Information & Ethics Committee on March 9th, 2011

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I call the meeting to order. I want to welcome everyone. Bienvenue à tous.

This meeting is meeting number 49 of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. It's a continuation of our ongoing study into open government.

We do have two witnesses before us this morning, both appearing via telephone conference. But before I get to the witnesses and introduce the witnesses, I want to just follow up on Mr. Easter's motion that was passed by this committee two days ago to call Mr. Nejatian tonight.

Mr. Nejatian was out of the country and wasn't able to come tonight, but with the clerk he agreed to come Monday night. That's Monday, March 21, from 7 to 9. Of course the clerk will send out the appropriate notices in due course.

Mr. Easter, do you have a comment?

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Just a comment. I think that's good, Mr. Chair. That would allow us to do the scheduled meeting on CBC that the Conservative members on the committee wanted, so that is fine by us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay, then.

I will go now to introduce the witnesses. We have before us, first of all, from University College London, Mr. Ben Worthy, research associate, constitution unit, and also Mr. John Sheridan. Mr. Sheridan is the head of e-services and strategy at the office of public sector information in the National Archives in the United Kingdom. Of course he is appearing before us today as an individual, and he is not speaking for his office but as an individual.

On behalf of this committee, I certainly want to welcome and thank you both, Mr. Worthy and Mr. Sheridan, for your appearance here today.

The way the committee operates is that we will invite you each to give opening remarks, hopefully in the vicinity of anywhere from five to ten minutes. Then we will go to questions from individual members according to a pre-allotted schedule that the committee has agreed upon.

I have nothing further to say. Again, welcome.

I am going to ask you, Mr. Worthy, if you have any opening comments you want to leave with the committee.

[Ben Worthy, Research Associate, Constitution Unit, University College London]

Yes. If I could, first I want to say thank you for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to appear before people of your stature, so thank you for that.

I just want to tell you very briefly for about five minutes what we've been doing at University College London.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I want to interrupt you just for ten seconds. Perhaps I should have clarified this issue. This is coming via the teleconference, but there's no video. Perhaps everyone wasn't aware of that, so I just wanted to let everyone know. You can hear the witness, but you cannot see him.

I apologize for the interruption. Go ahead, Mr. Worthy.

[Ben Worthy]

No, that's fine. My apologies for not being able to appear via video conference.

What we've been doing at the unit is for the past few years we've been looking at the impact of the Freedom of Information Act in the U.K. We've spent two years looking at the impact of freedom of information on British central government, and we're now looking at both the impact on local government and also on the Westminster Parliament. We've also been looking internationally at how other regimes work.

Also, we're becoming increasingly interested in issues around proactive publication, and particularly—

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Mr. Worthy, can I interrupt you again?

[Ben Worthy]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

I'm going to interrupt you again. In Canada, we have two official languages, so when you're speaking, your actual presentation is being translated by interpreters or translators here into the other official language, French. Could I just ask you perhaps to slow down by 20% or 30% so that they have an easier job in translating what you're saying?

[Ben Worthy]

Absolutely. My apologies.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

It has nothing to do with you. It's just the way we do the system.

[Ben Worthy]

Right.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much. I'm sorry for the interruption.

[Ben Worthy]

What we've been doing is looking internationally to see how other freedom of information regimes work, or access to information, as it's known in Canada. Also, we're increasingly interested in issues around the online publication of information and proactive disclosure via the Internet.

The way we've been looking at how the act works in these different areas is by interviewing officials across central government as well as local government. We've also been using the media to look at stories based on freedom of information requests. We've looked at case law. And we've also tried an online survey of requesters who use the act to see what they think about it.

To talk very briefly about what we've been doing, we've tried to examine to what extent freedom of information has met the objectives set for it by the people who supported the act. So we've tried to see to what extent freedom of information has made the government in the U.K. more transparent and more accountable, whether it's had any impact on decision-making and on public understanding, and if it has in any way affected levels of public participation and trust.

We've also been quite keen to look at the impact on the day-to-day work of public institutions and to see whether it has affected things such as records management and even constitutional conventions. We've also written a brief article about some of the difficulties involved in measuring freedom of information and how you go about seeing to what extent it's done its job.

Here are a few brief conclusions from us to the central government. We concluded that freedom of information had made the U.K. central government more transparent both in terms of the amount of information it put out and in creating a more open culture. Also, it made government more accountable. Government spent more time explaining what it did, often when FOI worked in conjunction with the media.

It had very little impact overall on things such as decision-making and levels of public participation and trust. But this is not because FOI has failed; it's more because these are very deep and complex issues and it's rather difficult to get to the bottom of them. And FOI alone probably can't affect these.

We also found that few of the fears relating to freedom of information were borne out in practice. There was little effect, for example, on how records were kept as a result of FOI and there was little impact on things such as ministerial accountability.

I want to flag a few things of interest to the committee. How freedom of information or ATI works depends very much on where you put it. And different public bodies have different cultures, different levels of leadership, and different relations with the media, for example, all of which means that freedom of information can work differently.

We felt that leadership is absolutely key to making open government work. Strong leadership and support high up from both politicians and officials help other people not to resist within the organization and also allow space to innovate. Freedom of information never really settles down; however you change the act to whatever you're doing, there will always be scandal and embarrassment. That's part of the nature of freedom of information.

