Government pressure for councils to increase their competitiveness could lead to a conflict of interest with its separate drive to boost openness of public sector data, an e-government specialist has told E-Government Bulletin.
Speaking in a personal capacity, Carl Haggerty, enterprise architect at Devon County Council, said local authorities face two conflicting agendas. “One of these agendas is open data. The other is that we’re likely to increase competitive, commercial-in-confidence material,” Haggerty said.
This situation, he said, was an unexpected consequence of the “huge pressures” put on local authorities to share services, as part of government plans to reduce costs within the public sector. In doing so, they would need to act increasingly as potential service providers to other councils and public bodies, introducing commercial sensitivities in areas such as service pricing and costs.
Strong leadership is now needed from local authorities to stave off this conflict of interests, said Haggerty. “[Councils] need to say ‘we’re not going to make our information commercially sensitive because we believe in openness, and if people want to deliver services based on our information and policies, then that’s up to them.”
Haggerty first expressed his views in a reply to a blog post on Kingston University’s Information Management and Knowledge Sharing forum ( http://bit.ly/dgIRdQ )in which he referred to “the government’s drive to allow employees to take over services and allow councils to sell services better in a shared service environment.”
NOTE: All views expressed by Carl Haggerty in this piece are entirely his own, and not those of Devon County Council.
NOTE: Article originally published in E-Government Bulletin issue 316.
I think Mr Haggerty is a little confused; if Councils are competing with the private sector using data collection funded by taxes (local or otherwise) then they would be using state resources to compete.
And that is as likely to give rise to accusations of illegal state aid (cf, e.g., BBC Jam).
One way to avoid that would be to to open up the data. Further, if private companies (third sector, whatever) can provide these services, (and y’know: pay taxes) an alternative view would be to negotiate hard on price rather than “hone” commercial skills in a no-risk environment.