Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): I welcome you to the Committee for Finance. Regrettably, Matthew O'Toole is in Brussels, so I am chairing the Committee today. Our excellent Deputy Chair is out and about in the country doing some constituency business.

We are joined by Dr Rebekah McCabe, Mr Colm Burns and Dr Andrew Bolster. Rebekah, I invite you to make a brief opening statement, after which we will have a Q&A session. Committee members should indicate to me if they wish to ask questions.

Dr Rebekah McCabe (Northern Ireland Open Government Network): Thank you, Chairperson and Committee members, for the opportunity to speak with you today about the role of open government in Northern Ireland. I am here as the chairperson of the Northern Ireland Open Government Network (NIOGN), which is something that I and my colleagues do on a voluntary basis. In my day job, I am a specialist in civic participation and deliberative democracy as the Northern Ireland head of the charity Involve.

I am joined by two of my fellow directors of the Open Government Network. Colm Burns is a founding member of the network and is our lead on fiscal transparency and open contracting. Dr Andrew Bolster is a cybersecurity data scientist working in the private sector and is our lead on open data.

I will start by giving a little bit of background on us as a network. We were founded in 2014 as an alliance of individual citizens, activists and representatives of community and voluntary organisations. We were the first sub-national open government network to form in the UK, and we were successful in securing Northern Ireland's first formal open government commitments back in 2016 as part of the UK's national action plan. Past commitments have included the delivery of Northern Ireland's first open data strategy and the exploration of open policymaking, such as participatory budgeting and opening up Northern Ireland's public procurement processes to greater transparency and public scrutiny.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is the international, multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together reformers from inside and outside government who are committed to making their Government more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. That started in 2011 as a founding partnership of eight member states and has since expanded to have 78 national members and 106 local members. It is really important to emphasise that the partnership is a global community of Governments that have committed to openness, and that comes with a lot of benefits. It means that there can be a lot of exchange between Governments — you mentioned Estonia prior to the evidence session — to learn what works, and that includes Government to Government and civil society to civil society, as well as between Governments and civil society. There are regular international meetings, and there is a global summit every two years. There are local meetups, at which there is a real chance for people to hear about what is going on in respective jurisdictions.

At its heart, open government is about building trust. It is about building trust between citizens and their Government and about building trust in the processes that shape decisions that affect our lives. It is grounded in the three principles of transparency, participation and accountability, which are essential to improving governance and ensuring that decisions are fair, effective and inclusive. Northern Ireland has already made important progress on embracing open government. We contributed to the 2016 UK national action plan, and, really significantly, in 2020, we supported our counterparts in the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) to successfully apply for membership of the OGP in our own right, through the OGP Local initiative.

The Executive are a committed member of the Open Government Partnership in two important ways: as a member of the national Open Government Partnership in the UK and as a member in their own right. The Executive have also worked collaboratively with civil society to contribute to two national action plans and one local action plan, and I will say a little bit about the latter.

The local action plan, which we agreed in 2021, led to the co-production between government officials and civil society of an open government strategy for Northern Ireland, which is now with the Minister of Finance and awaiting implementation. Included in that strategy is a shared vision for open government in Northern Ireland; a plan for internal communication and education in the Civil Service and across government; and a high-quality co-production process for developing collaborative action plans. Although those steps are really encouraging — we have made a lot of progress and have built a really solid foundation — they have not progressed to implementation. They highlight the potential for more ambitious action to be taken and the need for champions in the Assembly.

Open government is not just about delivering individual projects but about embedding a culture in which transparency, participation and accountability are integral to how decisions are made. That is particularly important for Northern Ireland, where trust in institutions has been tested in recent years. Evidence on the need for robust action to build public trust is mounting. I will cite a couple of recent publications. Carnegie UK research has shown that 74% of people in Northern Ireland feel that they have no influence over the Executive or over lower-level decision-making. Northern Ireland life and times survey research in 2022 showed that only 17% of people trust the Executive and that only 41% trust the Civil Service. That has a corrosive effect on society and on democracy.

Ensuring that decision-making is open, inclusive and accountable is critical for rebuilding confidence in our democratic structures and for addressing complex challenges such as resource allocation, public-sector reform and climate action. The good news is that one of the ways in which you can do that is already available to you. The Executive have already made the commitment. Resources have already been given for writing the strategy and developing terms of reference for a multi-stakeholder forum. We exist as your civil society partners. Our membership and sector colleagues are willing to work with you to bring in diverse expertise in order to explore together how we can improve transparency, participation and accountability.

There are therefore a lot of positives, but what I say comes with a caveat. International oversight of the Open Government Partnership creates the standards, monitors us to make sure that we meet our international open government commitments and puts us under time pressure to make that happen. We are here today to say that we are really fearful that that opportunity is slipping through our fingers. Today, I really want to explore how we can build on the progress that has already been made and how the Committee will help make sure that we do not lose what is a really important asset.

