Public institutions and governance

Public data: saleable asset or national resource?

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Tom Barrance

Recent announcements by two government agencies, the HMRC and the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), regarding the sale of information has thrown a spotlight upon government information and the attendant debates of privacy verses exploitation. What is the ownership of information collected by the state? Held in trust for the citizen, or seen as assets like 3/4G mobile phone licences to be sold by government to the highest bidder? Or should all government data be treated as open data that is made freely available to all?

Government information is gathered in a number of ways, by legal requirement and from its nodal position within networks. Data, then, may not be provided willingly. The willing provision of information is governed by the concepts of notice and consent. Consent is given by the citizen having the right to know why information is collected and for what purpose, and is supported by the right to withhold agreement.  Without this procedural fairness, the use, and sale, of data can fatally undermine trust in the data collector.

The sale of public data is not a new phenomenon brought about by the clamour for “Big Data” or the development of database services like Hadoop; indeed the trend for the sale of public data may be seen with the sale of the edited electoral register under the terms laid down by the Representation of the People Act 2000. The sale of personal address data, for those who have not opted out (and the sale of all data to Credit Reference Agencies), is now well established and has fuelled the direct marketing industry, allowing large numbers of companies to purchase and exploit information. Consent is assumed with a default opt-in, the citizen having to actively request that their information is not sold. The principle established then is that data accumulated by the state is an asset of the state, and may be disposed of as such.

Turning to the recent examples of the proposal to sell some HMRC tax data,  described by Conservative MP David Davies as “borderline insane” and the currently suspended care.data plan under which the HSCIC will make data available to a range of organisations, or customers in the language used by the HSCIC, meeting the wide ranging description of  “academics and universities, healthcare commissioners and providers, third sector organisations, information intermediaries and commercial organisations including life science companies”. These groups can purchase, and a detailed cost schedule is provided for, what is described as “De-identified data for limited disclosure or access – data that has been through a process of pseudonymisation, however there remains a risk of individuals being identified”.

The question turns to who owns personal data; that is the data likely to infringe privacy, and is this still considered to be a state asset? At first glance medical, social care and financial information would appear to be central to the definition of the private realm, especially when combined with name and address. However does this still hold when the information is pseudonymised? How secure is a pseudonym, could the data still make the individual identifiable; for example how many individuals with Crohn’s disease and one child live within a given postcode?  The exact nature of the information and the ability to cross-correlate data can lead to individual identification.

In all of these examples, it can be seen that government treats the information at its disposal as an asset which it owns outright and can sell within the bounds of data protection legislation, if it so chooses. In taking this step, the government assumes the best use of this data is to sell it to a small number of selected users, rather than releasing the information wholesale.

The voluntary sharing of what would otherwise be considered sensitive or personal data has been commonplace since the introduction of store “loyalty” cards. These cards act as a method of exchange for personal details, for example basic demographic information (including name and address) together with a detailed transaction history allowing the store to determine the spending habits of the individual and of a cohort of similar individuals; (Rust, et al., 2010).  People are happy to voluntarily part with some personal data as part of a transparent process, where there is an obvious reward and where they may consider themselves to be in control.

The Government approach is somewhat different; it appears to take the view that information its asset to be disposed of as it sees appropriate, in what is perceived as the national best interest. This is a case of acting without procedural fairness, which as can be seen from press coverage, results in a fatal loss of trust.

So, where does this leave the question of the sale of information? The issue that government must address is the conditions and terms for the release of data; and it must take the public with it on this journey. A keystone in this debate, government must determine whether it sees public information as a saleable asset or as a national resource. Transparency regarding the state’s attitude to information that it holds is crucial to popular support for either open data initiatives or the treatment of information as an asset. This transparency must include an understanding of the value of the information.

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Tom Barrance is a part time Doctoral Researcher looking at Gov 2.0 in UK Local Government, and a full time Business Analyst/Project Manager at the London Borough of Hackney. He has worked in the public sector for the past 13 years, at a number of different local councils in a range of roles in Economic Development, business change and delivering ICT solutions.

Rebalancing Britain

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Martin Stott

The Scottish referendum campaign is having an interesting knock-on impact on English political debate. The position and dominance of London – the place Scots most dislike about the United Kingdom in its present form – is being looked at more critically. There have been a couple of think tank reports recently, but the debate has moved quite a way beyond the narrow audiences that these reports usually attract. That in itself is a reflection of the way the ground is shifting.

