Disruptive Proactivity

Just before Christmas, the Cabinet Office hosted a short-notice meeting about their data sharing plans. The meeting topics reflected a continuation of the different streams from the data sharing work conceived in 2013.

There are few details yet – all we’ve seen are titles – but the title of the “statistics strand” suggests that the major concern of civil society has been entirely ignored. That is going to be a serious problem if it is reflective of the rest of the work that’s been done.

Whether the Cabinet Office have learnt any lessons about data sharing since 2013 is currently an unanswered question. Last year, the Data Sharing bit of the Cabinet Office moved to become part of GDS, looking to benefit from their culture of openness and transparency. If that cultural change has happened, the Data in Government will have a post on all they’ve learnt, and how their current plans have changed as a result.

Statistical sharing: who decides? who knows?

The Statistics and Registration Services Act allows Parliament to approve a Statutory Instrument specifying some particular data that can be shared with ONS by a particular department for particular purposes.

That permission is permanent, but it is only permission, and does not form an obligation to share on the department or ONS. As a permanent arrangement for the sharing of personal data, it is a legitimately and necessary high bar.

The first question is whether these new arrangements will change that consent mechanism. Will they, for the first time, force a department to share data? In practice, if the Government has gone to the effort of getting a SI through Parliament, the consent questions should entirely have been resolved, this is a mechanism that allows all involved to make sure that everyone keeps up their end of the agreements. If not, anyone can walk away.

Absent comprehensive Data Usage Reporting across Government, given citizens don’t get told how their data is used, it is up to Departments to keep other Departments honest. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs, but hopefully it wont get worse before it gets better.

A proposal for weakened scrutiny?

A legitimate problem is that getting the Statutory Instrument through Parliament is a high bar. Often, it is difficult to make the case that the “permanent” data sharing is necessary, without the data being shared in do the analysis that everyone thinks will work. There are good reasons that this is a realistic problem worthy of an acceptable resolution.

When designing that “temporary” data sharing process, there must be no ability for data maximalists to jumping the “temporary” bar and land as a “permanent” flow. Simply adding a lowering the bar with an optional “sunset” clause means that data sharing scrutiny process is reduced. They land in effectively the same place. The current “sunset” proposal lets each department choose between a “strong” or a new “weak” process. There is no accountability infrastructure in place to provide any confidence in that decision.

The creation of a “temporary” sharing power, for particular use with a defined set of outcomes to be measured, is a functional response to the criteria for a “permanent” decision. If the “temporary” project or research comes out that the flow should be made permanent via the existing processes – as the reports and transparency on the “temporary process will have created the necessary evidence base to request the existing (unchanged) “permanent” data sharing agreement.

We’ll see which way the Cabinet Office and ONS decide to go.