On the records

Public records, open data and Freedom of Information

From Westminster blog May 7, 2012

The House of Lords authorities are refusing to hand over officials’ estimates of how much it will cost taxpayers to replace the chamber with a mostly elected senate, prompting anger from Tory politicians.

Officials have rejected a freedom of information request by the Financial Times, saying that the relevant information was produced “solely” for the joint committee on Lords reform. “A decision was taken by them not to publish it as part of their report,” they said in their response.

David Davis, MP for Haltemprice and Howden, said there was a “clear-cut case” for the cost estimates to be put in the public domain.

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Posted in Freedom of Information Act |

Chris Cook Birthdays and school grades

March 1, 2012 4:15 pm by Chris Cook

Your birthday matters: children who are older when they start school as 4 year-olds outperform their peers. This is not a small effect, nor does it peter out as they get older. We can spot it easily at the national level among 16 year-olds. Read more

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Posted in Data, Data Points, Education, On the records, Open Data, UK |

Chris Cook The social mobility challenge for school reformers

February 22, 2012 9:47 am by Chris Cook

The social mobility problem is not that there is a small number of weak schools serving a lot of poor kids. It is that poor children do badly in the majority of England’s schools. Read more

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Posted in Data, Data Points, Education, Open Data, UK |

Chris Cook How do you define ‘official’?

February 13, 2012 5:36 pm by Chris Cook

A fortnight ago, MPs caught a fleeting glimpse of a process that has, to this point, taken place discreetly: the Information Commissioner’s Office investigation into the office of Michael Gove over suspected breaches of the Freedom of Information Act.

A transcript is now available for Mr Gove’s appearance before the education select committee, when he answered questions on the topic. He said the DfE had not released data from one document in response to FoI requests because it was political.

The law is straightforward: only government data is covered by the FoI Act. Party political or private business is never captured, even if it is sent via a government email address. Official business, however it is transmitted, is always covered.

In circumstances where there is a mix of party, personal and government business, official data is released and the remainder is redacted. So the whole text would need to be party political and not official for the document not to be covered by the act.

We have published it below. Read more

Posted in Education, Freedom of Information Act, UK |
From Westminster blog November 19, 2010

The release this morning of data detailing every Whitehall payment above £25,000 is a step towards the culture of public transparency that the previous Government intended to create when it passed the Freedom of Information Act a decade ago.

Rather than waiting for requests under the FOI regime, the coalition Government has committed to releasing this basic spending information proactively, in a format that allows scrutiny by anyone with the necessary time, software and skills.

This morning’s data release will be repeated each month, and from January, local government bodies will have to release similar datasets accounting for all transactions above £500.

Some of the frustrations with analysing public data to which journalists have become accustomed were absent. There were no files released as locked PDF documents that are difficult to import into database software, for example.

While each department’s monthly spending was released as a separate spreadsheet document, these were formatted in a consistent structure across departments, thanks to detailed Treasury guidance on how to release the data.

Nevertheless, analysing the data still posed significant technical challenges.

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Posted in Data, Open Data |
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