First out of the blocks was the Centre for Cities’ ‘Cities Outlook 2014’ report. The document is mainly pretty dry, though jazzes up with unusual graphics and some different takes on the issues. Basically it is saying that London has become super dominant in the UK economy, so much so that four out of five private sector jobs are created in London and that every major city outside the South East is losing young people to London with one in three 22-30 year olds ending up there. Put another way, London accounted for ten times as many private sector jobs as any other city and also saw a growth in public sector jobs as well. By contrast Bradford, Sheffield, Bristol, Southampton, Blackpool and Glasgow all saw employment shrink in both the public and private sectors.

All this is very much backed up by word done for the Core Cities group (Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield) who have initiated an Independent City Growth Commission chaired by Jim O’Neill, the Manchester born ex- Goldman Sachs Chief Executive. Their focus is on how to make Britain less focused on London in order to promote higher levels of national growth and create a less divided nation. Their plan is to issue a final report in the autumn in an attempt to set the agenda for the period leading up to the 2015 General Election. Essentially, the Core Cities interim report ‘metro growth: the UK’s economic opportunity’ argues that cities outside the South east need to be built into larger economic zones with better connections between them to create bigger markets and the kind of economies of scale for business that are to be found in London and the South East.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s Evan Davis has been busying himself on a very similar topic. His mini-series ‘Mind the gap: London vs the rest’ on BBC 2 looked at how London manages to earn more than one fifth of Britain’s income and continues to pull away in terms of growth and development while other regions still feel the sting of recession. Davis had some jolly japes in tall cranes and large diggers across London in search of the answers to his questions, but he knew that one very important answer was staring him in the face: public investment in intrastructure. Transport infrastructure investment is currently running at £5000 per person pa in London (think Cross Rail) and just £700 per person pa in the English regions.

Slightly perversely Davis took his viewers to visit the centre of his proposed new city-region-to-challenge-London: Hebden Bridge. But of course he had a point and it was that Hebden Bridge is in the centre of a huge potential city region stretching across England from Liverpool to Hull via Manchester and Leeds. Hebden Bridge is in the middle of this city region in the Pennines, rather winningly described by one of its residents as the city centre with an ‘inverted green belt’ – and places like Manchester and Leeds as its ‘suburbs’. This is far from outlandish. This part of the north of England really did challenge London for economic supremacy in the 19th century with its coal, steel and cotton as well as ports to export to the Empire.

But can it be revived as an economic counter-balance to London? That seems to depend on political will and a desire to invest in the area, especially its transport infrastructure. The Centre for Cities report makes a telling comparison. While acknowledging that the combined economies of Leeds and Manchester are just one fifth the size of London, it argues that they are unlikely to make the best of this combined scale because of ‘weak transport links’ citing ‘the distance between Leeds and Manchester is around 30% shorter than between Cambridge and London, yet the quickest train takes four minutes longer’. Jim O’Neill makes a similar point in an Observer interview about HS2, which he thinks will exacerbate the problem and simply make Birmingham a suburb of London, arguing that the money should be spent instead on creating a web of good links in the north: ‘In my judgement, for the national economy, that is way more important than improving the speed of the link from London to any of these places’.

Improving transport links in a new ‘super city’ is one dimension, but a couple of other factors are worthy of mention as well. London is the financial, political and cultural capital of the UK. This doesn’t give a lot of space for other cities to shine, unlike in say Germany with Frankfurt as its financial capital, Berlin as its political capital and Hamburg as its cultural capital. The same is true in Italy (Rome/Milan) and the USA, amongst others. Moving Whitehall and Westminster out of London would do them a power of good. If Scotland stays in the UK, the British Parliament could meet in London occasionally, but the four ‘nations’ would have Parliaments of their own in other cities.

More prosaically, the Centre for Cities report suggests that all the core cities should have access to the same policy powers as London has, i.e. strategic planning powers, powers over the budget for its transport system and police force, and a super-city wide elected assembly and directly elected mayor. A revival of regional identity and local government could yet come out of these debates, and not before time.

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Martin Stott joined INLOGOV as an Associate in 2012 after a 25 year career in local government.

