Still, political parties and newspapers (even the Tories and the Daily Fail) being interested in the publication of it is an argument for, not against, publication. So I still believe reasons in your original post for opposing the scheme are were not particularly good ones.

Anyway, that’s a rule-proving exception on this blog. Thanks for responding!

Yup, I think it’s amazing the Tories are proposing this. Do they not claim they are going to make pubic services more efficient? This would, surely, mean one extra person being employed for every, say, 50 members of staff. Unless they are willing to increase taxes to pay for this, they will have to cut public services even more. For public service efficiency, surely it’s much better to only collect the data people actually want?

It almost makes me think the Tories want to make public services less efficient, so that they can then complain that they are inefficient, and so cut them.

Great piece, and work.

Adam

If these plans were carried out this would simply mean that you would get bland, insipid statements of expenditure published that do not add any value whatsoever to the public interest. It would also keep at least a dozen people in work scrutinising every description of each transaction above £25k (note I said description of what it was spent on, NOT what it was actually spent on, or whether it delivered good value for the public purse!) in order that it passes a rather Daily Mirror-esque “public palatability” test.

FoI legislation provides anyone with the right to have this information already.

Not convinced that the comparison with the private sector holds. Yes, Government and Parliament decide what level of regulation is necessary for industry, and this is done (at least nominally) in the public interest.
But the public sector is also highly regulated – often more so than companies are – and a whole set of machinery exists to scrutinise Government spending. The auditor general, Audit Scotland, the Public Service Ombudsman, the Freedom of Information Act and indeed Parliament itself with its Finance Committee – they all exist for this purpose. And they all publish their findings.
Adding this extra layer, which will involve a great deal of additional bureaucracy, will ultimately only serve one very narrow political agenda, and it’s one which is obsessed with cutting public services.

I think the fact that the Tory^H^H^Haxpayers’ Alliance would be interested in this information shows that it’s of interest to someone and should be published. Whether or not you agree with their political aims, data to people that want it is what transparency is all about.

I can’t help but supplant the situation to one in which we might be more readily inclined to want the information published: a corporation saying “we *could* put this information on-line… but all this mundane data about how much waste we’re dumping into the rivers is of interest to no one and will only serve to score cheap political points about our environmental record and damage this important and productive company.”

If there’s no one interested in the data then (if it’s of negligible cost to do so) it’s no bother to anyone if it goes on-line. If it’s of interest to someone, then it should go on-line for the sake of transparency.

The difference with this proposal is that it will simply dump huge amounts of information onto the web which nobody was actually looking for. The result will be that nobody finds out anything they actually wanted or needed to know, but that right wing campaigners against any aspect of the public sector will have material to sift through. Every public health leaflet, every training course, every salary will be turned into ammunition for the pro-cuts agenda.

Proper transparency and scrutiny are important – and they’re already in place through FOI. This scheme will add nothing, and risks damaging every part of the public sector.

If you don’t believe in transparency for things that make you look bad, you don’t really believe in transparency.