This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Provide a complete Data Release Register, listing all data flows of individual level in/between departments and other public bodies and why, readable by the public.  

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

There is no transparency on how and where Departments share individual level data as part of sharing of bulk personal datasets.

Main Objective

Provide a complete Data Release Register, listing all data flows of individual level in/between departments and other public bodies, readable by the public.

While initial Registers will be incomplete, due to Departments themselves not being aware of all data flows (some are annual or less often), the Register should be a complete-as-known list.

Departments currently have an unknown number and range of “bulk personal datasets” covering individuals, and share them in ways which are opaque to both the department, other departments, and the public.

Moving towards a comprehensive register of all bulk personal datasets, and the flows thereof,  is a necessary prerequisite to understanding those flows, and raising public confidence in their use.

Relevance

In meetings, civil servants often complain that the public think that Departments/projects (should) share data far more than they actually do. Irrespective of the accuracy of that position, the civil service has demonstrated a fundamental gap in the evidence base for a public debate:

How does Government share data between bodies/departments, and on what basis?

Absent a comprehensive list, the debate on data sharing will be characterised by “trust us” from Government, scepticism from the public, and an increasing data trust deficit ever made worse by Government mistakes. Comprehensive and complete data release registers will begin to provide a knowledge base which can be read and the situation known, rather than bureaucratic weasel words which require trust that is routinely broken. Over time, Departments should assure completeness for stated time periods, and for any new flows to be added.  The HSCIC already regularly publishes such a register for flows of individual level medical records.

The Open/Data community can then build tools on top of such registers for notification/analysis purposes, such as the Data Disclosure Standard.

Ambition

It is widely accepted that “data sharing” will rise in importance and volume.

Following the care.data fiasco in the Department of Health and NHS England, the HSCIC has for over a year published a “data release register” of what data leaves the organisation, where it goes, and why.

Every Department should follow their lead, and publish such a register.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Formally adopt The Declaration of Parliamentary Openness.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Enshrining openness at the heart of our parliaments.

Main Objective

The UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly should formally adopt The Declaration of Parliamentary Openness.

This sets out 44 principles for advancing parliamentary openness, grouped under four headings:

Promoting a Culture of Openness:
Parliamentary information belongs to the public. Parliamentary information shall be able to be reused or republished by citizens with any limited restrictions narrowly defined by law. To enable a culture of parliamentary openness, parliament must enact measures to ensure inclusive citizen participation and a free civil society, enable effective parliamentary monitoring, and vigorously protect these rights through its oversight role. Parliament shall also ensure that citizens have legal recourse to enforce their right to access parliamentary information. Parliament has an affirmative duty to promote citizen understanding of parliamentary functioning and share good practices with other parliaments to increase openness and transparency. Parliament shall work collaboratively with PMOs and citizens to ensure that parliamentary information is complete, accurate, and timely.

Making Parliamentary Information Transparent:
Parliament shall adopt policies that ensure proactive publication of parliamentary information, and shall review these policies periodically to take advantage of evolving good practices. Parliamentary information includes information about parliament’s roles and functions, and information generated throughout the legislative process, including the text of introduced legislation and amendments, votes, the parliamentary agenda and schedule, records of plenary and committee proceedings, historical information, and all other information that forms a part of the parliamentary record, such as reports created for or by parliament. Parliament shall provide information on the management and administration of parliament, parliamentary staff, and comprehensive and detailed parliamentary budget information. Parliament shall provide information about the backgrounds, activities and affairs of members, including sufficient information for citizens to make informed judgments regarding their integrity and probity, and potential conflicts of interest. 

Easing Access to Parliamentary Information:
Parliament shall ensure that information is broadly accessible to all citizens on a non-discriminatory basis through multiple channels, including first-person observation, print media, radio, and live and on-demand broadcasts and streaming. Physical access to parliament shall be provided to all citizens, subject to space and safety limitations, with clearly defined and publicly available policies for ensuring access by media and observers. Parliamentary information must also be available free of charge, in multiple national and working languages, and through tools, such as plain language summaries, that help ensure that parliamentary information is understandable to a broad range of citizens. 

