Agent151: Through a glass, darkly
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Agent 151 is a senior local authority finance director and S151 officer. The agent writes exclusively for Room151 and is licensed to speak candidly.
The new regulations on local authority meetings and access to information* came into force on 10th September 2012. I am trying to make some sense of them. The government’s Transparency Agenda – a pledge to make government more open – is a damp squib if ever I saw one. It is underpinned by two weak ideas.
The first of these is that making lots of government data available to the public is intrinsically helpful. It isn’t. Making useful information available to people is helpful. The idea that the average council taxpayer is willing to sift through mountains of data in the hope that they will ultimately be able to extract a piece of useful information is, frankly, ludicrous. Most information that is useful is published in committee reports and minutes, annual reports, statements of accounts, auditor reports, and a plethora of other documents. In fact, faced with the prospect of ploughing through all of this, most people would say there is too much already!
The second is the odd idea that there are lots of people who want information about government that isn’t being published already. I’m not talking about state secrets here: lots of people have been waiting for the Hillsborough papers to be released. I’m talking about routine data – for example, on council contracts and payments. This is unappealing fare to the average council tax payer. I don’t recall any friends or acquaintances outside of local government (or indeed inside local government) regaling me with tales of how they browsed pages of data on council websites from their armchairs out of interest. People with a normal range of interests, friends and family give this kind of thing the same level of priority as bus spotting.
Local government is complex. If you have ever tried to explain local government to anyone that isn’t somehow professionally involved with it, you will be familiar with the glassy look that descends upon their features after only a few moments. It is too complex to explain in only a few sentences, and in this media age of Twitter and sound bite, that means it is too complex to matter to most people unless it goes badly wrong. The fact is that most residents are at their happiest with their local council when they don’t have to think about their local council. So why does the government persist in the delusion that there is a vast appetite out there for such information? Is this the work of campaigners like the Taxpayers’ Alliance, or is it, as I am tempted to suggest, the work of politicians who wish that voters were more engaged and mistakenly think that this is the way to achieve it.
On to the new regulations. Some of the content simply codifies good practice that councils are already following. Public meetings should be public. Proper notice should be given of important decisions. Decisions should be properly recorded. Councillors should have access to meeting papers. Quite right, but unfortunately there are some difficult issues in here too. Regulation 13(4) poses the most acute difficulty: it seems to require officers to produce a written statement for all decisions (not just key decisions) they take under power delegated to them by the Executive. The statement has to include the reasons for the decision, any alternative options rejected, and any conflict of interest declared together with the relevant dispensation from the chief executive. So let’s see… every time I order some stationery, say, in addition to the usual paperwork I have to produce a written… Oh dear!
No doubt local government will sort this out, in the competent way it always does. Legal opinions are being sought, and common sense will ultimately prevail. But I must ask: how did this piece of nonsense manage to find its way into the final regulations without being spotted?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not against openness. But I think that transparency means making information useful, accessible, and understandable. Perhaps those drafting future legislation could bear these three words in mind.
Now, about this massive pile of FOI requests…
*Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Meetings and Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2012, SI 2012/2089
