Is this transparency? No consistent format for 500 more UK ministerial meetings.
Who’s Lobbying has today been updated with over 500 new ministerial meetings from May to July 2010. The new meetings involve ministers from DEFRA, HM Treasury, DH, FCO, MoD, and BIS.
Our
- Confederation of British Industry 34 meetings
- Trades Union Congress 19 meetings
- Local Government Association 17 meetings
- World Wide Fund for Nature 12 meetings
- National Farmers Union 11 meetings
- Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations 11 meetings
- Barclays 11 meetings
- Greenpeace 10 meetings
- British Chambers of Commerce 9 meetings
Individual departments are reporting meetings in wildly different formats, making this analysis unnecessarily time consuming and error prone.
Number 10 has helped by providing an index to transparency information published by each department.
The PM launched business plans and “transparency database” on 8 November 2010.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
The Number 10 flickr stream calls this index a “searchable online database of government transparency information”. However it is really just a page of links to department reports. Each report containing slightly different data. The reports are in a mix of PDF, CSV, and DOC formats.
Unfortunately Number 10 and the Cabinet Office have not mandated a consistent format for publishing ministerial meeting information.
The Ministry of Defence published data in a copy-protected PDF format, proventing copy and paste from the document.
DEFRA failed to publish the name of each minister in its CSV formatted report.
The Department for Transport is the only department transparent enough to publish the date of each meeting.
All other departments only provided the month of each meeting - was that an instruction given centrally to departments? Because of this it isn’t possible to determine if two ministers were at the same meeting. Our analysis is likely to be double counting meetings with two ministers in attendance.
Ironically, meeting dates are published in department flickr streams.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
Under the previous Labour government, departments had published dates for individual meetings. In this regard, are we seeing less transparency under the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition?
Very few departments are publishing each organisation name on a new line, most give comma separated lists.
We found it a time consuming process to identify each separate organisation given the poor separation of organisation names.
The published organisation names also contained many mis-spellings and other inaccurancies. We have attempted to normalise organisation names where possible for reporting purposes.
We’d like to think these are just teething problems with department implementation of the coalition’s transparency agenda.
Who’s Lobbying will be FOI requesting the dates of meetings from each department. With the request we will share with departments our cleaned CSV formatted data, as a recommendation for how they should transparently publish in the future.
By providing this feedback, we hope to help UK government departments improve the consistency, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of their reports.