Enabling Electronic Communication of Parliamentary Information:
Parliamentary information shall be released online in open and structured formats that allow citizens to analyze and reuse this information using the full range of technology tools. Parliamentary information shall be linked to related information and be easily searchable, as well as downloadable in bulk to encourage the development of new technologies for its exploration. Parliamentary websites enable communication with citizens even in societies with limited Internet penetration, by facilitating information access to intermediaries, which can further disseminate the information to citizens. Parliamentary websites shall seek to use interactive tools to engage citizens and offer alert or mobile services. Parliament shall give preference to the use of non-proprietary formats, and free and open-source software. Parliament has a duty to ensure technological usability of parliamentary information, while guaranteeing the privacy for those accessing the information.

Relevance

Signing the declaration is a commitment to openness and transparency and therefore is a way to hold the parliament to account for its actions (or non-actions)

Ambition

The Declaration is only a document but recognising the commitments within are important for driving a cultural change within legislatures are they move towards being more open and focussed on serving the wider public as well as members.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

All parliamentary data to be freely available for the public to download and/or re-use.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Parliamentary data is inconsistently available or not available at all.

Main Objective

The UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly should make their data freely available and openly accessible to the public so that the public can download, re-use and re-share. This includes all documents, data, audio and video content.

No material should have its usage restricted through any unreasonable copyright restrictions and it is expected that at most the constraints would be Parliamentary Copyright (which allows for sharing and re-use).

Relevance

This addresses issues of civic participation and public accountability.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Work with local authorities and civil society to scope out and develop an local open government partnership.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Local government has always played an important role in UK democracy and public service provision, and that role is only becoming more important as greater powers are being devolved from central to local government. Local government is therefore an increasingly important focus for open government reform.

Pockets of good open government practice already exist across the country, but they are scattered and often restricted to specific projects or small teams and departments. There is currently no mechanism or incentive for spreading existing or supporting new innovations in openness in local government.

By adopting an Open Government Partnership model, open government practice can be developed and spread across local government.

Main Objective

The features and principles of the Open Government Partnership can be adapted and applied to local government in the UK, to help develop and spread open government practice and tackle the challenges being faced by local governments and communities.

An Open Local Government Partnership would need to be developed in collaboration by a wide range of stakeholders, including local authorities, national government, civil society organisations and citizens. Its features could include:

• Open and inclusive - The project could start by identifying a number of local authorities already interested in and/or making progress on aspects of open government, but it would be open to any local authority to join on the condition that they agree to a high level statement and commit to developing their own open government action plan. As such, the membership of the partnership would grow organically over time.

• Peer support - The partnership would work on the basis that there is already distributed practice of open government in local government, with organisations excelling in different areas. Some work could be conducted up front to scope out the different aspects of openness for local government to develop a number of illustrative commitments and collect together useful resources and examples. However, the focus of the partnership would be on the sharing of practice between members - building up an ever more detailed picture of what open government can mean for local government.

• Race to the top - The partnership would seek to instigate a race-to-the-top whereby local public organisations would compete with one another to be more “open”. Local authorities would be encouraged to sign up to commitments already pioneered by others, but also to develop new stretching commitments that set them apart from the rest.

• High level cover for reformers - The Open Local Government Partnership would become something that politicians and senior officials want their organisation to be associated with,  providing high level buy-in for reformers within those organisations to implement open government reforms.

• Involves public organisations, civil society and SMEs - The partnership could be governed at a national level by representatives from participating local authorities, civil society and SMEs. Members would be required to develop and agree their commitments in partnership with local civil society and SMEs, and include them in the assessment of their progress.

• Independent and non-partisan - The partnership sould be managed by organisations independent from national government and any political party. Local councils invited to pioneer the project will be selected to include a spread across the main political parties.

