Entitlements guarantee access to and quality of services, and digital technology enables more services to be joined up and online. It is equally vital to use new technology to harness people’s appetite and ability to drive up service standards. In the past, much public service improvement was driven by the force of government targets set by central government. In the future, much more of the pressure for improvement can come from the local level.
Ultimately, a more informed citizen is a more empowered citizen. In a modern democracy citizens rightly expect government to show where money has been spent and what the results have been.19 With the interactive capabilities of the web, government can offer citizens and communities the chance to pass comment on services in real time. The website http://www.lovelewisham.org/ encourages residents to report graffiti and fly-tipping for quick removal, and since its launch there has been an 8% decrease in graffiti and 30% reduction in complaints.20 The new online crime maps which went live in October 2009 mean that for the first time everyone in the country can search by postcode for facts about crime in their area and what is being done by the police and courts to deal with it.21
Across the UK both informal and professional groups use the internet to share information and drive change. Teachers, for example, share lesson plans through the TES Connect resource to save time and to learn from others.22 Most recently, volunteers have updated base maps on the Open Street Map website to show where roads and bridges have been blocked by flooding or damage.23 Many local councils offer communities the opportunity to propose projects that offenders work on as part of Community Payback and to choose how assets seized from criminals are spent. Building on crime mapping, the Home Office is piloting ways to allow people to use police data on late-night incidents to help them choose the safest routes home - and to post travel tips for others.
TES Connect contains an online resources exchange for teachers to share lesson plans, and is the largest online professional network in the UK, with 870,000 registered users. The resources part of the site receives 850,000 visits per month with 2,000,000 teaching resources being downloaded by the teaching community monthly. 97% of teachers believe that TES resources are effective or very effective in delivering their lessons. The TES estimates that the site is reducing duplicated work at a rate that will result in up to £1 billion of teaching time going back into the classroom by 2010/11 - equivalent to adding 30,000 full-time teachers.
Data can also be used in innovative ways that bring economic benefits to citizens and businesses by releasing untapped enterprise and entrepreneurship. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt predict a significant increase in economic growth if more publicly held data are released for reuse.25 A study by the University of Cambridge found that the growth to the UK economy from freely releasing just a subset of the public sector data that are currently sold could be £160 million in the first year alone.26 And from a Cabinet Office pilot which involved better access to government data, developers were able to create new tools to better inform the public:
Public services are run and assessed on objective, non-personal 'public data' that are generated in the course of service delivery. The taxpayer has already paid for its collection, but does not always have the right to access it. Enabling access on the terms of our public data principles (see box) will create opportunities for third parties to develop innovations using free government data.
'Public data' are 'government-held non-personal data that are collected or generated in the course of public service delivery'.
Our public data principles state that:
To enable this innovation, government must unlock much more data. These data have to be usable: the Power of Information Taskforce Report28 concluded that even where government data are currently available it can be hard to find, published in non-reusable formats or subject to licences which prevent access and reuse.
Within these guiding principles we will take the following actions to open up data and promote transparency:
We will release valuable public datasets and make them free for reuse. This will include:
We will make government data accessible through a single access point at http://www.data.gov.uk/, which will go live from January 2010 with over 1,100 central government datasets free for reuse, ranging from lists of schools to traffic volumes on the trunk road network.
We will encourage local government to release local public data and make it free for reuse, and establish an open-platform local data exchange. Professor Nigel Shadbolt will lead a local public data panel to ensure that data are linked effectively across local authorities, the Local Government Association, government departments and agencies.
We will create new ways for the citizen to interact with public services and public policy. By December 2010 we will extend user comment capabilities on NHS Choices to cover all health services, and we will publish key consultations online via the Directgov consultation index, with tools for interactive dialogue, enabling citizens to comment on draft legislative bills.
We will make a number of important technical improvements to public data: we will aim for the majority of government-published information to be reusable, linked data by June 2011; and we will establish a common licence to reuse data which is interoperable with the internationally recognised Creative Commons model.
Notes
