Transparency

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Elton]

That this House takes note of Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to transparency.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion standing in my name. I have to point out to your receding Lordships that, had things been different on Tuesday, I would now be moving a Motion for Papers and nobody outside this Chamber would have had any idea what on earth I meant. Now, following acceptance of Proposal 8 of the Leader’s Group on working practices, I am simply drawing your Lordships’ attention to something, and the rest of the world can understand what we are doing. Your Lordships are therefore already taking part in a miniscule footnote to a small sub-paragraph of history: a micromove in the direction of transparency; a tiny part of a much larger tide. Incidentally, the very next day, the House agreed the proposal from the Privileges and Conduct Committee to amend the code so as to remind Members that its underlying purpose is to provide openness and accountability.

Openness and accountability are not the same, and neither on its own produces the other. In an admirable report to the Cabinet Office on privacy and transparency, Kieron O’Hara points out that the,

“transparency philosophy contains two separate and independent agendas”.

He calls them,

“the accountability agenda … and the information agenda”.

The first, the accountability agenda, is gradually providing the means by which formal internal systems of maintaining accountability are supplemented by informal external means. This means that, as well as Permanent Secretaries breathing down the necks of Deputy Secretaries, the public are increasingly looking over the shoulders of both. The language in both cases is strictly figurative.

The wealth of information now available to the public —by the “public”, I mean principally the electorate—makes them increasingly able to judge the performance not only of the government machine but of Ministers who are driving it. So the coalition Government’s early commitment to what I regard as a breathtaking acceleration in the move towards transparency and openness in government was courageous. It was consciously courageous. They said:

“The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account”.

They claimed that, by so doing, they would also secure,

“significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites”.

The economic benefits of this appear to be part of the second O’Hara agenda. I shall allow that to distract me from the intricate, fascinating and sometimes opaque subject of central government transparency to which I am sure my noble friend will do ample justice in her reply. Some of us were a bit doubtful whether what emerged from the mill of transparency would lend itself readily to the sort of process, or have the sort of effect, that the Government expected. Sceptics remained doubtful when, at the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference a year ago, my noble friend Lady Hanham said that,

“releasing the data in its rawest state”—

your Lordships should note “rawest state”—

“will enable businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites which will make the data easier to understand”.

Did not the Treasury have to hold seminars for financial journalists on how to understand and interpret COINS before and after the publication of those data? Government, it seemed, was to produce data much as a mill produces flour—it would be for others to turn it into bread and cake.

We waited—really not very long at all—and they did. What is more, they made them easier to use as well as easier to understand. To take a small example: the Department for Transport’s parking database was not citizen-friendly material when it was published, but, today, if you put Transport Direct into your web search engine, you can find the nearest car park wherever you are on this island. That is useful not just if you are a holidaymaker; it saves time and therefore money if you are a retailer trying to find somewhere where customers arriving by car can park and get to your shop and spend money there. The same website has brought in data from other sources, both public and private, with a view to making it a tool to plan every aspect of a journey by road or rail, by public or private transport.

That example is outside the accountability agenda, so let me turn to one that falls within it. I quote the Prime Minister, who wrote in the Telegraph on 7 July that,

“five years ago, it was made far easier for the public to access, understand and use data on survival rates following heart surgery. And guess what happened? Those survival rates rose dramatically”.

In that case, transparency easily outperformed formal internal systems of maintaining accountability. Death rates for some procedures fell by 20 per cent or more. That is a figure to remember. The NHS extended publication of outcomes as a result to more areas of surgery and, today, it estimates that we avoid 1,000 deaths every year by doing so and acting on it. Opening the professionals up to the public also opens them up to each other. In any trade or profession, this identifies best practice and spurs emulation. Spread across the medical disciplines alone, results such as this can bring enormous benefits not only to patients but to the Exchequer and, eventually, to our own pockets and purses. Spread across the whole spectrum, not just of central and local government activity but across amenable private enterprises as well, they may well achieve the savings and the growth, predicted at £90 billion by some, expected of them.

Transparency can be a double-edged weapon. The protection of confidentiality disappears as completely as a net curtain disappears when the light is turned on in the room behind it. However, confidentiality is often both desirable and necessary. The patient who wants to know why his operation went wrong and who would benefit enormously if the outcome of all similar operations could be aggregated and published on a database is the same patient who very much does not want his personal details to appear on a public website. There are difficulties here, not just in deciding where the border between confidentiality and transparency should lie, but in retaining the confidentiality of anything that it is decided should remain behind it. Data on huge numbers of those operations can be aggregated and anonymised, but anonymising processes can be reverse engineered, and techniques for this keep evolving, because there is a market for the sort of personal information that we wish to keep private. All data sets are subject to this potential risk. Getting it wrong could have pretty dreadful results. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell us what response the Government are giving to the 14 recommendations of the O’Hara report on this subject—perhaps not individually, as it would take too long, but in general.

