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UK Open Government Action Plan Consultation
The UK Open Government Civil Society Network is collecting ideas from anyone committed to the values of transparency, citizen participation and accountability, for reforms the UK Government should commit to in its 2018-2020 Open Government Action Plan.
Starting: 11 Dec
Ending
0 days left (ends 06 Apr)
What would you do to make government in the UK more open and accountable?
Submit your idea now!
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What is Open Government?
Open government is the simple but powerful idea that governments work better for citizens when they are transparent, participatory and accountable.
Open government reforms can transform the way government and public services work, ensuring that they are properly responsive to citizens, and helping deliver better outcomes for society. Good health and wellbeing, quality education, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, reduced inequalities, sustainable cities and communities - open government is critical to achieving all of these outcomes and more.
What are we doing?
The UK Open Government Network is collecting ideas for reforms the UK Government should commit to in its 2018-2020 Open Government Action Plan from citizens, community groups, civil society organisations, and anyone else committed to the values of transparency, citizen participation and accountability (in other words, you!).
The strongest ideas will have a clear explanation of what is being proposed and why. Please consider structuring your idea according to these three questions:
- What is your idea? - Brief summary of the idea
- Why is it important? - Explanation of what problem the idea would help solve (including any evidence)
- How would it work? - Explanation of how the idea would work in practice
At the end of this crowdsourcing phase, the Open Government Network will prioritise and develop the best ideas into a set of proposals to present to the government and advocate for.
Join the Open Government Network to help prioritise and campaign for the ideas!
Submit your idea!
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Open Government Network
The UK Open Government Network (OGN) is a coalition of active citizens and civil society organisations committed to making government work better for people through increased transparency, participation and accountability.
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Category:
Public services
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There are occassionally reports of UK officials lobbying on behalf of UK companies in developing countries, in ways that appear to work against the interests of people in those countries, for example https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/09/british-diplomat-lobbied-big-tobacco-bat-bangladesh-unpaid-vat. These may be the same people that the UK is trying to assist through its aid policies. However, it is hard to know how prevalent this issue is as data on meetings of UK ambassadors / high commissioners is not routinely published, and so issues only tend to be uncovered through targeted FOI requests (which assumes there is some knowledge of the issue to be targeted).
A solution to this would be for regular transparency data to be reported for these meetings, in a similar way as is done for ministerial meetings. The scope of regular reporting could potentially be limited to certain countries and/or to meetings with representatives of UK controlled companies.
Category:
Open data
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The Government publishes its datasets on data.gov.uk. However, one current major limitation is that this service does not allow you to search inside datasets (i.e. CSV or XLSX files). For example, if you wanted to find all datasets that contained the text "Deloitte" or "Nigeria", then there is no simple way of doing this unless you know the specific datasets you are after. The response I got from GDS when I asked about this last year was.
"the search on data.gov.uk only looks at the title and descriptions of datasets, and not inside the actual data file itself. ...This is obviously a limitation to our current search function - but not one that would be simple to fix, since data.gov.uk doesn't actually host data files, just links to them.... I'm afraid it's not something that's on our roadmap at the moment as it's technically quite complex. "
However, I am not sure that it is *that* complex to build such a search function to do this (I have been told it is quite easy to write a python script to do something similar) and it would be of significant benefit in uncovering useful information, particularly if you don't know exactly what you are looking for.
Category:
Open data
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There is a lack of information published around the diversity of candidates and elected representatives. It is vitally important that this information is publicly available to allow us to monitor progress and identify areas where representation needs to be improved.
As such we would like to see a Government commitment to the enactment of section 106 of the Equality Act 2010.
This would cover the publication of information pertaining to candidates selected for an election by each political party, candidates successfully elected and those that fail to be elected. This should include elections to the UK Parliament as well as to devolved administrations across the UK.
We would further urge UK Government to consider extending the requirement for information on selection and election to local government elections (including combined authority mayoral candidates) and putting a duty on local authorities to publish this information, ideally by the local elections in 2019.
Electoral Reform Society
Fawcett Society
Helen Pankhurst
Category:
Parliament
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A national register of corporate convictions and regulatory fines
What is your idea?
In order to improve information available to public authorities, helping them to make informed and accurate decisions about how to contract with responsible companies, the government should create a publicly accessible national register of companies that have received a conviction, regulatory fine, ruling, remedial order or other relevant adverse finding in relation to economic crimes, social, labour and environmental laws and professional conduct. This would support the development of consistent practice across the public sector and support contracting authorities in their interpretation and application of Reg. 57 of the 2015 Public Contracts Regulations.
Why is it important?
Currently, there is no centralised information about companies that have been convicted, subject to regulatory action in the UK, or that have been excluded by other public authorities. Under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 (PCR 2015), companies must be debarred from bidding for public contracts if they have been found guilty of corruption, fraud, money laundering, modern slavery, tax evasion, terrorist offences, child labour or human trafficking (reg.57(1) PCR 2015) subject to self-cleaning provisions (reg.57 (13) PCR 2015). Additionally, companies may be excluded from bidding for public contracts where they have violated environmental, social and labour laws, engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, grave professional misconduct or conflicts of interest, as well as if they have failed to meet previous contractual obligations (reg.57(8) PCR 2015). Contracting authorities are also under an obligation to terminate any contracts with companies that should have been debarred due to a mandatory exclusion ground (reg.73(1)(b) in relation to reg 57(1) PCR 2015). It is thus crucial for contracting authorities not to enter into contracts with debarred suppliers.