I look forward to hearing your questions and discussing how we can advance this important agenda together. Thank you.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Rebekah, thanks very much for your presentation, the papers and all the other pieces of information in front of us. You talk about open government. Quite a few of us would dispute the claim that we have an open Government here. Trying to get any information out of the Executive and, in particular, the Civil Service is sometimes nigh on impossible, with the result being that we have to take some extreme actions, or try to take some extreme actions. Rather than my going into specific cases, I will just say that you will be aware of the renewable heat incentive (RHI) inquiry report and what came out of that. You will be aware of its recommendations on accountability, openness, tracking of records and all the rest of it. We are quite a long way past the publication of the recommendations, yet we are still not delivering. You said that you have some concerns about the length of time that it is taking to get to where we need to get to. Can you outline what those specific concerns are so that the Committee can hear them, please?

Dr McCabe: Yes, I can, and I invite my colleagues to respond if they have anything to add. As I said in my opening remarks, the action planning process is at the heart of open government and at the heart of the collaborative relationship between government and civil society. We agreed an action plan in 2021 with a single action, which was to develop a strategy to guide how we worked. The strategy aimed to address, through reform, some of the issues with open government that had emerged since we began the relationship in around 2015-16. It proposed moving from the open government implementation group to a new multi-stakeholder forum and broadening the remit of open government from just open data to some of the issues to do with record-keeping and participation.

We spent quite a lot of time developing a strategy with our counterparts in the Department of Finance. It was finalised in 2021 — three years ago — but has not been implemented. That is causing the delay, because nothing can happen without its being implemented. Open government rests on the partnership element, the co-creation of action plans and the ability to work together to scrutinise and make sure that those plans are implemented. It will not work until we are able to set up the multi-stakeholder forum, which is the engine for all of that. We cannot do that until the strategy is agreed and signed off by the Minister. It has stalled. We keep in touch with our counterparts in the Department, but we have not received a satisfactory answer as to why things are not progressing. As I said, there is pressure on us from the Open Government Partnership. If it sees inaction from us for an extended period, we come under threat of being expelled from the partnership, which is not a position in which any of us wants to be.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): There is therefore a chance that, unless we get on with it, we will get expelled from the partnership.

Dr McCabe: Yes. Use it or lose it, to put it crudely.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): I apologise for this, Clerk, but I have another declaration of interest to make. The British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly (BIPA), of which I am a Member, was involved in talking to the Estonian Government and the Finns about open government, the use of digitisation, the move to the digitisation of services and the fact that, particularly in Estonia, there is a large degree of trust in services and in their delivery. The Estonian Government are obviously concerned about cyberattacks, Chinese ships inadvertently pulling up cables and their "friends" just across the border.

They talked quite a lot about how trust in government was built on a robust system in which people had faith. How will we get there in Northern Ireland?

Dr Andrew Bolster (Northern Ireland Open Government Network): These two are starting to look at me, so that is my cue. I was involved in some of the early open data strategy discussions, between 2012 and 2014, and with the original versions of the strategy. At that point, there were an awful lot of open questions about what systems, standards and formats we should use and what counts as "open". There were very many questions at the time, such as, "Are we the ones who should do it first?". That sounds like a significant technical, political and social investment that we did not really want to make at that time. The fact is that we are now 10 years past that. We look at countries such as Estonia, which you mentioned. All the Scandi countries also have it nailed down. They have it nailed down not by taking a unitary approach to solving open government standards but by sharing those standards and making the most out of one another's investments. Instead of saying, "We have to do this differently. We have to do it specially", you do what we do in the private sector, which is take something that is battle-tested and bulletproof off the shelf and make it a component of your foundation of trust. You do that rather than saying, for instance, "We need to solve all the security issues", about which you talked.

Dr McCabe: May I quickly add to that?

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Sure.

Dr McCabe: I refer back to some of the statistics and data that we have on trust. We know that trust in the Executive is very low and that trust in the Civil Service is low. We also know where trust is high, however. People trust one another. They trust people like themselves. There is a reason that participation is one of the three pillars of open government. When things are done in collaboration with citizens, and when people see that they have a voice or that people like them have had a voice in shaping something that affects them, they are much more likely to feel that it is trustworthy. The three pillars are not separate. Rather, they really work together. It is therefore about building that transparency. Things such as e-governance are really dependent on a very strong participatory ecosystem. Colm wants to come in.