From Monday’s debate on Amendment 20 to the Health and Social Care Bill, the Minister will be aware of the anxiety in this House over the balance between benefit and risk when it comes to imposing, for instance, a duty of candour on hospitals. There are major transparency issues also in the Localism Bill, which is also before the House. The public should take comfort from the energy and thoroughness with which this House examines these changes before deciding whether or not to accept them, and in what form. Had there been fewer people getting up at Question Time, I would have drawn attention to that when we had the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a few moments ago.

I spoke of the coalition’s early commitment to a breathtaking acceleration of this move to transparency. That was no exaggeration. In 2010, 2,500 government data sets were made available. This year, the number is already 7,500. That is a 200 per cent increase. I understand that this country now has more government data accessible to the public than any other country in the world except the United States of America, and they keep ahead of us only because they have a vast surface area and they count all the maps as data sets.

The move to transparency is an international phenomenon. A very important aspect, and one in which Great Britain has taken the lead, is the introduction to transparency in the giving of overseas aid—transparency not only at our end of the transaction, but at the recipient’s end as well. To get transparency at the recipient’s end is the present aim and is only just beginning. The International Aid Transparency Initiative —IATI—was launched in 2008 and started by establishing a common format of published accounting for aid programmes. In January this year we became the first country to publish DfID’s aid information entirely in this form. At the next meeting of IATI, in Busan at the end of this month, will Her Majesty’s Government be pressing other Governments to join the eight organisations now publishing in this format?

Next Tuesday, the first international aid transparency index will be published. We should be among the top three of the 58 donor countries included. We now want to establish the same procedures in recipient countries as we have here, a move which has been recommended by Transparency International among others. To that end, will the Government exert themselves to secure from the EU early legislation to make it mandatory for oil, gas and mining companies to publish in common form all payments they make to foreign Governments, disaggregated by project as well as country? Like Tearfund, I believe that there should also be a requirement to publish production volumes, pre-tax profits, employee numbers and labour costs. The people of countries from which immensely valuable commodities such as oil, copper, diamonds and so on are extracted by foreign or international corporations are often exceedingly poor. By these means we can, for the first time, bring to them the benefits that transparency is already beginning to bring us. When that happens, I will gladly seek once again to draw your Lordships’ attention to Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to transparency.

I have touched only the surface of the subject. I look forward to your Lordships contributions, especially that of the noble Lord, Lord Gold. I beg to move.

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I would like to remind your Lordships that all Back-Bench contributions are limited to eight minutes and that when the clock shows eight minutes, time is up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, I understand from the Table that the change in the nature of the Motion does not deprive me of the opportunity of replying briefly to the debate. I should like to start by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Gold, on a most interesting and excellent maiden speech, in which he confirmed Herbert Smith’s reputation as a formidable nursery of nobility and brought to our attention the importance of transparency in commercial, as well as national, transactions.

I will not pick up all the points everyone made, but I must reply to the noble Lord, Lord Wills. I readily accept that I should have been more courteous in accepting the efforts of the previous Government, but I remind him that what I actually said was not that the present Government invented transparency but that they started an acceleration of the movement—a breathtaking acceleration. I was careful to give 2008 as the date of clarity being brought to the surgical procedures to which I referred. I acknowledge that this movement is not new, but it is very much better and stronger.

Three specific points were raised that are worth following: the possibility of Waldegrave II; the need to look again at Section 27 of the Communications Act; and the importance of accessibility to transparent information if some of our citizens are not to be disenfranchised.

The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, made a forceful contribution, in which his expression was shared between his voice and his hands—the latter not always as courteous as his voice. However, his point was taken on board by my Front Bench, I am sure.

I conclude by saying that the purpose of this debate was to draw attention to the Government’s commitment to this breathtaking acceleration in transparency, and to point out that it has effects that spread through the whole polity and economy of this country. It raises highly sensitive issues of privacy, which have been discussed and raises the question that was central to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Prescott: what actually is private? As I said at the outset, drawing the line is very tricky and technical, and it is important that it should be drawn impartially.

In their present initiative, the British Government are world leaders, as we have already seen. They are extending the benefits of transparency to disadvantaged countries in the world, which is entirely admirable. In the process, the Government are releasing an enormous possible gain for our economy—up to £90 billion, we are told. I therefore congratulate my noble friend Lady Warsi and the right honourable Francis Maude for the part that they have played in pushing forward this initiative.

Motion agreed.