Transparency Board Minutes - 8th June 2011

TRANSPARENCY BOARD

Minutes of the meeting held on 8 June at the Cabinet Office:

Welcome and Introductions

The Chair welcomed all attendees, and noted apologies.

Prime Minister’s letter and Strategy update

Tim Kelsey outlined the direction of travel in the proposed PM’s letter; which was welcomed by the Board. They discussed some additional datasets for inclusion, including a previous commitment to publicise the government property database and information on literacy in schools. They suggested an explicit commitment to use the Open Government Licence when publishing.

The Board noted that process reform is central to the Transparency Agenda. They were also keen to see the letter reiterate the success of the UK open data initiatives, restate the commitment to strengthen information rights via the post legislative scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act and reflect the Chancellor’s commitment in his Zeitgeist speech, that ‘our ambition is to become the world leader in open data, and accelerate the accountability revolution that the internet age has unleashed’.

Transparency Strategy general update

The Transparency Board discussed the proposed strategic approach for the - next 6 months.

To support the Transparency Board recommendations it was proposed that the members of the Transparency Board sit on – and chair, where appropriate the departmental panels which will guide development of the open data strategy, amongst other deliverables and then hold departments to account for delivery.

The Board noted that it was vital to get the secretariat approach right. The secretariat needed to be involved and active. It was also important to get activists on the panels.

It was agreed that the generic name for these panels would be ‘Sector Transparency Boards’ to denote that they would often extend their interest beyond the specific data holdings of the department, where that department delivered its responsibilities through agencies or private sector contractors.

The Board welcomed the international aspects of the strategy. By political vision and timely delivery the UK had a strong base to exercise more leadership in the international arena.

Action: The Transparency Director will present on The Open Government Partnership at a future Transparency Board.

Due: September

Action: A letter from the MCO will be circulated to departments to accompany the terms of reference for the new Sector Transparency Boards

Due: June

Local Public Data Panel update

Professor Nigel Shadbolt gave a verbal update of progress and lessons learnt from the work of the Local Public Data Panel.

The Board thanked him and his colleagues for their work, and noted that it was important that the successful attributes of the Panel were taken into the arrangements for the new Sector Transparency Boards.

Data from the Health Sector

Dr Mark Davies presented to the Board on how transparency is core to future healthcare. He cited the challenges of demographics and the increase of chronic conditions as reasons why healthcare professionals need to work with patients as equal partners in order to share the limited resources available. He described this as being, in his opinion, the beginning of a cultural shift for the doctor/patient dialogue.

In listing the achievements to date he noted that the health sector is the largest contributor to data.gov.uk. The areas of greatest interest are: patient reported outcome metrics (PROMS); NHS dental statistics; adult critical care; obesity, physical activity & diet. Improvements to this existing work would be those such as the information gathering of C Difficile cases which are now collated on a weekly, rather than a monthly basis.

He supported the Transparency Agenda’s aim of releasing information to support individual choice. Though beneficial in the short term, the real benefits will show up in a decade. He pointed to healthcare information already available which is at times too detailed and non-specific to be readily useful to citizens.

He quoted the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF), introduced 4 years ago, as an example of progress which initially caused debate but has since become the accepted practice for supporting clinical outcomes.

A particular area of interest is that of prescriptions: for example what drugs are being prescribed at a practice level: and can these inputs be mapped to outputs? As with other areas of transparency the Board acknowledged that citizens must be reassured that only non-personal data will be considered.

Dr Davies used the example of the National Diabetes Audit (NDA) which is the largest such database in the world, with over 2 million persons in England and Wales. However 30% of practices are still not submitting their data despite this being the best example of care from cradle to grave. Ideally all practices should submit information to ensure that statistics can be viewed across the UK.

The work of GPES, the GP extraction service, is designed to provide data extractions that are comparable across the whole NHS. The information is managed centrally, and will provide evidence to justify which reforms are prioritised, and which resources are provided with investment. Lasting reforms are not possible without good data, and all processes adopted need to be transparent.

The NHS Information Centre is running a pilot to increase the number of GP practices where patients have access to their own records: currently there only 50 in existence. The Transparency Board noted that this feeds into the ‘digital by default’ agenda whereby doctors, patients and their families can work together to ensure the best healthcare is provided via digital means.

Improving the quality of financial data 

The Deputy Director of Financial Management and Reporting, HMT, presented to the Board. While all departments were publishing data there was still work to be done to make this business as usual:

• there were still manual processes to prepare the data for publication, which were burdensome in departments with the highest number of transactions or redactions.