For an open local government partnership to be adopted and be effective, it needs to be established and owned by local authorities. The open local government partnership idea is not prescriptive and the shape it might take is dependant on the aims and aspirations of the participating local authorities.

National government would:

1. Support the initial scoping and development of the idea by helping to convene relevant stakeholders

2. Develop links with the Open Government Partnership community and other relevant sub-national OGP initiatives

3. Showcase innovative developments under the umbrella of the UK’s membership of the OGP.

Relevance

This commitment furthers OGP values by extending the principles and process underlying the OGP to local government. It is particularly relevant at a time when the OGP is grappling with how best to involve sub-national governments.

This initiative would mark a significant innovation in the OGP that could be adapted and adopted by other member countries.

Ambition

An Open Local Government Partnership would become a catalyst for increasing the openness, transparency, responsiveness and accountability of local government in the UK. It would develop a network of local authorities and reformers committed to the principles of open government, supporting them to develop, commit to & share actions designed to make local government more open. It would become recognised as a kitemark for good government and spread the principles and practice of open government across local government.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

The Freedom of Information Act should be protected and its scope widened to achieve comprehensive coverage of public sector bodies and the companies they own or control.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Freedom of Information is the foundation stone of open government which allows citizens to ask questions, and receive information, on the issues that matter to them. However, Freedom of Information does not currently apply to all public bodies, and often important information is inaccessible from bodies providing public services on the behalf of government.

Contractors providing public services are not themselves subject to the FOI Act. However, the FOI right does apply to information which a contractor holds on behalf of an authority. Deciding what information is held on the authority’s behalf is not easy and depends on what the contract itself says. This varies from contract to contract.  Often, important information is considered to be held for the contractor’s purposes, not the authority’s, and is therefore inaccessible under FOI.

Main Objective

Where a service is provided on behalf of a public authority by another body, or is otherwise  supported by public funds, information about the quality of the service and way in which it is provided should be available under FOI.

The Freedom of Information Act should be extended to all public bodies, unless powerful reasons for excluding a body are found during public consultation.

Relevance

Freedom of Information is the cornerstone of open government, as it allows citizens to request information about issues that are relevant to them.

Ambition

To achieve comprehensive FOI coverage of public authorities and bodies providing public services on their behalf.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Each government department and agency should provide a single point of contact for public requests for evidence related to departmental policy.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Government departments and agencies do not provide a clearly identified contact that the public can request evidence from.

Main Objective

Each government department and agency will provide a single point of contact for public requests for evidence related to the department’s policy.

A nominated individual in each department and agency will have responsibility for the contact point. At a minimum this will be a dedicated email address prominently advertised online and in communications.

This individual will monitor public requests for evidence; identify and collect appropriate information; respond to public requests promptly; and keep a public record of public requests received including the progress of ongoing requests.

Relevance

A single point of contact and an ongoing invitation for people to use it will increase civic participation. People sending a request to government for evidence underlying public policy, and getting an answer, is beneficial to public understanding. It will increase the public’s access to information. It will mean the public will be less prone to misunderstanding on issues such as vaccination, agricultural policies and screening programmes.

Institutionalising responding to public requests will be a sign that government accepts its accountability to people, as in the 1980s companies accepted accountability to consumers by introducing dedicated phone lines and addresses for customer services and as public bodies accept their responsibility to properly look after public data by providing a point of contact for enquiries under the Data Protection Act 1998 for example.services, and when public bodies accepted their responsibility to properly look after public data by providing a point of contact for enquiries under the Data Protection Act 1998 for example.

Ambition

A single point of contact for requests for evidence used to shape public policies answers the government’s commitment to empower and transform the relationship between citizens and governments, as set out in the UK National Action Plan 2013 – 2015. It also answers the government’s commitment to public engagement in policy making.