Mr Colm Burns (Northern Ireland Open Government Network): You mentioned Finland. One of the things about Finland that jumped out at me is that, in one of its action plans, it aimed to make procurement data user-friendly. It put that at the heart of its work on open data. That work went on to win international awards and recognition for the best procurement development in open government. There are numerous articles on how wonderful it is. We can learn from others who are doing it. We can learn from Finland, Estonia and even our neighbours in Scotland who, like us in Northern Ireland, are Open Government Partnership local champions. Scotland has made some great advances on opening up data on procurement, contracting and other aspects of public participation. This is an opportunity, as Rebekah says, but time is running out. It is an opportunity to address a lot of the issues and frustrations that you and citizens have. You mentioned the RHI inquiry recommendations. I have been involved in open government since the start, and we were involved in the negotiations on good record-keeping then. We have reached agreements with the Civil Service on possible —.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): What happened?

Mr Burns: The Assembly was not sitting, and there was no Minister in place. We could not take forward the recommendations because we had no political oversight. One of the issues with open government over the years has been the stop-start nature of the Executive and the Assembly. We have put an awful lot of work into good record-keeping, modernising freedom of information and opening up more data, which saves money, because there are then fewer FOI requests. At a certain point, however, something happens in Northern Ireland that means that we sometimes have to go back to square one.

Dr Bolster: May I make one final comment? One element of the conversation that often becomes a little bit of a roadblock, which, hopefully, we can make sure that we skip over, is the fact that, when people talk about open data, it often implies that all that data has to be public. One of the critical strands of an open government policy is using open data standards, even if the underlying data itself has to be secured in a different way. We do not want to jump on the healthcare argument, but we have looked at having the open, public definitions of standard reporting from a procurement perspective, but you may not have to provide all the data. An open strategy does not necessarily mean that all the data has to be made public first.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): To demonstrate how open we are in government, I will tell you that the session is being reported by Hansard. We need the agreement of members to do that.

I have a final point to make before I bring in other members. It goes back to our discussions at BIPA with the Finns and the Estonians, and they gave us an interesting insight. They said, "The problem with you Brits is that all you think of is 1984 and Big Brother, whereas we look at the best way in which to get delivery". Do we have a problem with selling how we use data?

Dr Bolster: Do you want to jump in on that one?

Mr Burns: I do not mind starting. The answer is yes and no. [Laughter.]

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): We are the politicians, Colm.

Mr Burns: No, I genuinely mean yes and no, because people are sometimes scared of change or worried about opening Pandora's box. The lesson that we can learn from our neighbours in Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Finland and Estonia, however, is that we do not need to be afraid of the process. There is more good that can come out of the process. I have had discussions in which people think that open government is about someone winning and someone losing, but it is not. If we work together and create the processes properly, everyone benefits. Citizens will better understand what is happening in government and will be able to scrutinise it more closely. Government can depend more on its citizens. For example, if the data is out there on a controversial subject, and there are proper discussions with them, citizens will gladly participate, and that makes the decision-making process easier. We have seen that time and time again through the many different open government national action plans, and we have heard presentations from different countries around the world: everywhere from Mexico to Finland and, as you said, Estonia.

Dr McCabe: The key to it is how you do it. It is not a closed room in which people decide what is open and what is not. A process of co-creation is at the heart of open government, and part of that, as Colm said, involves hearing from the public about where their comfort levels with the use of data sit. I underline the point that open government is about more than open data. In the beginning in Northern Ireland, it was one of our big successes, but it is about much more than that. I want to keep that as part of the conversation.

Dr Bolster: We have talked a lot about our friends and colleagues in other parts of the world, but I have a concrete story to tell. I was on the Department of Finance's open data advisory committee, as part of the implementation of the OpenData NI portal. One of the big fears that Departments and civil servants had about contributing to the portal was, to speak plainly, about being caught out. They feared that, if a piece of data was mistakenly released or had incorrect numbering, someone might lose their head. We invested, however, in a shared platform with data generators, data users and data owners. It was an open, collaborative platform. We had students, journalists and, in some cases, children play around with code or visualisation, and if they spotted a number that did not make sense, or if they made an odd graph, the users could go back to the data owners and say, "We spotted something weird with your data". That is a critical part of the constructive collaboration process. We could take that back to the advisory committee and say, "Your fear was not realised. The populace is interested, but it is not interested in weaponising data". That started a much more concrete conversation about how the Brits are sometimes better at using data.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): OK. I thought that you were going to say Fujitsu.

Dr Bolster: No.

Mr Burns: No.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): I am glad that you said no.

Mr Carroll: Thank you very much. I will continue on the theme raised by the acting Chair. How open do you think that government is here?

Mr Burns: OK. [Laughter.]

It depends on the area, I suppose. How does government currently engage with citizens? Is it through consultations? If we look at how the Budget is set or at how the Programme for Government is designed, what work is done before the policy reaches the Assembly? The degree of preliminary work that has gone into either document gives you an indication of how well that policy has been consulted on. Improvements can be made. Every Government can make improvements. Some of the stuff that we do here, we do very well. There are other things that we do not do very well. When we were having this chat 10 years ago, we focused on improving transparency and public accountability, and we wanted to work with the Executive on doing that.