Sustainable construction and local authorities: a failed experiment

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Max Lempriere

Sustainable housing policy is a hot-topic at the minute. The autonomy that local authorities have had from central government since 2007 to require local energy efficiency and sustainable construction that supersede those in national building regulations is set to be revoked. The government has raised concerns that because so few local authorities are embracing this autonomy there is a hotchpotch of standards in different parts of the country, creating an un-even playing field and raising costs for developers. The decision to strip local authorities of this legislative independence represents a serious blow to the question of whether the sustainability of housing can be raised but, importantly, it also forces us to ask why the uneven playing field was created in the first place.

This experiment to involve the local level in the design and adoption of sustainable planning policy has failed not because of a lack of environmental concern amongst local authorities but because central policy makers and academics alike are unaware of the social, economic and political factors that affect the ability of local government to embrace any autonomy they are granted. They failed to see that conditions on the ground simply weren’t right for a significant number of local authorities to face up to developers and require more from them. Political, institutional, economic and sociotechnical barriers prevent a large number of local authorities from raising local standards, even when the will was there.

In my PhD research I attempt to increase our understanding in this regard by focusing on the barriers faced by local authorities. Up until now there hasn’t been much work that looks at what factors encourage or inhibit local government to legislate in pursuit of environmental goals, so my research doesn’t just help us understand this policy area but helps us refine our analytical models of the politics local government in processes of sustainable development.

It is becoming clear that for change to occur policy champions must push sustainable construction proposals through the local legislative process, there must be a culture of innovation and sustainability and a sense of ecological optimism in the council and proponents of change must be organised and resourced well enough to counter any challenges. It looks like these conditions simple weren’t there in the majority of local authorities to the extent required for reform of spatial planning policies.

Of course this provides only a snapshot of a bigger, far more complex picture. Spatial planning in particular and sustainable development in general cuts across many areas of policy, economics, society, technology, history and geography and the answer to why a local authority is more or less willing to legislate for either goal lies in a particular combination of factors drawn from all of these areas.

My work is therefore part of a bigger picture, one that policy makers and academics alike need to start painting. We need to recognize the important role that local government plays in the transition towards a more sustainable society and ask how we can understand the barriers they face in order to encourage more, and better, policy.

That brings me on to the main point I want to make here: If we are to prevent a repeat of this failed experiment then we need to increase our understanding of whether and why local authorities embrace the legislative autonomy granted to them in the context of environmental policy. Doing so will allow us to increase our certainty that future devolutions from the national to local level will be successfully endorsed. If, alternatively, we continue along our current trajectory of ignorance of the politics of local government’s role in legislating for sustainable development then we can expect any future experiments to fail.

Local authorities have an enormously important role to play in the provision of sustainable development and we cannot afford to ignore the mechanisms that permit or prevent them exercising that role.

lempriere

Max Lempriere is a second year PhD student in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the politics of planning and construction, local government innovation and ecological modernisation.

Policing the journey along the low road

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Alan Doig

Up to the 1980s, crime control in the UK was widely seen as virtually the sole domain and responsibility of law enforcement. Nearly all police forces had, for example, a fraud squad whose purpose was laid out in a 1970 Home Office circular (apparently 115/1970 since you ask) and who traditionally dealt with criminalised aspects of local government misconduct.

As I noted in my recent article and elsewhere that world has changed substantially. Successive governments have initiated policy-driven changes, from frontline policing to prioritised local policing plans, more recently reinforced by the election of local police commissioners with local objectives and local audiences to keep onside. The increasingly attuned political antennae of Chief Constables and the continuing downward grind of spending reviews have thus seen the abolition or downsizing of fraud squads in favour of these agendas.

Those which remain have an increasing focus on ‘economic crime’ – code for another government agenda which relates to financial offences involving organised crime, professional enablers (lawyers and others) and higher-end corporate scams. It is the same code that had the government announce the end of the National Fraud Authority as shifting the focus to ‘cutting economic crime’ through ‘concentrating effort into law enforcement bodies’.

Fraud squads – or economic crime sections or units as they are now invariably labelled – have long dealt with specialist crimes in this area, including misconduct in public office and, more recently, the steadily-growing number of election frauds. So they will no doubt be expected to take on the consequences of the government’s decision to swap some of the Standards Board’s and Audit Commission’s arrangements for a single conflict of interest/disclosure offence in Chapter 7, section 34, of the Localism Act.

Given what I know about their past enthusiasm for wading into local politics and council cultures, I am sure that the police are relishing having to untangle what on earth what is meant by councillors being ‘reckless’ about whether information on their disclosable interests is ‘true’ and ‘not misleading’ (and that’s after the police have already dealt with a whole raft of legislative linguistic ambiguities, including disclosable, pecuniary, taking steps, participating and – my favourite – reasonable excuse). Indeed, and given the economic crime agenda’s focus on serious and organised crime, one may wonder whether the police, and especially economic crime sections, are likely to have the interest and appetite for Section 34.