Freedom of information requests are not all about expenses and high-level things. They're often rather niche, about very small pieces of information that are of importance to the person asking.

And finally, of course, freedom of information works alongside a host of other things, not the least of which is information technology. As you know, the U.K. coalition government committed itself to publishing online all spending over £25,000 for central government, and all spending over £500 for local government. And we're now starting to look into this to see what impact it's had. I'd be more than happy to speak about what we know up to now.

That's all I have to say. Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Worthy.

We're now going to you, Mr. Sheridan, for your opening comments.

[John Sheridan, As an Individual]

I would first like to thank you very much for this opportunity to talk to you.

I'll give you a little bit of background, as you say. I'm head of e-services and strategy at the Office of Public Sector Information. I have worked around the issues to do with open data, and publishing data in particular, for about five years as a public servant and have been involved in most of the initiatives the U.K. government has taken forward around open data publishing and how we do that well.

In policy terms, we distinguish between access legislation, which is covered by freedom of information legislation—you're just hearing about the Freedom of Information Act that we have in the U.K.—and re-use issues, which are about people who may take the information that government has made available and build maybe new commercial products or build applications that potentially help the citizen to hold government more to account.

There has been a long-running separation between access on one side and what we would call re-use on the other. Re-use probably involves more the economic use and the economic contribution that public sector information and public data can make. It also involves the use we now see for transparency, as well as the contribution that having better public access to data and better use of public data can make to new models of delivering public services. So the re-use agenda tied into lots of different agendas: an economic agenda, a transparency agenda, and a public services reform agenda along with the changing role of the state in society.

These have all driven a number of initiatives over the last decade or more in the U.K. A very striking and important moment was the coalition agreement that sets the policy framework for the current Parliament. The coalition agreement enshrines a number of obligations, a number of commitments with regard to our data publishing.

You've heard the commitment around publishing spending data and the idea that if we publish spending data, not only would the public be able to hold the government more to account but people would also be able to understand better what public organizations are doing and potentially public servants will make different decisions about how they spend public money. Also, information about the organizational structure of government, how much civil servants are paid, who reports to whom, and who is making decisions would be published.

Simultaneously, there's a very strong focus around growth, and quite a lot of work is happening at the moment with respect to further adapting the policy framework to try to make sure the private sector and the voluntary sector have the access they need to key government data sets.

For the first time--and this is very interesting--given this long-running separation between access and re-use both in policy terms and in terms of our statutory framework, the freedom bill that has been introduced to the U.K. Parliament proposes amendments to our freedom of information legislation...[Technical Difficulty—Editor]...right to government data sets and defines what a data set is. So for the first time we actually see those two strands potentially coming together in our statutory framework. That's just to give you a flavour.

My particular competence is around the technologies we have to enable this and the possibilities that new technologies, particularly on the web, will open up for bringing information together from lots of different sources, as well as why that's important and why suddenly data is, as I've heard it described, the new oil. It's an amazing resource that people are able to do all sorts of wonderful things with.

With some of that it's very much the government's role to enable from many different policy-check tests.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Did we lose you, or are you through?

[John Sheridan]

I'm finished.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay. Thank you very much. That was helpful.

I want to thank both of you for your opening comments.

Now we'll go to the first round of questions. Mr. Easter, you have seven minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations.

Mr. Worthy, I went through your paper, More Open but Not More Trusted? The Effect of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on the United Kingdom Central Government. You talk about how it has improved the quality of government decision-making and intended to increase public trust. Can you comment further on that? Your title kind of indicates that it hasn't meant more trust. Can you expand on the quality of government decision-making, and whether or not there has been more public trust in greater public participation?

[Ben Worthy]

Those are two of the hopes for freedom of information: that it would improve the quality of decision-making within government, and make government more trusted. So if I take each of those in turn, we found it hadn't had much impact on the quality of government decision-making, but part of this was the difficulty that so many things had influenced the quality of government decision-making, particularly in the last ten years, that freedom of information could only be a very small part of any change that had taken place.

It hasn't improved trust at the central government level. This is not a fault of freedom of information, but more the political environment in which freedom of information exists. A few FOI-based stories get into the press. They're generally the rather negative ones. So they have no effect or a negative effect on public levels of trust. We also found that pre-existing low levels of trust shape what sorts of requests people make. So sometimes they make requests that confirm their low levels of trust that already exist.

We found that things like how the media and government interacted and fought shaped issues around trust. It wasn't really FOI itself.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Where do you think it is going now? You have the new coalition government. Is it their intent to go more to open government and open up access to information further? How do you see that working out?

[Ben Worthy]

Is that for me or John, or both of us?

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Both of you can answer either question.

[Ben Worthy]

John really hinted at that when he was speaking. Lots of things are coming together. The open data movement and the FOI movement are coming together. As I see it, the coalition government is firstly committed to kind of joining up ideas of proactive publication, with use of the Internet and online publication of information to obtain a range of political and economic benefits. They're also committed, interestingly, to extending the Freedom of Information Act to new bodies that weren't previously covered. The initial list was rather long. It seems to have been cut down slightly, but we'll have to see how that develops.

So in a sense it's spreading crossways towards information technology, and outwards to cover new bodies. That's where the future of freedom of information is. It's joining up, as John said, with this new idea of a right to data. That is very similar to where it seems to be going in the U.S. under Obama, with a linkup to electronic record diffusion, electronic information systems.