Will we see a Trip Advisor for councils?

A requirement for all councils to publicise online their items of spending over £500 takes effect next month. Michael Burton reports on a seminar which found the transparency agenda to be the tip of the iceberg Next month sees the deadline for all councils in England to upload online their spending details over £500. Will this create the much-vaunted army of armchair auditors or will the public respond to this new wealth of data with supreme indifference? Will we see the growth of a Tripadvisor for councils? And what of the role of private-sector analysts of this data? As with most initiatives in local government, there is no ‘one size fits all' and the so-called transparency agenda is no different. A fortnight ago 100 councils had already met the deadline. But the way they present them is varied with a quarter in the form of a basic PDF, some updated each month and many categorised in quite different formats. These in turn reflect the commitment of the respective councils to the principles behind the onward use of their data. For example, placing such information in PDF form is of little help to users planning to benchmark it or make some use of the content for analytical purposes. One commentator said, in a Christmas analogy, that placing data in such a format was akin to dumping piles of earth containing Brussels sprouts and then expecting people to dig them out. Some councils however have seized the agenda with enthusiasm. One is Redbridge LBC which has come up with an online consultation exercise called ‘YouChoose' and whose leader, Keith Prince, spoke last week at a seminar on transparency organised by The MJ and Neil Stewart Associates. YouChoose is an online tool which asks users to make their spending choices within certain parameters, such as a maximum 4% council tax rise or 5% cut in staffing. The council uses the results as a consultative exercise, Cllr Prince believing that traditional consultation ‘has had its day.' YouChoose users so far have budgeted staff costs to fall by 16% and management costs by 44%, though Cllr Prince recognises that the latter figure is impractical and will certainly not be forming part of the real budget! Some 4000 people have so far completed the exercise including 400 who filled it on public terminals in libraries, helped by specially trained library staff. Cllr Prince told the seminar: ‘The big message was for us was to take costs out of the back office. But we also learned that the public has an appetite for tackling different problems and to join in making difficult decisions. For us taking decisions about cuts is no easier but they are more legitimate.' Some 20 councils are using the YouChoose model with a further 60 planning it. Keith Prince sees future applications in publicising planning applications online along with objections and reporting faults. And he says transparency makes the work of councillors monitoring their managers' performance much easier. ‘The £500 reporting tool is great for me as I've now got all my residents doing the job for me, looking out for potential savings.' Another issue is how such data can be refined from flat figures on a screen to a resource that can analyse and provide meaningful conclusions about costings. Tim Kelsey, who founded the health data research company Dr Foster in 2000, told the seminar: ‘Public reporting is the quickest way of reducing costs and improving productivity. People feel exposed when data is published. But there are significant variations in local authority attitudes to this.' Irene Lucas, Director general of the CLG, pointed out that the power of data was not new; after all, it was analysis of cholera outbreaks in Victorian London that traced the disease to polluted wells. She told the seminar; ‘The transparency agenda is just the tip of the iceberg' and said that years ago the travel users' comparison site Tripadvisor had been received with trepidation by the travel industry and yet was now standard. She added: ‘It's only a matter of time before the public sector goes down the road of the private sector with comparison websites.' Harry Phibbs, a well-known Conservative Party blogger and Hammersmith & Fulham councillor said councils had to publicise internal spending as well as payments to suppliers ‘to get the full picture.' The council was also looking at publishing details of its assets and staff by job description. He added: ‘Transparency will be permanent. A future Labour government won't repeal it as it won't be politically acceptable to do so.' The conference can be viewed on Policy Review TV www.policyreview.tv

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WHITEHALL

Will we see a Trip Advisor for councils?

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