Comment
Getting government to show its workings
Our new evidence transparency framework will give citizens a tool to understand governmental transparency.
The Government is now in full policy making mode – able to translate manifesto commitments into action. But if it is also to meet its commitment to transparency, citizens need to be able to understand what problems the Government sees its policies as addressing, why they have chosen these interventions – and whether they deliver. Our new evidence transparency framework will help assess the extent to which they can.
The last Parliament saw the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Independent Commission on Aid Impact, the Regulatory Policy Committee and the What Works centres – all designed to ensure that policy was based on robust evidence and assumptions. But this progress in specific areas was not translated into a transparent approach across the board. Our earlier work suggested that there were few external incentives to promote demand for evidence by policy makers.
At the suggestion of Cabinet Office ‘What Works’ adviser David Halpern, we decided to accept the challenge of developing a method for benchmarking government departments’ use of evidence to make policy. What appeared to be a simple idea in theory proved to be much harder in practice, as we came up against the following barriers to openness:
- The government website, .gov.uk, contains a long list of ‘policies’. But it is often hard to track down the initial proposition and harder still to see how it evolved through rounds of consultation and legislation. Many entries simply consist of an uncurated list of links, with no explanation of how they fit together and what problems they are seeking to address.
- It is often hard to determine what evidence is being used to support a proposition.
- For non-experts, even if there are clear links it is impossible to judge what evidence has been omitted, what has been cherry-picked and what has been misused.
- Heads of policy should find a way to present policy more clearly on .gov.uk.
- Chief Scientific Advisers (and chief analysts) should set out how they will make sure their departments can meet the demands of the framework.
- Topic
- Policy making Public services
- Keywords
- Government transparency Accountability
- Publisher
- Institute for Government