An open and ongoing invitation to people to ask the Government for its evidence will make government more open and will improve the relationship between citizens and the government. Obfuscation and delays in implementing easy ways for the public to engage in policy making until now has put departments in a bad light. An open invitation and a direct, clear route for citizen’s questions will address this.

An institutionalised single point of contact will reduce time delays. There will be no need for people to engage the Freedom of Information Act request process. A dedicated individual in place will reduce the passing around of public enquiries within and between departments to try to find someone to answer that frustrates people now. This will save government time and money too and enable government to provide other relevant resources and information that helps people to focus and refine future requests.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

As it also relates closely to newer ideas on open contracting (ideas 31 and 33), these will be considered all together.

Increase the opportunities for citizens to be involved in planning, tender and oversight processes

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Open Contracting principles call for citizens to be engaged in all stages of the contracting process, including design, planning and review.

Yet, there are few structured opportunities in the UK for citizens to participate: either in the planning for procurement, or in assessing whether goods and services delivered were of a high enough quality.

Main Objective

• Increase the opportunities for citizens to be involved in planning, tender and oversight processes - at both national and local level;

• Pilot digital tools that support citizens to engage in the planning, delivery and evaluation stages of contracting;

• Ensure there is a preferential option for those living in poverty and marginalised groups, so that public expenditure stimulates skills and entrepreneurship amongst these groups.

This may include creating visualisation and user-input tools that help citizens to discover aspects of the contracting pipeline relevant to them, and to provide their input and feedback on proposals, including those that will work for people who live in poverty and marginalised groups. Right now, the Contracts Finder platform is oriented solely towards suppliers: yet citizens often have key expertise on identifying precisely what the demands are in each local context as it changes over time, how to get the best value for money, and deliver the best services, for a planned procurement. Developing interfaces that can alert citizens to planned contracts affecting their local area, or their subject areas of interest, and then tools that help solicit input from citizens, could offer an important way to crowdsource insights and experiences.

Similarly, at the implementation stage of contracting, citizens have a key role to play in oversight. Creating visualisations that can indicate contract performance (drawing on information provided as part of the common baseline in Commitment 2) and that invite feedback from the beneficiaries of contracts, opens up a further space to ensure contracted out public services are delivering effectively.

Relevance

Participation is a central theme of Open Government, and contracting is a central way in which public services are now delivered.

Increasing openness, including transparency and participation, in contracting ensures greater accountability for public funds, and opens up opportunities for greater citizen control over those services.

Better oversight of contracting information allows government to understand its supply chain better, driving more efficient procurement and use of public resources, and reducing government exposure to supply chain risks.

Ambition

The UK has a leading role to play in connecting the disclosure and participation aspects of Open Contracting. Public procurement and contracting are a vital strand in the Prime Minister’s golden thread of conditions that enable countries to be successful the world over. It’s the biggest part of government spending and it’s the most at risk of corruption.

Government, the private sector, and civil society, will all have more information to engage effectively with public procurement.

Citizens will guide procurement processes to produce better outcomes. Civil society monitoring, for example, is transformational for service delivery, helping to halve the costs of textbooks in the Philippines and infrastructure such as roads, clinics and schools in various OGP countries.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Increase transparency, public participation and accountability in the budget process at all levels domestically and internationally.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

Greater transparency and increased active public participation in the budget process at all levels to ensure more accountable, responsive governance and effective use of public funds in the UK and abroad. The UK government should be a leading performer on the Open Budget Survey.

Transformation and innovation in developing reformed public services is essential in the current fiscal climate, but we know that formal politics and our traditional democratic processes struggle to attract participation and engagement from the wider demographic of the UK.  This proposal suggests a ‘test and learn’ approach to designing greater participation in the influencing stages of budget setting and spending, and opening up budgets to greater transparency and public participation.

