Openness or prudence?
Open government - is it a matter of being reactive or proactive? Is it about how you react when you're asked for information, or is it about what you publish anyway whether or not anyone has gone to the trouble of asking you for it?
If it's the latter, then public authorities are becoming a lot less open, according to the latest issued yesterday by the Information Commissioner.
This reveals a significant decline in the number of public authorities who automatically release a wide variety of information. In 2007 the proportion of authorities who automatically disclosed material was significantly lower than in 2006 for all the following categories of information (which was nearly all kinds covered by the survey):
Future strategies and objectives; information about decisions made; internal policies; details of what public money is spent on; statistics about the organisation; information about the organisation's performance; minutes of meetings; details of consultations and research; and personal information about staff.
To take one example, in 2007 just 45 percent of authorities proactively released meeting minutes compared to 75 percent the year before.
The survey covered a wide range of public bodies from government departments to local NHS organisations. The decreases in 2007 were seen for both large and small/medium authorities.
The report comments that the significant decline 'may be due to organisations becoming more aware of what needs to be published in order to comply with the Act'. In other words, they've realised it's not legally required so they're not going to do it. A prudent approach to the spending of public money?
A 
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