On Thursday David Cameron attended a conference held in London which was intended to promote the use of open data by Governments and private business. One of the aims of the summit was to ‘open up government data to boost entrepreneurship, economic growth and accountability’. At the beginning of this two day Inter Governmental summit with 61 national governments who are members of the Open Government Partnership plus 12 others present, the Prime Minister gave a speech in which he claimed that “open government isn’t some kind of optional add-on or a “nice to have” but why it is absolutely fundamental to a nation’s success in the 21st Century” and went on to suggest that “an open, vibrant market economy – and that is underpinned by an open, vibrant successful democracy a place where people have a say in the future of their nation.” and then “Over the past 3 and a half years the government I lead has been unprecedented in the information we’ve released.”

Within 48 hours of the open data conference starting, MacMillan Cancer Support had appeared to run into an accountability clash with Iain Duncan Smith’s, Department for Work and Pensions. This disagreement was published by the BBC on their News website and was broadcast on Radio 4 throughout yesterday. MacMillan advisers spend their working day helping people who have been diagnosed with cancer and in particular those whose cancer is judged to be terminal. This group of people are supposed to have their benefit claims and payments fastracked. However the experience of the MacMillan advisers is that the changes within the welfare system have led to excessive delays, in some cases for as long as three months. Rather than asking for an urgent high level meeting with Macmillan to better understand the context and background of these experiences, or adopting an open data approach to publish the full figures so that any delays could be seen in their context, the DWP has done what Governments and Politicians tend to do when they don’t want to be open, they went into defensive mode. According to a DWP spokesperson there were no “robust statistics” to back-up Macmillan’s claim that the change had caused delays for hundreds.

The failure to be open and accountable is not limited to one Government Department, the Prime Minister who explained to 71 other Governments “When we talk about transparency elsewhere, we’ve got to show it at home too.”….”We’ve got to give our full-throated support for groups that promote transparency” failed to point out that his government has been working for over a year on a series of proposals to make it easier for public authorities to refuse FOI requests on cost grounds, despite a campaign opposing this from organisations such as Friends of the Earth, Jubilee Debt Campaign, League Against Cruel Sports and nearly 70 others.

There has also been criticism from others including Clare Algar, the Executive Director of the legal charity Reprieve who said of David Cameron “His Government is carrying out a wide-ranging assault on the public’s ability to hold it accountable through the courts – cutting back judicial review and legal aid, Add to this Government proposals to roll back Freedom of Information, and clamp down on recent revelations about the extent of mass-snooping by our intelligence agencies, and a clear picture emerges of a programme to limit, not enhance, transparency and accountability.”  

It is vital to recognise the openness that does exist such as the items mentioned by David Cameron in his speech “You can now map the crime on your streets, the standards in your schools and the performance of your hospitals. You can see the businesses and people who the government meets with, the names and roles of senior civil servants, not to mention the pay of many of our top officials”. He goes on to speak about an aspiration to increase the amount of data that is published about private companies which is surely going to be a challenge if this is to be about substance rather than style. One of his final sentences is “Time and again history has shown that us open governments make for successful nations.” I confess that I want to live in a successful nation and I believe that David Cameron is right that our nations success depends on having an open government with a commitment to open data. However this openness must extend to Cameron and his tribal colleagues in all three parties accepting that the rules and structures of our democracy were conceived by closed and private Governments. The foundations of any structure will shape the outcome. If we are to have open Government we need an open democracy, one where power is not vested in the wealthy or an organised political elite. As representatives from 72 national governments return home from the summit and the rhetorical spotlight is switched off, lets have a commitment by our parties to take a new look at democracy. We heard last week from Russell Brand and later a response from Robert Webb with his views on democracy. One of the places where I hope this discussion will take place more broadly is at a conference being organised by a left leaning network called Compass at the end of November. These might just be blips in a closed environment, or perhaps they are part of the trajectory towards a truly open democracy? If so, lets see more movement including from those to the right of the Compass grouping?