Main Objective

There are two objectives for this commitment:

1. To increase transparency, public participation and accountability in the budget process at all levels by promoting the implementation of the GIFT High-Level Principles domestically and internationally and  improving fiscal performance as per the transparency, participation and oversight indicators of the Open Budget Survey. Steps include increasing comprehensive of budget documents, legislative public hearings during the budget cycle where citizens can testify and provision of feedback by the executive and supreme audit institution on how public inputs are taken into account.

2. To implement the principles of participatory budgeting into a process that empowers the public to spend a percentage (0.25-1%) of public funds.  A Citizen’s Jury will design the process and make recommendations in response to their question: What would it take to devolve 0.25- 1% of a public budget to a citizen participation process?  Our objective would be to apply those recommendations in a ‘test and learn’ environment.

Relevance

On 28th March 2015 The United Nations passed a resolution that stated it is the "...responsibility of States to ensure that relevant national laws and policies are translated into transparent, participatory and accountable budgets and spending" The resolution follows UN Resolution 67/218 endorsing the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency High-Level Principles and calls upon States to make budgeting processes open, transparent, accessible and participatory.

The UK is in a strong position to deliver on this commitment domestically and internationally as per the transparency, participation and oversight indicators and practices of the Open Budget Survey and GIFT High-Level Principles. There is extensive evidence of how national and local governments have delivered on greater transparency, public participation and accountability in the budget process at all levels in a mainstreamed manner.

The UK should draw on tried and tested use of Participatory Budgeting in policing, health, local government and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations, and extending that practice into the mainstream budgeting process of both national and local budgeting.   This commitment has civic participation at its core and applies best practice principles of PB to ensure that civic participation becomes a strong and meaningful feature of open government when influencing public spending decisions.

The commitment can be measured by using the Open Budget Survey. The Open Budget Survey 2015, released on 9th September, provides specific recommendations for the UK and 101 other countries. Recommendations for the UK include increasing the comprehensiveness of the Executive Budget’s Proposal and Enacted Budget; establishing credible, effective participation mechanisms such as public hearings, surveys and focus groups during the budget process; holding legislative hearings on the budgets of ministries, departments and agencies; providing feedback on how public inputs have been used.

Ambition

By adopting a ‘test and learn’ approach to greater participation in budgeting processes, the learning from this commitment will inform how the UK could extend and develop their approach to mainstreaming citizen participation in public spending.

By developing and scaling up existing practices, the government can deliver greater assurances to the UK taxpayer that their funds are well spent, and greater dividends to governments and recipients of UK aid.

Implementation of the GIFT High Level Principles, the Participatory Budgeting principles, the learning from over 300 participatory budgeting processes in the UK, and the practices outlined in the Open Budget Survey can improve governance, trust and services that respond to citizens’ needs.

This idea was originally developed by civil society for the 2016-18 Open Government Action Plan, but did not result in a government commitment. It is being resubmitted for consideration for the 2018-2020 action plan.

Develop process and tools for more effective consultation practices.

Status quo or problem/issue to be addressed

The principle that those affected by decisions should be given the opportunity to shape those decisions is central to open government. Outside periodically voting for elected representatives, citizens (in the broadest sense of term to mean all inhabitants of a country or local region) must be offered opportunities to provide their input into key policy decisions that affect them.

Consultation provides not only an opportunity to gather opinion and values, but also an opportunity to tap into the expertise of the public; crowdsourcing insights that government would not otherwise have access to. However, this process is often experienced, both by government and by citizens, as a tick-box exercise: more concerned with compliance than with conversation and dialogue.

Consultation principles and requirements on government to consult have been progressively weakened, with recommended and mandatory timelines removed. Many national and local government agencies have lost specialist staff capacity to deal with consultation, and early experiments by government with the use of social media for greater consultation and dialogue have not been followed up systematically. Furthermore, many consultations taking place in ways that limit the effective ability of citizens to engage, and too frequently the process of consultation is not transparent, and those who do respond are often left with little understanding about how their ideas have been considered and heard, or why their views may not be taken on board.

