Companies House should discuss their concerns about use of the Open Government Licence with the Cabinet Office Transparency Team and come back to the Transparency Board if necessary.

• it was important that BIS fully supported the strategy.

Action:  URI project team to discuss with the Contract Finder team a) how URIs can be included in the information provided, and b) ways in which this would help Government better understand supplier activity, e.g. the proportion of SMEs bidding for Government contracts.

Due: June

Action:  Officials to discuss URI project with BIS

Due: June

Action:  URI project to engage with the Office for Fair Trading and National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) to determine how to apply this initiative to government grants and contracts with charities.

Due: June

Action: Companies House to discuss licensing further with the Cabinet Office Transparency Team

Due: June

Transparency Strategy

There was a discussion on the proposed areas of focus for the next 6 months. Following the initial focus on the transparency of public bodies in the next phase there would be a focus on using Transparency data to ensure better public sector delivery and to increase citizen choice.

Transparency information case studies demonstrate that transparent information is a key factor in successfully driving-up better safety provisions within healthcare. For example, the benchmarking of this information, via anonymised event level data, offers citizens enough information to enable them to make informed decisions about which professionals they turn to, or which hospitals they choose to attend.

Transparent data also provides the government departments themselves with a mechanism to demonstrate how and when they have responded to citizens’ feedback.

There followed a discussion on proposed deliverables. It was suggested that in key areas of public sector delivery (i.e. health, education, transport, and justice) there be a clear ministerial lead for Transparency identified in each sector and a board established to focus on the specific area and to support and challenge the sector. TK requested the support of the members of the Transparency Board in helping to focus progress via these boards.

AOB

There were no other matters arising.