In our world of open government, it is sometimes easy to forget what we are doing it all for. Open data alone can never be enough, but it is the key to helping us all as citizens better understand and monitor the work of government, holding it to account for how our money is spent and how well public services are performing, creating an army of armchair auditors.
But while there are a number of interesting tools emerging to help us make sense of this flood of data, one initiative in particular recently caught my eye. The Tech Policy Scorecard simplifies and centralises government pledges on, well, technology policy, creating a clear and accessible means by which to hold the coalition government to account for its pledges on the use of technology in government. Here the man behind the scorecard Richard Parsons tells us more…
Reform of the structure and operation of government is often seen as of little interest to anyone but professional Whitehall watchers.
Yet there is one such change the coalition is seeking to bring about which has huge implications.
As David Cameron told civil servants:
“I do not want you and your colleagues to think your role is to guarantee the outcomes we want to see in our public services ñ or to directly intervene in organisations to try and improve their performance. It’s our job – we as politicians, you as civil servants – to create the conditions in which performance will improve, by making sure professionals answer to the public.”
So if you are unhappy with the quality of your local school or hospital or council then it is now your job to move to another service provider or vote for a new council.
One of the tools to drive this change of approach is greater transparency.
This is the main reason why the government is so enthusiastic about open data – it provides the information to hold individual service providers to account.
But if the government insists it is not responsible for delivering better services, what is it accountable for?
The declared position is that ministers are responsible for creating the systems which will in turn drive improvements through choice, payment-by-results, democratic accountability and so on.
So if results on the ground aren’t the yardstick for measuring the government’s success, what is?
The information which the government wants the public to focus on is provided in the form of the departmental business and structural reform plans, which outline policies intended to create successful structures and systems.
There are also the monthly status reports which show how much progress is being made against the declared timetable for individual changes.
Given that these are now the most important way in which the government says it wants to be held to account, it is important to give them as much visibility as possible.
This is one of the reasons why I started keeping track of how the government says it is doing at www.eDemocracyBlog.com/scorecard.
On this page I’m tracking around 80 significant eGovernment, eDemocracy and parliamentary reform policies which are relevant to the issues I most frequently post about on the blog.
The Scorecard lists the commitments, which department is responsible, when the policy is due to be delivered and whether it is currently on track or not.
The Guardian’s pledge tracker does something similar, covering a broader range of policy areas.
But the Guardian takes the Coalition Programme for Government [PDF] as its starting point. While this contains all the policies the government is committed to delivering, it has the drawback of missing out all the policies which were contained in election manifestos but were subsequently ditched in the post-election negotiations.
So with the Scorecard I opted to focus on a narrower set of policies but to take as the starting point the manifestos and other election pledges of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
From there it is possible to see which pledges made it into the coalition agreement and which were dropped.
Then it is possible to track which pledges made it into the departmental business plans as well as those which currently appear to be in limbo.
Missed deadlines, and those commitments which are quietly reworded, are made more visible with a ‘traffic light’ colour coding scheme.
And, unlike with the Number 10 transparency site, the Scorecard can be sorted by users on criteria such as party manifesto, policy area or delivery status.
This gives more flexibility to the user than the basic departmentally-organised information produced by Number 10.
It is also interesting to discover policies which were never in any manifesto, such as the commitment to release more data on sentencing for each individual court. This gives some indication of how parties learn from the experience of governing, and adapt to challenges they may not have anticipated.
So this form of accountability is going to become increasingly important if ministers have their way (admittedly a big if).
It would be great if blogs in other areas also took up the challenge of keeping tabs on what ministers are up to.
A network of bloggers from different sectors all collating and assessing government progress would be a great resource for the public at election time.
And this is what the government wants, after all.
nice post Richard…definitely crucial that we ensure transparency is not a mask for less accountability (try finding the killer fact within 157,000 lines of gov expenditure!).
We’re constantly trying to do what you say – ‘keeping tabs on what ministers are up to’ – in the policy areas we know about (which are similar/overlap with yours).
