Developing a common data standard for reporting election results in the country is among the thirteen commitments included in the United Kingdom’s most recent National Action Plan (NPA), published in May.
This third Action Plan, which is the result of a co-creation process, covers the period 2016-2018. It marks an “important step forward in our ongoing mission” of becoming the most transparent government in history, the UK government said. Civil society, government representatives and active citizens were involved in creating the plan.
Civil society’s ideas and suggestions were collected by the UK Open Government Network (OGN), which brings together over 700 individual members from across the country. For example, OGN created an Open Government Manifesto early in 2015, gathering 28 proposals drafted from contributions from 250 members of civil society.
“We haven’t committed to everything civil society asked for, and there are areas where they would have liked us to go further. This tension is central to both the challenge and opportunity of open policy-making - it drives innovation and encourages ambition”, the Action Plan notes.
The 13 commitments are:
- Beneficial ownership. “We will establish a public register of company beneficial ownership information for foreign companies who already own or buy property in the UK, or who bid on UK central government contracts.”
- Natural resource transparency. “We will work with others to enhance company disclosure regarding payments to government for the sale of oil, gas and minerals.”
- Anti-corruption strategy. “To develop, in consultation with civil society, and publish a new Anti-Corruption Strategy, ensuring accountability to Parliament on progress of implementation.”
- Anti-Corruption Innovation Hub. “We will incubate an Anti-Corruption Innovation Hub (…) to collaborate on innovative approaches to anti-corruption.”
- Open contracting.
- Grants data. “Government plans to collect more granular data on grant making.”
- Elections data. “We will develop a common data standard for reporting election results in the UK faster and more efficiently.”
- Enhanced transparency requirements and revised Freedom of Information Act Code of Practice.
- Identifying and publishing core data assets. “We will create a high quality national information infrastructure.”
- Involving data users in shaping the future of open data. “We will ensure government’s work to modernise and improve the management, use and availability of data assets is informed by active and wide-ranging collaboration with current and potential data users.”
- Better use of data assets. “We will encourage and support data-driven techniques in policy and service delivery across government departments and encourage the better use of open data in the economy and civil society.”
- GOV.UK. “Assess opportunities for digital consultation tools, rebuild navigation to bring guidance and policy together by topic, provide APIs for government content and provide a full version history of every published page.”
- Ongoing collaborative approach to open government reform. “Identify, develop and implement robust and ambitious open government commitments on an ongoing basis through collaboration with partners in governments, parliaments and civil society across the UK.”