Our pushback from that, as Andrew said, is that there is sometimes reluctance in government. I do not want to use the analogy of how a sausage is made, but its attitude is, "If we show behind the scenes, people might lose trust in us". We said, "Listen, this is a partnership, and the more that we work together and the more open that we are in our processes, the better that the outcomes will become".

We do some stuff well but not everything. How trustworthy it is perceived to be depends on the area at which you are looking. On contracting and fiscal transparency, we could do a lot better. We are well behind where we should be and well behind other areas of the UK, Ireland and Europe.

Rebekah is better able to talk about citizen engagement. Some of the things that we do work well, as do some of the ways in which we engage with our citizens from the Executive's point of view, but, again, they could be done better.

Mr Carroll: That is a very diplomatic answer again. [Laughter.]

I suggest that we are not very open. The Executive do not publish minutes of their meetings. Nobody knows the agenda beforehand, unless they are on the Executive or in one of the Executive parties. Colm, you touched on FOI requests. Have you any sense of the number of FOIs that are left unanswered? Is the figure available? Perhaps it is not, but I am curious. It is just that you mentioned FOIs, and I thought it an interesting point to raise.

Mr Burns: It is. In fact, I will give you an example of a success of open government. Since 2020, ministerial expenses and those of senior civil servants have been published in an open data format on the OpenData NI portal. That happened as a result of our work. To be honest, it was part of an ongoing lobbying and transparency issue at which we were looking. Doing that, however, was a quick win that the Executive and the Civil Service could achieve.

I do not have the detail of FOIs to hand, but I will go back and get it for you. There are great organisations that do work on FOIs. I will get what they and others who have some great statistics on FOIs know and come back to you with the specifics.

Mr Carroll: Thank you. I have two other quick questions, which are perhaps for Rebekah. Am I right in saying that it is up to Departments to draw up local action plans and implement them? If so, is it not the case that they are marking their own homework? Is there concern about that?

Dr McCabe: The process that we co-designed as part of the open government strategy was a true co-production process. It involved identifying a set of themes where reform is needed or wanted and then finding people in civil society who can provide support with a theme and work with their counterparts in government. That is how it works for the UK national action plans. There are organisations such as Transparency International and —. Remind me who else does this.

Mr Burns: There are so many.

Dr McCabe: Yes. There are so many.

Mr Burns: There is the Campaign for Freedom of Information. There is —.

Dr McCabe: Civil society organisations that have expertise outside of government on what good reform would look like in those areas work with their Civil Service counterparts, and their homework is marked by an independent branch of the Open Government Partnership that does only monitoring. That is done every time that an action plan is created. The Open Government Partnership has a team of people who come in and mark it against a set of pre-existing standards. The monitoring report for the previous action plan is available. We can arrange for it to be sent to you, Gerry.

Mr Carroll: Thanks. That would be useful.

Finally, I appreciate your briefing, but I have to say that I am slightly concerned. I am certainly not an expert on Estonian matters, but a member of NATO being held up as a template for open democracy certainly sticks in my craw. I have to put that on the record. I do appreciate the briefing, but I had to make that point.

From your end, is there anything that should not be disclosed by government? Have you stipulated anywhere that Governments should not disclose x, y or z, or is it more the case that the method and the template should be more open?

Mr Burns: I will answer that question, having been in negotiations with senior civil servants on proposals that went to the Executive. When we agreed previous action plans between civil society and Departments, they then went to the Executive to be signed off, so it was up to Ministers to decide. We would make the case for being as open as possible, but, again, that would be done through co-creation processes. For us, there needs to be a reason that something is not acceptable in an action plan. If we were to think that the reason was important, we would ask ourselves what steps we could put into the action plan to make it part of the next action plan. That is how the co-creation processes between us and the Northern Ireland Civil Service worked.

Dr McCabe: The phrase that we use is "open by default", so the default is openness, and where there are exceptions, justification for them is made. That is the standard.

Mr Burns: As Andrew said, however, there are certain things in government that perhaps cannot be open, but having the standards in place is a good first step. We find that, as time goes on, the more that Governments feel comfortable doing so, the more that they are willing to open up.

Mr Carroll: Thank you, and thanks for the presentation.

Miss Brogan: Thanks, the three of you, for your presentation. It has been an interesting conversation, and I appreciate your attendance.

I have a couple of quick questions. Following on from Gerry's first question, Colm, I think that it was you who said that government often uses consultation as a way of engaging with the public about policy or legislation. That method is frequently used, and it is probably the most likely way in which government liaises with the public. As part of your strategy, can you suggest other means for government to have that engagement with the public so that people can have their views heard in different ways?

Dr McCabe: I will take this one. Yes. We have a lot of ideas, and there are some really good examples from the international open government community of how it has embedded participation through open government.

