Publish and be praised: Open Data in Windsor & Maidenhead

As befits a local authority that is home to some of the leading IT companies in the UK, the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead is ahead of the game when it comes to technology.

 

The council was the first local authority in the UK to publish data, for instance. As far back as March 2009, the authority has been putting details of expenditure above £500 on its website - two years ahead of the new government’s data transparency mandate.

 

The authority aims to place as much information in the public domain as possible. Recent work with partner consultancy Spikes Cavell means it now publishes detailed information via its website on how the council spends money and how it compares with other authorities.

 

The service also allows local suppliers to look at where Windsor & Maidenhead spends money enabling them to make decisions on whether to bid for work with the council.

 

“Our chief executive describes it as ‘doing it all on a trestle table in front of the Town Hall,'” says its Head of Finance Andrew Brooker. “It makes it easier to do business if you are seen as being open and honest and you don’t get bombarded with strange requests for information.”

 

The council now publishes details of all invoices for payments above £100 as well as establishment costs such as expenses, salaries and pension payments. Although the salaries of senior managers are a matter of public record, more junior staff are not identified by name. Their earnings are expressed in terms of salary bands and the overall salary costs of the team they work in.

 

One of the trickiest aspects of open data is making sure that confidential information does not leak out. For example, the names of children in care must be removed from documents showing payments to foster parents. But Brooker says the council’s maxim is “when in doubt publish”.

 

It is a move that has won public approval. The proportion of citizens satisfied with council services has risen from 37% to 47% in the last four years. Open data is not the only factor, Windsor & Maidenhead is also a Vanguard Big Society council for instance, but open data has certainly played a part, Brooker insists.

 

He says publishing the council’s invoices was easy, however there were both technical challenges and questions about confidentiality to be resolved. “Initially I thought it was a half hour job each week,” said Brooker. “But as things became more prescriptive I became to understand some of the opposition that my peers at other councils put forward.”

 

The technical difficulties were mostly to do with the design of Windsor & Maidenhead’s accounts. For example, under Government rules published invoices have to include VAT numbers, but the council stored suppliers’ VAT details in a separate file to the invoice data.

 

Fortunately, Windsor & Maidenhead uses UNIT4’s Agresso ERP system with its Linked4 linked data generator. Linked4 allows CSV data base files to be fed into the system to produce open and linked data. UNIT4 also provided advice on the best way to extract and redact sensitive data.

 

Experts such as World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee think the linked data format is the most effective means of achieving the Government’s aims of holding public bodies to account and delivering better value for money in public spending.

 

Linked data allows outsiders to analyse an authority’s spending decisions. Rather than just seeing outlay by individual councils it should be possible to view the previously published details and link that to the actual spend, potentially showing spend against number of items or number of users and so on.

 

“Our supplier analysis data doesn’t comply with the full open data spec. We could publish to a great level of data which would help with Freedom of Information enquiries, but they tend to be very specific and we don’t have the resources at present,” says Tanith Champion, Senior Systems Accountant at Windsor & Maidenhead.

 

Brooker says he and his team are fortunate in that it doesn’t have daily newspapers or local TV stations in the area. Other councils such as neighbouring Oxford which has a daily paper must contend with journalists fossicking through their files on a slow news day.

 

“When we put the data up it was done fairly quickly and we expected to be inundated with questions about why we had spent money on this or that taxi company. In the event it hasn’t been like that at all.”

 

Instead, it seems, citizens are doing what they 'should' - be using data o help them make decisions to better their lives. In Windsor & Maidenhead, a start has been made, it seems.