Information & Ethics Committee on March 9th, 2011

[John Sheridan]

I don't know of any yet. There may be more studies in the U.S., where their policy is a little more advanced. It's of course extremely difficult to trace it, particularly because it's so new.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I think you've had some association with the World Bank Institute and the study on proactive transparency that I think Helen Darbishire wrote. And I gather there is some sense in there of data publishing being related to freedom of information, that they somehow be combined, that they not be seen as separate regimes, and that maybe even data publishing and open data be seen as a subset of access to information and freedom of information law.

I wonder if that's something you're familiar with, and if you could comment further on that, or if there is more to be said about that kind of framework for improved publishing of government data and access to information.

[Ben Worthy]

I think what Helen Darbishire has done--and I heartily recommend her report--is point out that ten years ago the transparency community and the open data community were two very different bodies, but increasingly they're coming to work together. You can see this in the U.S. and the U.K.

One of the parts of freedom of information that people don't talk about much is the proactive aspect. When people discuss freedom of information and access to information they often talk about people making requests and responses. But proactive dissemination is contained in every act I know of, and it is as important. And it's hoped that technology can alleviate some of the problems around freedom of information.

Freedom of information can be seen as quite costly to bureaucracies in terms of time. It can be seen as quite complex, in the sense that the information isn't always easily understandable to everybody once it's put out there. And it's hoped that use of open data and information technology can both cut down costs and also make the information much simpler so that more and more people can understand it. So the hope is that open data can mean that FOI leaps ahead and becomes easier to use and much less costly and, as was pointed out earlier, you can do much more with the information once it's out there and it's combined with applications.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Siksay.

We're now going to go to Ms. Pat Davidson, who is a member of the governing Conservative Party and vice-chair of the committee.

Ms. Davidson, seven minutes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your information you've given us this afternoon. Certainly it's useful information, and we're very glad we were able to have this connection here today.

One of the things I am still a little unsure about, Mr. Worthy, is what stage you are at in the U.K. with putting together the Freedom of Information Act in the open data exercise. I thought you made some remarks about two different bodies, but they're now starting to come together. Is that correct?

[Ben Worthy]

Yes, that's more about the supporters groups. There's obviously quite a long-established pro-transparency community in the U.K., headed by people like the Campaign for Freedom of Information and other groups like that. Also, there's an advocates group for open data.

Just to specify, I was referring to the fact that Helen Darbishire points out that actually the advocacy groups themselves are starting to merge more closely. As John pointed out, as policies on the right to data merge with FOI, so the advocates groups have increasingly begun to work together and recognize that they can actually push the agenda forward by learning from each other.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

At what stage is the government on open government?

[Ben Worthy]

I'd refer back to what John said earlier. The coalition government is less than a year old. It started rolling out what you'd call, I suppose, version 2.0 of freedom of information, which is about online publication. All local authorities in Britain have to publish online all of their spending over £500, as of the end of January 2011, and all but eight of the local authorities have done that. Government departments have published contracts and have published their spending over £25,000.

The point is that although these things can be done relatively quickly, it can take some time for people to start using this information and looking at it. So there's often a gap between a reform happening and being able to see what exactly the impact on the public is. But I'll perhaps pass over to John to comment on this, because he probably knows a bit more about what stage it's at.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Sheridan, if you're going to answer that question, could you perhaps also tell me if it is the coalition government at the national level that sets the limits for the municipalities? Or is that set separately?

[John Sheridan]

It's the national government that is setting the thresholds for local government and for central government. It's the national government that is driving the policy. Obviously that only extends to the competence of the U.K. government. It doesn't extend to our devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. There is a different degree of emphasis placed by the devolved administrations on the transparency agenda compared to the coalition government.

As you're saying, there are very clear commitments in the coalition agreement about particular data sets that are to be published. That has been done, and those commitments have been met. We're moving from exercises to publishing these sorts of transparency data sets and organizational structures' contracts as a matter of routine.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Worthy, going back to your document that was circulated to us, in the conclusion you talk about some resistance, some obstruction, and uneven levels of openness. You talk about the unexpected finding that requesters who responded were distrustful as a result of the FOI. Could you talk a bit about that, please?