One thing we’ve just done, which will be published very shortly, is to look at progress the Coalition has made against our ’10 Big Ideas for 2010′, which were drawn from our recent research – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/what-s-new/10-big-ideas-for-2010. We then assessed each manifesto against these – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/files/the_road_to_may_6th_2010_04.pdf – and now we’ve gone back to see what progress has been made since the election.
Sadly, some of the most promising proposals have been lost by the wayside (anything to support local economies that the Lib Dems had has been jettisoned)….but we’ll continue to monitor progress, formally and informally, and would happily be part of a bigger push to monitor and hold the government eto account in this way.
cheers
Toby
nice post Richard…definitely crucial that we ensure transparency is not a mask for less accountability (try finding the killer fact within 157,000 lines of gov expenditure!).
We’re constantly trying to do what you say – ‘keeping tabs on what ministers are up to’ – in the policy areas we know about (which are similar/overlap with yours).
One thing we’ve just done, which will be published very shortly, is to look at progress the Coalition has made against our ’10 Big Ideas for 2010′, which were drawn from our recent research – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/what-s-new/10-big-ideas-for-2010. We then assessed each manifesto against these – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/files/the_road_to_may_6th_2010_04.pdf – and now we’ve gone back to see what progress has been made since the election.
Sadly, some of the most promising proposals have been lost by the wayside (anything to support local economies that the Lib Dems had has been jettisoned)….but we’ll continue to monitor progress, formally and informally, and would happily be part of a bigger push to monitor and hold the government eto account in this way.
cheers
Toby
nice post Richard…definitely crucial that we ensure transparency is not a mask for less accountability (try finding the killer fact within 157,000 lines of gov expenditure!).
We’re constantly trying to do what you say – ‘keeping tabs on what ministers are up to’ – in the policy areas we know about (which are similar/overlap with yours).
One thing we’ve just done, which will be published very shortly, is to look at progress the Coalition has made against our ’10 Big Ideas for 2010′, which were drawn from our recent research – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/what-s-new/10-big-ideas-for-2010. We then assessed each manifesto against these – http://www.urbanforum.org.uk/files/the_road_to_may_6th_2010_04.pdf – and now we’ve gone back to see what progress has been made since the election.
Sadly, some of the most promising proposals have been lost by the wayside (anything to support local economies that the Lib Dems had has been jettisoned)….but we’ll continue to monitor progress, formally and informally, and would happily be part of a bigger push to monitor and hold the government eto account in this way.
cheers
Toby
Thanks Toby,
Yes, finding the “killer fact” in such a vast amount of information is a challenge… for a start, how do you even know it is a killer fact without any context? And then, what do you do with that information? How do you get a minister to justify it or report it as waste? And if you do report it, what happens to the person who spent the money? A note on their HR file? So many questions!
Your work on tracking progress sounds valuable too, and even when manifesto policies don’t make it into the initial coalition agreement, it is possible that this kind of scrutiny can increase the pressure to adopt them at a later stage. Fingers crossed anyway!
Thanks Toby,
Yes, finding the “killer fact” in such a vast amount of information is a challenge… for a start, how do you even know it is a killer fact without any context? And then, what do you do with that information? How do you get a minister to justify it or report it as waste? And if you do report it, what happens to the person who spent the money? A note on their HR file? So many questions!
Your work on tracking progress sounds valuable too, and even when manifesto policies don’t make it into the initial coalition agreement, it is possible that this kind of scrutiny can increase the pressure to adopt them at a later stage. Fingers crossed anyway!
Thanks Toby,
Yes, finding the “killer fact” in such a vast amount of information is a challenge… for a start, how do you even know it is a killer fact without any context? And then, what do you do with that information? How do you get a minister to justify it or report it as waste? And if you do report it, what happens to the person who spent the money? A note on their HR file? So many questions!
Your work on tracking progress sounds valuable too, and even when manifesto policies don’t make it into the initial coalition agreement, it is possible that this kind of scrutiny can increase the pressure to adopt them at a later stage. Fingers crossed anyway!