A wider issue concerns not just the police but also those other agencies and resources councils could draw upon as part of maintaining an effective control environment. In a landscape populated by agencies with various anti-fraud and anti-corruption roles and responsibilities, from the Land Registry to NHS Protect, a number have worked together with local authorities as task forces. Councils themselves shared information through the at-risk National Fraud Initiative. Councils have also been able to rely on DWP-funded Housing benefit investigators whose involvement in non-benefit-related frauds rose from 13% in 1994/95 to more than 40 per cent in 2010/11.

All these arrangements and resources, as well as the continuing fallout from the abolition of the Audit Commission, are, however, in a state of flux, leaving councils to ponder how they will sustain their control environments at a time when the localism agenda will require councils to become increasingly engaged in traditional red-flag areas, such as planning, new areas, such as public health, or spending through other partners, such as charities.

With two ministries debating over who pays the – very modest – bill to revive councils’ in-house investigative resources (with each council being lucky to get one FTE out of whatever deal is cobbled together), councils must wonder where the support exists in terms of any low road journey that involves criminal investigation, joint or joined-up working and information-sharing.

With only Greater Manchester Police bucking the trend and setting up a volume fraud, locally-focussed team to add to its economic crime section, accessing police expertise and capacity may be as unlikely as expecting any of the law enforcement or other bodies tasked to take on National Fraud Authority functions showing any willingness for leading, coordinating and working with councils. Even if the high road thus remains closed for the foreseeable future, the journey along the low road is not going to be without its challenges.

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Alan Doig is Hon. Senior Research Fellow at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham; Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University and Board member, Management Board, North-east Fraud Forum.

It wouldn’t be honest! Will closing the high road lead to congestion on the low road?

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Alan Doig

Only a few weeks after my recent article on addressing fraud, corruption and conflict-of-interest in local government from the enforcement and public ethics perspectives – the low road and high road approaches – the EU produced an overview report on corruption. Drawing on a series of member state country studies, the report unsurprisingly argued that corruption continued to be an issue because although most member states had the necessary laws and institutions in place, they were not entirely effective.

This was apparently because ‘anti-corruption rules are not always vigorously enforced, systemic problems are not tackled effectively enough, and the relevant institutions do not always have sufficient capacity to enforce the rules. Declared intentions are still too distant from concrete results, and genuine political will to eradicate corruption often appears to be missing’.

While the UK report did not cover local government, such conclusions would raise pertinent comments about the abolition of the Standards Board and the Audit Commission in terms of the high road approach. Given the UK study also claimed that, ‘traditionally, the UK promotes high ethical standards in public service’ then it would be worth asking what does the abolition of the two institutions tell us about this ‘tradition’ in terms of capacity, results and will.

While is it often relatively easy to identify why public officials become involved in dishonesty – and my next blog will talk about ‘vigorous enforcement’ – what is of interest to those seeking to develop preventative strategies to guard against the misuse of public office is how to develop and maintain a culture of public service that promotes honesty. The objective of any prevention strategy would therefore seek to reflect a theme raised by the US National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice over a quarter of a century ago in relation to corruption: ‘corruption has three main components that are controllable and one that is not. The three controllable ones are opportunity, incentive, and risk; the uncontrollable one is personal honesty. Many public servants over a long period of time have had the freely available opportunity to be corrupt, a large incentive to do so, and little risk of being found if they did, but have refused because ‘it wouldn’t be honest’ (Zimmerman, 1980).

It was the 1995 report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that raised the question of the ‘grey area’ of uncertainty of ‘the difference between what is right and what is wrong’ and sought responses that encouraged guidance and education in ethical conduct. Since then the Committee itself has hardly taken the lead in responding to issues of capacity and will following the abolition of the organisations. This has appeared to take place at the same time as its interest in local government waned since it suspended its inquiry into leadership and trust in local government in 2009 in order to rush after the unfolding scandal of MPs’ expenses. This inquiry has not been picked up subsequently. Despite the Committee’s 2012 concerns about ‘the inherent robustness of the new arrangements’ and its Chair’s late 2013 reiteration of 2010 comments on the new regime being ‘stripped back too far’, an inquiry into the regime and arrangements – pencilled into the Committee’s 2012-2015 strategy – yet did not appear as an agenda item on the Committee’s 2014 workplan.