[Ben Worthy]

I think resistance is extraordinarily hard to measure. It does go on at whatever level, but I think it's very much in the minority of cases. The problem is that a requester may see a delay as resistance, whereas the official will see it as the fact that unfortunately the response to the request has been delayed. It varies from department to department. Now that we're finally looking at local government, it varies from local authority to local authority. It depends on a range of things. For example, different departments deal with different sorts of information. Their leadership has different levels of enthusiasm for FOI, and all these things can make it rather uneven.

We expected, when we did this study, to find that while reporting of stories in the media would decrease trust, people who used FOI would increase their trust in government. We found that for central government that wasn't the case. What's interesting is that it seems that a lot of the people who use FOI are using it for a certain angle or perspective on an issue of importance to them. Sometimes it's an issue that's part of an ongoing conflict with a political authority or with someone related to it. So actually their trust wasn't very high to start with. FOI can act to confirm their distrust, if you see what I mean.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Yes.

So as the central government moves towards more open government and a more open data situation, do you see that trust in government changing?

[Ben Worthy]

I think it's extraordinarily difficult, because trust is influenced by so many other things. We found for central government there was no change in trust. We found for the ongoing study of local government—and it's not yet complete—that there was a very different perspective. We suspect this is because local government can do things central government can't do, such as be visible in the community or make a difference to what's happening virtually on people's doorsteps. In that way, it can increase trust because it has much more contact, whereas central government is much more remote.

I think, and this is just my opinion, that the evidence seems to point to the fact that very few people ever really do trust politicians, and I'm not sure if there's that much you can do to greatly increase levels of trust in politics. Unfortunately, I think politics is widely perceived as just that sort of game. It's made especially difficult in the U.K., of course, by the MPs' expenses controversy, which I'm sure you heard about, which seems to have poisoned all of the political system, and probably will do for some time to come.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

So what do you see as the big advantages of open government and open data?

[Ben Worthy]

I think, as with FOI, it will make government more transparent and accountable. I think it does reduce some of the problems caused by old-style FOI, such as the resource costs. Again, I'd agree with John here that some of the really interesting things we'll start to see will be when websites are developed and new applications are developed that allow people to do new things with the information.

I was speaking with one person in the U.K. who created a site called Openly Local, and you can track through 200 different local authorities' spending and find out which companies have been paid by how many local authorities. As this person pointed out, when you can find that 20 local authorities have paid a company, that's interesting, but when you can find that 200 have paid a particular company, then it becomes a different game altogether.

I think it may be in some of the spinoff innovations where we start to see really interesting things happen that could have all sorts of economic, political, and social impacts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Davidson.

Mr. Worthy, in Canada everyone has total trust in politicians.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

That concludes the first round.

We're now going to go to the second round of five minutes each and we're going to start with you, Dr. Bennett.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you very much.

As you know, we're a little behind here in Canada, and as we've done the hearings, one of the problems seems to be that there isn't an open government policy. And certainly the Prime Minister has never made a statement on this. So I would want you to tell us how important it was for Prime Minister Cameron to issue the public letter on June 1, and then tell us about actually making sure that all the departments, politicians, and public bodies knew this was an expectation.

Then I was wondering if you would also talk to me about the public sector transparency board and how important you think that is in terms of enforcing or accelerating the progress.

[Ben Worthy]

Perhaps I would talk about this very briefly and then I'd hand over to John again, as he can tell you from inside of government.

I think the importance of a prime minister or a president endorsing freedom of information can't really be overstated. Prime Minister Tony Blair was very tepid on FOI, and he was then followed by Gordon Brown, who made a number of public speeches in favour of it, followed by David Cameron, who has made public statements and speeches in favour of freedom of information.

Of course bureaucracies operate on signals, and these different signals send a kind of positive or negative message throughout the whole of the system about how seriously to treat the issue—how seriously to take it, what sorts of resources to put into it, and what the consequences could be if you don't, for example. These are all very mysterious and kind of difficult to measure, but they definitely exist.

Contrast this with the experience of Ireland, where previous Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who's just left, publicly described most freedom of information requests as a waste of time, and you can imagine what effect that had on hard-pressed FOI officers and people who were trying to decide how to prioritize it.

In terms of the transparency board, it looks to me like a very interesting group of people, and they seem to be doing a very interesting job in pushing forward with innovative ideas; and they've also been very open about how they go about doing it.