To refer again to our neighbours in Scotland, they made a commitment in an open government action plan to create a participation framework for their civil servants. That is embedded in Scotland's policymaking, which looks at the range of methodologies available to policymakers for engaging with the public, so it does not fall back on consultation. Consultation is fine, but it is not the only method of engaging, and, most often, it is not the best method, especially if the goal is to hear from a diverse range of voices or to understand why people are saying what they are saying in response. Consultation is not the most insightful method.

The participation framework for Scotland is something that I worked on as part of my day job. I was involved with the organisation that supported the Scottish Government. The framework is a toolkit for policymakers in the Scottish Government to use in order to understand the legislative case, the cultural case and the how-to of participation. Their default is always to assume that there is space for participation in any decision that is being made and to justify when that is not the case. There are also any number of interesting examples emerging from the South, and, if you are interested, I am happy to provide the Committee with examples afterwards.

Miss Brogan: Yes, that would be very helpful, Rebekah. I worked closely on that aspect of the childcare strategy when we were still pushing for it to be implemented. There were so many stakeholders involved and so many different viewpoints to consider across a wide range of Departments that it was difficult to get all those viewpoints heard, so that is certainly worth looking into.

When you talk about the open government strategy, has the initiative that you have brought forward been costed? You will know that budgets are really tight across the Executive. Each Department is scrambling to meet the needs financially. Have you any idea of the level of financial and human resources that you will need to have the strategy implemented?

Dr McCabe: It was not costed as part of our process. I do not know whether the Department has since done that internally. Again, we have been requesting an update for a while and have not received one. Where open government is actively supported, those allocations are made because it also brings savings to government. Things such as open contracting and open procurement support the economy and support savings. A lot of money and resource are spent on, for example, responding reactively to freedom of information requests, and some of that can be offset by being open more proactively. It is not just a cost; it is a cost-benefit calculation.

My colleagues might want to add something on the savings that open government can bring.

Mr Burns: There are costings, obviously, but, from our point of view, it is also about data, which Andrew will touch on. If you are looking at open contracting — we are not picking on Scotland all the time; we have other examples — the Scottish Government's open contracting portal has, at this moment, about 600 organisations that will go out to tender, and over 60,000 people or organisations have registered — everything from large corporates to small to medium-sized enterprises and social enterprises. The way in which the data is put out in open data formats enables others to take that, be more competitive and have a better chance of tendering for contracts at all different levels of Scottish government, whether that is at the very high end for something like machinery for healthcare or right down to the delivery of local council services. The Scottish Government have spent about seven years now on their portal, and it is one of the better ones out there. Andrew will tell you about the application programming interfaces (API) involved in that and how people can go in, take all that data and filter it down.

Dr Bolster: I can take it in a slightly different direction. I was reviewing some reports and found a wonderful quote from Brian Gannon of Kainos in 2015. He was talking about the UK's investment in the G-Cloud service, which was its open procurement process. The quote that popped out was:

In the cost-benefit analysis, we are not looking purely at a pound, dollar or euro figure. We are talking about systemic changes in reducing what I would call "bureaucracy". Other people might call it "waste".

Miss Brogan: That is very interesting, thank you. I have just one final question about the Open Government Network. Who makes up the network, and how do people get involved? If a person or an organisation wants to participate, how do they become involved?

Dr McCabe: We have a board of directors, which is the three of us and three other colleagues, who cannot be here today. Then we have a membership, which is open to anybody, but we have a couple of tiers. For example, if one of you, as an elected representative, wanted to join, you would have a slightly different membership type from that of an ordinary citizen, but it is open to anybody, and we engage with our members on key issues.

We are really resourced-strapped as an organisation. We do not have any funding and have not had any for a number of years. Part of that is because we are so dependent on our interaction with government. We are not necessarily fulfilling our purpose if we are not able to be in this co-production process with government. We are not an attractive option for a lot of funders at the moment because progress has stalled so much at the Executive. A number of years ago, we received project funding from the Big Lottery Fund — I believe that it is the National Lottery Community Fund now — to undertake a project in which we looked at what real open government issues people were facing in their communities. We identified planning and participation in planning at local government level as an issue. One of the ways in which we did that was by engaging with our membership to find out what that looked like on the ground. As a result of that, we produced a report. We procured an independent researcher to conduct research for us into the levels of transparency, accountability and participation in the planning system in Northern Ireland. We identified that issue through participation from our membership.

Mr Burns: I am sorry to come back in, but it is important to say that, when we are negotiating with Departments, we cannot have all our members in a room, so we are a sounding board for our members, and we will talk to them in depth about specific issues. They come to us about specific issues as well, and we bring those forward.

Dr McCabe: When it comes to the co-creation of commitments for open government, we have proposed in the strategy that that go beyond just the Northern Ireland Open Government Network; that it be much broader. We do not want to be seen as representing civil society, because we do not. We are a conduit for other voices. We are the people who want to continue pushing this agenda, but we advocate that government engage much more broadly than with just us.

