For Theresa May’s government, there’s Brexit-related business – and the rest. The rest divides into the policies and programmes inherited from the Cameron era on which No 10 is still keen, and those that keep going only through inertia.
Data and digital increasingly feel like an also-ran. Matthew Hancock, the former Cabinet Office minister who oversaw data policy, has been consigned to the salt mines, ie arts and culture, where his energy is dissipated. His successor, Ben Gummer, would need tremendous drive to break through No 10’s indifference and make “digital transformation” more than a phrase.
Stars such as Paul Maltby, who has been director of data at the Government Digital Service for a year, have got the message and are going, leaving the GDS in that ambiguous position where so many Cabinet Office initiatives end up: grandly ambitious but lacking the oomph to push departments (notably health). Meanwhile the Treasury – which could push departments – appears mightily indifferent.
It doesn’t help that leadership at the GDS has been churning, with Kevin Cunnington, formerly a director-general at the Department for Work and Pensions, coming in a couple of months ago as the third chief executive in a year.
That’s not to say progress hasn’t been made. A new assessment of various self-adopted targets for opening up government data tells a positive story about visibility, in open contracting, for example, and moves to standardise the datasets held by departments.
On closer inspection, though, some of the progress seems glacial. It’s taken until now for the Department for Communities and Local Government to be able to publish a validated list of England’s councils and their websites. Companies House is struggling still with the dozen different ways Scotland is referred to in its online register. But Maltby says scraping away inconsistencies and making such lists reliably downloadable is important “if other services are to trust this core reference data, and end the practice of duplicating data within silos”.
Last week at the annual conference in Gateshead of local authority chief executives, Martin Reeves, the chief executive and digital lead of Coventry city council, said local government too often was still “playing on the periphery” of digital. That’s true, not only in local government but in Whitehall and the NHS, as well as the police service where major decisions are pending on curating records and making them available to both the public and developers.
May appears to have neither time nor inclination to cut through departmental logjams, let alone the vexing tensions between privacy, data protection and consent to sharing records on the one side and openness, transparency and data development and applications on the other. You don’t find much clarity or consistency from Labour, either.
For Maltby and the data mavens, data is the future of public service reform. But in its recent editorial, the Guardian doubtless spoke for many – on the right as well as the centre left – in adopting a highly suspicious line on data sharing between government departments and agencies.
Well before high questions of principle are debated, however, there’s the practical point of whether GDS and the ministerial backing it has are sufficient to keep up the momentum that the data agenda had in central government under Francis Maude and Hancock. The signs aren’t bright.
David Walker is contributing editor to the Public Leaders Network.
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