Who will pick up lead responsibility for public ethics at local level is now in limbo as the government also shifts its attention to what it sees as a more immediate and, in savings terms, more tangible results-based focus on preventing and detecting losses from fraud and corruption through the low road route. Even here the prevention aspect is losing ground to investigation and enforcement; the most visible sign of this came with the abolition of the National Fraud Authority, despite its apparent role in ‘successfully’ raising awareness of fraud and improving coordination, in favour of ‘cutting economic crime’ through law enforcement.

Nevertheless this comes after the Committee on Standards in Public Life that in 2013 changed its view about ‘grey areas’ explanations of unacceptable conduct in arguing that those in public life ‘behaved inappropriately not because they were unaware of what was expected but because they did not find it expedient’. In other words, both roads need to be tackled. Failing to discourage dishonesty and promoting honesty by closing the high road is likely to see an increase of both types of misconduct on the low road, leading to a potential congestion for those charged with investigation and enforcement. The next question is thus two-fold; how is the congestion likely to be addressed and how is the high road to be re-opened?

Zimmerman, J. F. (1980), ‘Ethics in the Public Service’, Paper Presented at the Maxwell Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, July 9, 1980.

Partnerships and service integration – is it all just hot air?

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Axel Kaehne

Since the 1990s, policy makers and academics have had a pet project in public service reform. Over time, they have called it differently but always meant essentially the same: public services collaborating with each other to improve service quality. At some point, it was called partnerships (remember the Partnership Agenda under Tony Blair’s government?), then it was service integration, a term particularly popular amongst health care professionals.

But what drives this collaborative agenda and where should it lead? Have we achieved anything over the last decades or was this all just hot air?

Academics have pointed out for a long time that there is a glaring gap in the partnership and integration project – evidence. We know from studies that working together does make a difference to professionals. This would be good if the main objective was to overcome service fragmentation per se, yet what drives much of the public policy announcements are intentions to improve service quality for users and patients.

Conceptualising service collaboration has been a well tilled field. Personalisation of services, where public services are shaped around the needs of the user is one way of thinking about improving public service delivery. Direct payments are a powerful instrument to re-orientate public services by putting the user in control. Yet, direct payments have been met with fierce resistance from some corners of the professional establishment, whilst the Welsh Government actively discouraged local authorities to use them until recently. Consequently, the take up of direct payments has been low.

In addition, producing evidence of the effects of service collaboration has proved to be the proverbial ‘holy grail’. The main stumbling block to it has been to establish a robust link between organisational changes and service improvements. As services improve their collaborative practices, the interface between users and professionals may often be largely unaffected. Organisational changes may not be noticeable for users. My paper on multi-agency protocols shows that even where the evidential link between changes and outcome is well defined, effects may be marginal and introspective at best.

Another reason is that service improvements are most urgent when users or patients draw on support from many different professionals because of the complexity of their needs. In the field of children’s services it is not uncommon to have families dealing with fifteen different professionals or more at a time.

The complexity of service delivery impacts on how organisational changes are perceived by the users and how they are affected by them. Key working may be a useful example. Potentially, key workers were supposed to reduce the number of professionals working with a service user, yet there is little evidence that they have had this desirable effect. More often than not, key workers joined the long list of professionals without reducing the need to be in contact with others. In other words, they turned into another layer of service delivery on top of the already existing ones.

So, why is it so difficult to improve service delivery in collaborative contexts? The answer lies in the discrepancy between policy objectives and the levers for change we have available. Policy makers constantly profess a desire to improve services by urging professionals to work together. Yet, there is only one player in this game who really knows what would constitute better services: the user. As long as professionals are in the driving seat, users will be a polite afterthought to their practice. Whether you call it partnership or service integration, collaborative practice grows from user demand. Better public services for users with complex needs should not be a product of professional generosity but an outcome of user demand. Until the user is in control of the service they get, service collaboration will remain little more than hot air.

Axel’s article, ‘Multi-Agency Protocols as a Mechanism to Improve Partnerships in Public Services’, is published in Local Government Studies.

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Dr. Axel Kaehne is currently Chair of GORWEL, the Welsh Foundation for Innovation in Public Affairs and a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty for Health and Social Care, Edge Hill University. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital NHS Trust in Liverpool.