Miss Brogan: Thank you very much; I appreciate that.

Mr Frew: This is fascinating. You talk about negotiating. Whom have you been negotiating with? What have they said are the reasons for the delay in the action plan and the multi-stakeholder forum?

Mr Burns: I will talk historically, because I have been at this for the longest, and Rebekah can talk about what is happening now. That is the best way, I think. When we were set up, we were part of the UK Open Government Network, and we negotiated with the Cabinet Office. There was not yet a Northern Ireland part. The Open Government Network was formed by individuals, organisations and citizens coming together. In our discussions with the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Office contacted the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive. The Northern Ireland Executive decided that, with its public reform remit, the Department of Finance and Personnel — now the Department of Finance — would be best suited to take forward the network on behalf of the Northern Ireland Executive. The Scottish Government —.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Colm, just a second. It was Nick Clegg who did that. That is a long way back, is it not?

Mr Burns: Yes. In fact, Francis Maude was one of the original signatories on behalf of the UK Government. I am old. Rebekah hates me saying that, but —.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Sorry, Paul. We are not talking about last week, are we?

Mr Burns: No, we are not. We are talking about a long journey. It was the then Department of Finance and Personnel. We went in and set up how we would like to work and go forward. It would be, like us, a conduit for the Executive: it would pull together all the Departments, and we would sit on a committee — it was not a multi-stakeholder forum at the time — and discuss the issues. As you can imagine, with the stop-start nature over those years and the changes in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Departments would come and go from that. Throughout the whole time, the most engaged Department has been the now Department of Finance, because it has had the remit for it, but we have worked with every Department, and every Department has had its opportunities to put forward commitments.

Mr Frew: You may not want to name names — that is fine — but what level of the Civil Service are you negotiating with?

Dr McCabe: We always find it hard to remember the levels, because they do not mean anything outside the Civil Service.

Mr Burns: Senior grades. It is not permanent secretaries, but it —.

Mr Frew: It is people who come to this Committee to give evidence.

Mr Burns: Yes. People who have been at our meetings have given evidence to various Committees.

Mr Frew: I suspect that what has happened is that those people have gone quiet on you guys.

Mr Burns: I would —.

Mr Frew: Before they went quiet, what did they tell you was the hold-up?

Mr Burns: The hold-up is what every hold-up has always been here. May I give you a slightly different example?

Mr Frew: Yes, sure.

Mr Burns: In 2016, the Minister of Finance, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, was answering a question in the Assembly.

Mr Frew: For the younger members, he used to be a Minister here. [Laughter.]

Mr Burns: He said that people should understand how Governments spend their money and how they bring their money in.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): As a matter of interest, it may have been me who asked the question of him.

Mr Burns: Sorry, it was not you, but you asked a good follow-up question.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): I did, yes.

Mr Burns: I was consulting the Hansard report last night for

He said that he was bringing forward a citizens' budget and would use tools such as visualisations to help people to understand exactly how Governments spend. We took that as a great win, because that was one of the big things that we were pushing for. A short time later, the Assembly collapsed. The Department did not put resource into the citizen's budget, because it focused on other things. After that, that commitment went away, and we have never been able to get it back on the table.

It has been a cycle for us. When we met the Department recently, I may have expressed the frustration that we seem to move in cycles whereby we get only so far with this. We have come far in certain aspects of it. The open data portal was great. We were getting there with the open contracting stuff and how we classified that, and, when it came to public participation, we were having really good conversations. Given the circular nature of what we are doing, however, it sometimes seems that we take one step forward and two steps back. Ministers have a big role to play in that, in that they set the priorities for their Departments. We seem to get further when there is a really engaged Minister. If the Ministers from all the Executive parties are a little stand-offish, however, we take two steps back.

Mr Frew: You are basically talking about the stats — the stuff that the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) produce on a UK-wide basis.

Dr McCabe: The data?

Mr Frew: The data that they produce. Is that what we are talking about?

Mr Burns: It is not about just the data; it is about how the data is presented. Andrew can tell you about the open data index — Northern Ireland sat tenth in the world on that in 2016, and GB was third — and what blockages were holding us back. Those blockages included election data, government spending data, procurement data —

Dr Bolster: And land ownership.

Mr Burns: — and land ownership.

Mr Frew: You are talking about all the offices of state such as Land and Property Services (LPS), the ONS, the NISRAs of this world, freedom of information offices and stuff like that. It all sounds a bit mundane when you talk about that level of detail in the context of trust. I will tell you why I say that: you could have an oracle present this stuff to the public, but the public do not do detail.

Dr McCabe: May I give you a slightly different example?

Mr Frew: Yes.