However, it is often impossible for contracting authorities to know and verify whether companies have engaged in any of these activities because of the absence of centralised information. Individual public bodies that have put out a contract for tender must expend considerable time and effort to check whether or not bidding companies have past, relevant adverse findings against them, including convictions and there is no guarantee that this process will yield accurate results. For instance, conviction records in the Police National Computer do not automatically include convictions secured by the UK Serious Fraud Office, which prosecutes the largest and most complex economic crime cases. While this could be fixed relatively easily, a public register that encompasses more than convictions is necessary to ensure consistency in the application of the PCR 2015, and enables public authorities to access a wide range of information quickly and easily.
A centralised register would make procurement decisions more efficient thus saving resources. Additionally, the register would help meet the UK Anti-Corruption Summit commitment of excluding corrupt bidders from public procurement.
How would it work?
The proposal is relatively straightforward, and could be implemented with minimal cost. The database would be maintained by a central authority. Public prosecutors in the UK, including the Crown Prosecution Service, Serious Fraud Office, Financial Conduct Authority, HMRC, the Health and Safety Executive, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and all other industry regulators, would be obliged to send the central body details of any action, regulatory or criminal taken against companies in the past five years for relevant behaviour under article 57 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Additionally, public authorities that have excluded companies based on any of the grounds under article 57 of the PCR would be required to notify the central authority and the exclusion would be registered in the database. This would help to ensure consistency across public authorities.
It should be noted that in the US a national register of convicted companies is already in place, and Germany is looking to introduce a similar system.
In March 2012 the OECD's Working Group on Bribery recommended that the UK establish a national debarment register in order to allow a systematic approach to excluding corrupt companies from public procurement. The recommendation remains unimplemented.
Category:
Contracting
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- What is your idea?
UK authorities should ensure that more court data, including court documents and court lists, are available to the public online.
- Why is it important?
Open justice, the general rule that the administration of justice should be done in public, is uncontroversial and widely supported. It brings a number of significant benefits, including: public scrutiny and accountability of courts and judges; public confidence in the justice system; and increases the deterrent effect of court sanctions. An open court system also puts pressure on witnesses to tell the truth and allows the public to find out about instances of major corruption, fraud and wrongdoing.
However, despite this, the court system of England and Wales can feel opaque and bureaucratic even for experienced investigative journalists.
Court lists, which detail when and where hearings take place, generally contain so few details that some key cases of significant public interest, including entire trials, are going largely unnoticed by the public and media. Court documents, which are necessary for members of the public to understand complex legal proceedings, are also very difficult to access without the payment of fees, multiple trips to the court, and in many cases litigation. To add, court transcription services are prohibitively expensive, costing upwards of £20,000 for a three-week trial.
- How would it work?
The government is currently undertaking £1 billion reform programme to modernise the court system, largely through the introduction of new digital technologies. This digital modernisation programme offers a number of opportunities for open justice:
- The government should make it mandatory for courts to publish judgments online unless there are strong countervailing reasons against doing so. This is particularly important as much of the case law, which lies at the heart of our common law system, is currently inaccessible without the payment of a prohibitively expensive transcription fee.
- HMCTS should ensure that key court documents are readily and publicly accessible online. As a general rule, this should include in civil cases: skeleton arguments and ‘statements of case’, such as the claim form, particulars of claim and defence. In criminal cases, this should include: opening statements, a copy of the judge’s summing up, sentencing remarks and basis of plea.
It should be noted that an online system for court document access is already available for the Rolls Building in London, but similar provisions are not available for the rest of the court system.
- The provision of public online listings for all courts (at present, there are no online lists for magistrates’ courts). Online lists should be published well in advance of hearings (at present, court lists are provided less than 24 hours before a given hearing/trial). Lists should give more detail than presently provided so that members of the public can make an informed decision about whether to attend a hearing, including the names of both parties and charges in a given case.
- If a court transcript is purchased, then this should subsequently be published online and made publicly available. This system is already in use in the US where transcripts from district and bankruptcy courts are published online following purchase.
More broadly, the government should carry out a review of the current costly court transcription system, which is provided by six private companies that claim copyright over transcripts. The review should look at the possibility of relaxing rules preventing recording devices being used by members of the public in court.
Category:
Courts
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Jubilee Debt Campaign has been developing proposals to incentivise transparency of loans to governments. This follows recent revelations, including in Mozambique and the Republic of Congo, of loans with government guarantees that were largely kept secret. We hope that incentivizing transparency of loans to governments would be useful both for market participants and the parliaments, media and people of the country concerned, and support in the wider effort to make governments more open. A motion in support of measures to increase transparency has been signed by 99 MPs in the UK parliament, and we are also discussing this with colleagues in New York. Almost 100% of government debts contracted under a law other than that of the borrowing state are in UK or New York law, so these are the two key jurisdictions.
Our proposal is that for a debt contract to be enforced under UK (or New York) law it would have to be publicly disclosed on a register at the time it is given. This would incentivise disclosure because the debt would be worth less, and less easy to be sold on, if it could not be enforced in the case of a debt default.
Intermediate steps towards this desired outcome would be the creation of a registry of loans to governments in an international body such as the IMF or UNCTAD, and a commitment by the G20 and/or UN Financing for Development process to work towards increasing transparency of loans to, and borrowing by, governments.
Category:
Budgeting
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