• there was variability in publication of 2009/10 data, where individual departmental ministers took the decision on whether to publish.

• Four departments still have not published pre-May 2010 data.

• departments with a board or steering group focussed on the Transparency Agenda seemed to show greater progress in their publication of spend data than those without.

Looking forward:

• all departments have submitted plans for improving data quality.

• given the practical challenges the Treasury expected to see a line of continuous improvement rather than immediate perfection.

• the Treasury had a project (“OSCAR”) to replace the current COINS system by June 2012, part of which will define a common Chart Of Accounts for Government Departments. When implemented this would make the data more comparable between departments, but many departments would only be able to adopt it when they upgraded their financial systems as they adopted shared services.

• 7 out of the 24 main departments were already reporting to the £500 level; the Treasury were consulting others on the implications and possible timescale for moving to £500, and would report to Ministers in September.

• feedback from the release of the historic COINS data was very positive despite its complexity.

The Board thanked the Treasury for the presentation and for the work done to deliver the Transparency commitment. In discussion the following points were made:

• it was important to improve upstream processes including the original recording of financial transactions so that data publication required less manual intervention.

• automating the processes would give officials more time to analyse expenditure, and thereby identify further areas for efficiency scrutiny.

• as with all examples of collated data, there will be errors, but that it would be really helpful to the wider process is if errors could be reported as part of a constructive feedback loop.

• it would be helpful to have an Open Data manual for the published datasets.  The Board discussed the use of a challenge function for ongoing policy work in this area, and suggested convening a workshop to explore strategies to help improve data quality.

• it would be helpful if expenditure items were linked to the contract data on Contracts Finder. Each item of expenditure should have a reference to the contract under which it was made.

• expenditure items needed to link to the unique reference identifiers being developed by Companies House and HMRC.

• it would be helpful, and would enable easier reconciliation with overall expenditure, for each month’s data to have two additional rows – one with the total value of expenditure below the threshold for publication and one with the total value of expenditure items which had been redacted.

• the threshold of £25,000 had originally been set on the expectation that central government payments were larger than local authority payments. However with delegated budgeting it now appeared that much more expenditure was in items below £25,000, and where expenditure had been reported down to £500 there was a much clearer pressure on local managers to ensure that expenditure was fully justifiable. The Board felt it was therefore important to make progress towards a £500 threshold across the whole of Government.

Demonstration of the Contract Finder website

The Director of Procurement, Policy and Capability, Cabinet Office, presented the website. It was beginning to be signposted by other organisations and that it had been received positively by users. The Board welcomed the progress made and the parallel simplification of procurement instructions. In discussion the following points were made:

• the contracts themselves needed to be presented in open, machine-readable formats. The use of Word documents and PDFs had been inevitable for the initial delivery, but there should be a clear plan to adopt open, reusable formats and a target date to do so.

• it was important to monitor closely the extent to which individual departments were complying with the requirement to publish their contracts and tenders, and their timeliness in doing so. These should show, for instance, how many contracts each department has signed during the last full calendar month; how old the contracts published in the most recent full calendar month are; and how many contracts have not been published and why.

• it was reported that just over 1100 new contracts had been awarded since January 2011, of which almost 800  have been published on Contract Finder.

 Public Sector Mapping Agreement

The Director General of Localism, Communities and Local Government was invited to discuss the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) work with the Board.

The Director set out the purpose of the PSMA: to provide a better deal for the public sector and the taxpayer on mapping data. There was discussion on the Transparency Board’s concern that though the PSMA is a good deal for the public sector it does not allow the data to be shared more widely. The Board set out their view that a single national address file, created by a merging of the GeoPlace data and the Postcode Address File needed to be available as a public good and as core data infrastructure. They also set out their view that this decision needed to be taken urgently.

The Board noted that the proposed central contract with Royal Mail for the Postal Address File was in line with the Government’s procurement strategy, but would like more details and, in particular, how the expenditure already made by the Government on this product could be used to free the data for everyone.

It was agreed that a wider decision about where responsibility lay within central government for policy on geospacial addressing was needed.

Action: Transparency team officials to liaise with CLG, ShEx and CO colleagues in the first instance to raise the issue of policy ownership.

Due: August

Action: CLG to provide the Transparency Board with a copy of the proposed agreement between CLG and the data provider for comment.

Due: June