Dr McCabe: There is that side to open data, and there is another side to open data that is much more connected to things such as citizen science. That could involve citizens producing data that does not already exist, such as ammonia monitoring in our waterways, which is a really big issue.

Mr Frew: Yes.

Dr McCabe: It also means equipping citizens with the skills, knowledge and, sometimes, the literal equipment to create their own data.

In another open government partnership, in Uruguay, the civil society open government people noticed that there were no statistics for violence against women, so they created them. They crowdsourced and created their own data set for violence against women and femicide. That is another example.

You are absolutely right that, for the majority of the public, data is mundane. The mundane stuff is in the public interest, however, and, when that data is open, it can be used by academics and journalists much more effectively.

Mr Burns: There are other things as well. I am talking about financial transparency because that is my area of expertise, but there is one thing to say on financial transparency. Scotland — I am sorry to pick on Scotland — has put 1% of its Budget towards participatory budgeting, for example, which has had a massive impact on citizens' direct engagement with government on how government spends their money. There are state case studies across the world on the importance of things like participatory budgeting and engaging citizens. I have found that — I do not know about others — the more that I am enticed into something, the more that I am willing to learn about it, open my eyes and do other things. There is benefit to the engagement, from my point of view.

Mr Frew: How will it be better to have an all-seeing oracle-style portal of information? I like the idea of it; of course, I do. I am the one who goes on to the internet and tries to find stats. All the trust that would be built up — I suggest that it is probably in single figures in percentage terms — would be destroyed by scandal or crisis. Trust tends to be measured by how a Government work when faced with scandal or crisis.

Dr Bolster: I speak as a career data scientist. My boring day job is, ironically enough, what I like to call "changing numbers into other numbers and occasionally making pretty graphs". From that side of the house, what you describe as "mundane", I would describe as "foundational and trustworthy". You want your data systems and data to be shared around in Departments. It should not just be an outgoing publication concern. It should be about how we use all the data that we experience through the generation of government and how we do mundane things with that data. As you were saying, you want to go in and play with the data. You want to add layers of insight and intelligence. You can do that only if your mundane foundations are battle-tested and, frankly, reliable enough. The Department's internal workloads should also be using the same — I do not want to get too technical — API, the same data as what is published externally.

As a little bit of a pushback and echoing what Rebekah was saying, that is more of a systemic and attitudinal change. We are not here to suggest, "Oh, hey, give us a couple of people who can run the little open data portal". That is not the real interest here. The real emphasis in pushing those action plans is around an approach to transparency — or selective transparency, if we want to go that way — trying to emphasise the use of shared standards and taking the good ideas that have been demonstrated by our friends across the world and asking, "Hey, how do we use that in our wee country constructively to make government better for everybody?". Simultaneously, that also means, as Rebekah was saying, increasing the levels of bringing people into government to really understand the contradictions and challenges that government experiences. Hopefully, as Colm was hinting at, having that participatory approach will make it easier to understand what our electorate actually needs and to really drive towards that.

Mr Frew: Do you have any view, or have you pressurised or negotiated with Governments or Departments, on their behaviour and performance when it comes to cover-ups, scandals or crises?

Mr Burns: We have challenged government officials on good record-keeping during certain inquiries. We have questioned decisions at those meetings about why they would not want to push that one area forward and why, at the start of this process, it was focused only on the data when it should be looking at a wider participatory range of work. We have had those conversations, of course. We are not behind the door in saying what we want. Hopefully, we have got across some of what we want here today. Yes, we will always try to work collegiately with the Government to help them on that journey, because they are on a journey too. It is important to remember that. They face internal and external pressures. We are facing our own pressures as well. It is about trying to build that relationship and work through that.

For me, it is not just about the data. One of the things that was really appealing in the first couple of meetings that we had was the conversations that senior people from all Departments were having as they sat around the tables. We tend to believe that our Civil Service has a silo mentality, and, to a certain extent, that may be true. However, those people were around the table, and, when one person said, "If we open this here —", someone else came in on the back of that. They were having discussions about how they could take this forward themselves. The stop-start nature of that has caused us angst — that is the best way of putting it — and frustration, but we would not be here and I would not still be doing this if I did not see the value in it for citizens.

I want to touch on one other area, which Andrew mentioned, very quickly. There is so much data for North Antrim, for example, but, if Departments start working together to layer that data, it will tell the story. The people in your constituency can then mirror that story or tell their own story, and that can then lead to something else.

Mr Frew: Do you measure the quality of the data?

Dr Bolster: The quality? That is a critical part of any data maturity process. It is part of the discussion about trust that we had earlier. Quite often, the feedback that we got from departmental partners was, "Oh, I can't publish this data, because I'm not sure of it". Our pushback was, "Well, then, why are you using it?" If the data cannot be trusted internally, why would you use it internally?