Thanks for this great post, and for the excellent tool you’ve created.
I think there’s an interesting point in here about manifesto pledges / business plans / milestones etc. about the quality of the outcome achieved. or not achieved and what is done about it. Knowing that something hasn’t been done is of course a great starting point (one that hasn’t always been clear in the past). It’s then using this information (plus the context) to do something about it where the real value is added.
Though I haven’t yet created a nice looking table, I’m keeping a close eye on the health and social care reforms put in train by the coalition. Various blogposts on these topics are here and here respectively.
Thanks for this great post, and for the excellent tool you’ve created.
I think there’s an interesting point in here about manifesto pledges / business plans / milestones etc. about the quality of the outcome achieved. or not achieved and what is done about it. Knowing that something hasn’t been done is of course a great starting point (one that hasn’t always been clear in the past). It’s then using this information (plus the context) to do something about it where the real value is added.
Though I haven’t yet created a nice looking table, I’m keeping a close eye on the health and social care reforms put in train by the coalition. Various blogposts on these topics are here and here respectively.
Thanks for this great post, and for the excellent tool you’ve created.
I think there’s an interesting point in here about manifesto pledges / business plans / milestones etc. about the quality of the outcome achieved. or not achieved and what is done about it. Knowing that something hasn’t been done is of course a great starting point (one that hasn’t always been clear in the past). It’s then using this information (plus the context) to do something about it where the real value is added.
Though I haven’t yet created a nice looking table, I’m keeping a close eye on the health and social care reforms put in train by the coalition. Various blogposts on these topics are here and here respectively.
Hi Rich, many thanks.
I think you are definitely right to say the quality of the outcome is important.
Sometime the promises are achieved, sometimes not, sometimes they are quietly redefined or watered down. And sometimes a pledge can be so meaningless (“Build strong relationships with the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”) that there is no way of really judging whether it has been achieved or not (although this applies less to the tech promises, which tend to be more clear-cut).
Also, you hit the nail on the head with your point about the need to follow up transparency information with action of some kind. I suspect ministers would say that if they publish this information and miss their targets but we the public don’t hold them to account, then that is our problem rather than their’s!
On the other hand, if people prove to be uninterested then perhaps it means that the government’s model of accountability doesn’t work and then there will be a clearer need to drive progress through processes and monitoring from the centre.
It is an interesting experiment, I think.
Hi Rich, many thanks.
I think you are definitely right to say the quality of the outcome is important.
Sometime the promises are achieved, sometimes not, sometimes they are quietly redefined or watered down. And sometimes a pledge can be so meaningless (“Build strong relationships with the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”) that there is no way of really judging whether it has been achieved or not (although this applies less to the tech promises, which tend to be more clear-cut).
Also, you hit the nail on the head with your point about the need to follow up transparency information with action of some kind. I suspect ministers would say that if they publish this information and miss their targets but we the public don’t hold them to account, then that is our problem rather than their’s!
On the other hand, if people prove to be uninterested then perhaps it means that the government’s model of accountability doesn’t work and then there will be a clearer need to drive progress through processes and monitoring from the centre.
It is an interesting experiment, I think.
Hi Rich, many thanks.
I think you are definitely right to say the quality of the outcome is important.
Sometime the promises are achieved, sometimes not, sometimes they are quietly redefined or watered down. And sometimes a pledge can be so meaningless (“Build strong relationships with the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”) that there is no way of really judging whether it has been achieved or not (although this applies less to the tech promises, which tend to be more clear-cut).
Also, you hit the nail on the head with your point about the need to follow up transparency information with action of some kind. I suspect ministers would say that if they publish this information and miss their targets but we the public don’t hold them to account, then that is our problem rather than their’s!
On the other hand, if people prove to be uninterested then perhaps it means that the government’s model of accountability doesn’t work and then there will be a clearer need to drive progress through processes and monitoring from the centre.
It is an interesting experiment, I think.