Research into civic engagement shows repeatedly that the consultation process itself is damaged and the public becomes apathetic if the time they invest in consultation is perceived to be wasted. If policy-makers do not respond to the findings of consultation, credibility, engagement and trust are severely impaired. Ministers, as elected representatives of members of the public, have ultimate authority in policy-making; their role in ensuring that consultation is carried out at the right time, heard, and responded to is paramount.

With Government self-monitoring consultation performance, there is little transparency about consultation performance, and little ability for citizens to raise concerns that decision making has not been sufficiently informed by the public voice.

Main Objectives

Government should work to create a stronger culture of responsive, accessible, and transparent consultation.

Building on the template of the Government Service Design Manual, which offers accessible guidance for civil servants in agile management of digital services, government should develop a Consultation Design Manual and toolkit, remixing existing resources to provide improved support for officials carrying out consultations, and should also include guidance on how findings of consultations should be processed to Ministers for consideration.

Work needs to be done to better understand what an effective response to consultation should look like and to develop the processes to enact this. While it is understood that government has to act on all most or even any of the findings of a consultation. However, those who have given their time and ideas in a consultation have the right to know that these ideas were considered, how. Furthermore, where popular or majority ideas were not incorporated into a policy, a response should explain the reasons for this.

Greater transparency should be provided about consultations, with a regular review published with information on consultations listed on GOV.UK, including details of their opening dates, duration, number of responses (alongside some data about demographics of respondents), and the number of days taken for a government response to be published.

Public sector consultation standards should not be monitored by government itself, and instead an external organisation, such at the National Audit Office, should be given responsibility for public sector consultation standards, and for ensuring compliance, with a clear complaints route to an Ombudsman. Introduce a system by which further checks and balances such as proper scrutiny of published summaries of data, feedback communications and submissions to decision-makers are added.

Civil society also has a responsibility here: to provide greater oversight of consultation as a whole, evaluating government progress, and providing constructive critical feedback on areas to improve.

Relevance

The right for citizens to participate in the decisions that affect their lives is a central element of open government and one of the key eligibility criteria for the OGP. Effective consultation processes that allow citizens to participate fully, including being heard, and the tools to enable civil servants to do this, are crucial.

This commitment seeks to develop better consultation process and tools, and to create opportunities to re-establish trust in the process of policy-making informed by consultation, requiring policy-makers to communicate their response in a way that demonstrates genuine consideration of public voices, and developing a process by which Government are not self-monitoring their own processes.

Transparent evidence, in the form of a published response to each consultation that details how the government have used the information from the public strengthens openness and accountability: how public voices have influenced policy and explaining where they have not strengthens accountability and openness.

An external body, in the form of the National Audit Office, should have responsibility for public sector consultation standards and ensuring compliance, with a clear complaints route provided. This would mark an end to unenforced standards, fewer judicial reviews, result in a greater confidence in consultative processes, as well as increasing government accountability.

Ambition

In an increasingly complex world, citizens’ input is a critical resource for policy-making, as good decision-making requires the knowledge, experiences, views and values of the public.

The process of consultation is typically opaque, with little built in requirement for engagement of a wide range of individuals. Institutionalising a minimum level of citizen engagement in the policy process is important for ensuring that the views of citizens and other stakeholders are present when decisions are made, and that decisions are better informed as a result.

With a lack of transparency about how decisions are reached from the input curated through consultation, too frequently citizens are left feeling disengaged and lacking in trust in the decisions. Creating a requirement for government to respond about how public voices have or have not been taken on board in the decision making process creates feedback loops and prevents this breakdown in trust.

Finally, there is need for greater accountability. Government should not self-monitor their own consultation standards, and instead this should be provided.

An external body, in the form of the National Audit Office, should have responsibility for public sector consultation standards and ensuring compliance, with a clear complaints route provided. This would mark an end to unenforced standards, fewer judicial reviews, result in a greater confidence in consultative processes, as well as increasing government accountability.