But I'd perhaps ask John to comment on this more.

[John Sheridan]

The commitment of the Prime Minister and officials from Number 10 is real. Those officials who are involved in transparency work know that our commitment is a day-in, day-out commitment by officials at Number 10, and a week-in, week-out commitment by officials at Number 10. If you want to introduce the kind of change that involves having the senior civil service have details about their salary published openly on the web, then you need a very strong political direction and push, because there are many points of inertia within the system.

I would say that if you look at that commitment from the Prime Minister and you look at how Number 10 has driven the agenda in the U.K. government and you look at what was being done, it all fits together. Officials right the way across departments know how important this is to the centre, to deliver on. In terms of the transparency board, they are very much part and parcel of that simple push, chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, who is a very important minister and very influential. It's joining the dots between transparency, strategy, and delivery, and some of the practical problems we encounter, for example, with publishing salary data: when we do or don't redact the name of an official, when we do or don't redact details of a particular payment. And they're helping to provide that strategic direction in what is a new art. Technically and in policy terms, it's a new art.

The other important observation is the extent to which open data is helping to achieve or relieve the burdens of freedom of information, because if our payments information is just published as a matter of routine, if people's salary information, if they're senior, is published as a matter of routine, and if our contracts are published as a matter of routine, when someone makes a request for that information it's very each to answer. It's on the web already. That's one of the efficiency drivers for open data as part of freedom of information. I think that's an important angle to capture.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Dr. Bennett.

We're now going to go back to Ms. Davidson from the governing Conservative Party. Ms. Davidson, five minutes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If I don't use all of my time I'll split it with Mr. Abbott.

Gentlemen, I'm just going to make a statement here and then ask a broad question, and I would like you both to answer it if you would, please.

In your remarks, Mr. Worthy, I'm reading here about the aims, the better decision-making. You were hoping that was going to be one of the aims of the FOI, to improve the quality of decision-making. It was also hoped that it would show the citizens how government works and how decisions are taken. Then you talk a bit about other countries' experiences and how some of those are a bit ambiguous. You talk about Australia. You talk about Canada. You also talk a little bit again about the United Kingdom, where the FOI is one part of a wider drive by government to disseminate more in higher-quality information. Then you go on to say that it's primarily through the media, though the Internet has been trumpeted as a new instrument.

How much do you rely on the media and how much do you rely on other methods such as social media or the Internet to get information relayed? Have there been any negative aspects to what's taken place in the U.K.?

Would both of you answer that, please?

[Ben Worthy]

I could begin with a few thoughts.

One of the interesting phenomena about FOI is that very few people actually use it; fewer than one in a thousand people make an FOI request. It's still a lot, but not a lot as a proportion of the population. Most people find out about freedom of information via the media, mainly via the mainstream media, whether that's in physical form or online.

In terms of people's sources for information, as far as I know, the majority of the population still use the mainstream media. However, more and more people are using blogs. One interesting thing about FOI is that it also gets onto blogs, and lots of journalists who use freedom of information, if they can't get their story in the press, will use blogs to publicize that information. There's also been some high-profile use of FOI by certain famous bloggers in the U.K., among whom one of the most famous is called Guido Fawkes. So there is an interaction between social media, for example, and freedom of information, and using that as an alternative source.

I suppose the negative effects are in a sense in the eyes of the beholder, really. One of the problems with discussing freedom of information is that I think there is a hidden bias in it when you speak with politicians and officials. To quote a very good U.S. study of transparency, to the politicians and officials freedom of information has led to “concentrated costs and dispersed benefits”. Politicians can very easily see the financial costs, but also the political costs. It's much more difficult for them to see the more long-term or more difficult-to-measure benefits, such as transparency. So there's a danger that you can actually see the costs much more easily than you can see the benefits, as it were. In a sense, the negative effects depend on from which viewpoint you're looking at it.

One of the often-repeated negative effects of FOI is that it actually leads to a change in how records are kept. It leads to the so-called “chilling effect”, which means either information isn't written down, or when it is written down it's written down in a very anodyne form. We found that how records have changed is due to so many other factors, that actually FOI has very little influence on this. So one of the significant negative effects we found didn't actually take place, although that didn't stop the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, from mentioning this in his autobiography.