One of the critical parts of any open-data pillar strategy is to lay down data-quality standards. There are various versions of specifying quality. At one level, you can go through how many stars of connected data there are or how much metadata there is — all of the technical stuff that is not particularly relevant. The real test of and testament to data quality is data use. As I mentioned earlier, if someone identifies something that is weird, they can challenge the data owners and ask, "Hey, where is that coming from?". If that data owner is correctly sourcing that information, they can trace it back — it is called a data lineage — so that you can say, "Hey, this top-line figure consists of this data set, which came from that data set, which came from another data set". That really informs evidence-based decision-making in which you do not have to hide any of the underlying systems and can still communicate them.

Dr McCabe: May I respond to your question about scandals? We deal with the preconditions of scandals and of trust. A precondition of trust is openness, and scandals do not happen in the open. They are a product of closed and unaccountable systems. It is about introducing some of those open government standards around record-keeping, minutes and agendas. We have open ministerial diaries now, which was a win for open government in Northern Ireland. You have to address the preconditions of scandals and corruption.

There are statistics on — they are not open government statistics — and research into the loss of civil society scrutiny functions over Governments. Preventing that includes things like having local journalists at committee meetings in councils: without that, corruption increases. Those things grow in the shadows. By opening things up, there is a behavioural corrective there. When you know that you are being watched, you behave better.

Mr Frew: Do you have a view on how Governments use data and their motives in doing so? The Government used data in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to deploy fear among the people of Northern Ireland and Western society. Have you measured how the Governments treated civilians in the COVID era?

Dr McCabe: That would be outside our remit. Our purpose is to coordinate civil society to work with government to create local commitments here that are within the devolved powers of the Assembly. The short answer to your question is no. Again, this is about having really clear standards that the public understand so that they can hold government accountable for living up to those standards.

Mr Frew: I will leave it there, Chair.

Mr Tennyson: Thank you very much for your presentation. Rebekah, you talked earlier about the fact that, if there is a period of inaction, there is a risk that, effectively, Northern Ireland will be excluded from the global network. How imminent is that risk? Are we up against a timeline?

Dr McCabe: We have exceeded the timeline, so we are operating under the generosity of the Open Government Partnership; that is down to its goodwill. The Open Government Partnership is generally reluctant to expel members: it has happened once or twice in the time that I have been involved, and it is serious and embarrassing for the members concerned.

We are not members of the Open Government Partnership; the Executive are. The Minister will need to give a progress update to the partnership fairly soon. It is able to extend the deadline to an extent, but, when we are inactive, they are spending resource on us when lots of jurisdictions are waiting in the wings to be members. We are in a privileged position. If we do not make the most of that privilege, we will lose it. We are on thin ice.

Mr Tennyson: On borrowed time, effectively.

Dr McCabe: Yes.

Mr Tennyson: That is useful.

You mentioned engaging with officials. Since the Executive's restoration in February, have you had any direct correspondence or meetings with the Finance Minister?

Dr McCabe: No

Mr Tennyson: None at all?

Dr McCabe: No.

Mr Tennyson: Have any been requested?

Dr McCabe: Yes.

Mr Tennyson: And those meetings have been —?

Dr McCabe: We have been referred back to the official in the Department with whom we work. We were told that they would speak to us and provide a briefing to the Minister.

Mr Tennyson: That is helpful, thank you.

You also mentioned the proposed multi-stakeholder forum. What is the status of that forum? Who would be the stakeholders?

Dr McCabe: There are agreed terms of reference for the forum, which we can send to the Committee after this meeting. The membership of the forum would be determined through a nomination process. It would be made up of equal parts government and civil society, and, ideally, the big themes of open government would be represented on it. We do not have names of the stakeholders that would be on it, because the membership is open to people who are interested and who can commit time to it, but we would love to see representation from all Departments, because open government is an issue for everyone.

Mr Tennyson: I have one final question, Chair, if I may. This one may be for Colm. The Committee's interest is primarily, although not exclusively, fiscal openness and transparency as well as the transparency of the budgetary process. The Fiscal Council is part of that, and we expect legislation to put the Fiscal Council on a statutory footing. Do you have any view on or assessment of the role of the Fiscal Council in openness and transparency? Is there anything that we, as a Committee, should be looking out for in that process in order to expand that?

Mr Burns: That is an interesting question. I read the Fiscal Council's May report when it came out and found a lot of the points in it very interesting. Sir Robert Chote briefed the Committee in October. He was asked some questions, including whether he should have more of a role in policy decisions. If I remember correctly — I am not giving it verbatim — he basically said, "No, my role is very much to interpret what the Executive are doing and what the Budget is doing". He also made a point about how the draft Programme for Government did not seem to connect to the Budget. I thought that that was another interesting aspect of what he said.

What the Fiscal Council does is very important for the Executive, and it is important that the public are able to read and understand the report. I do not see that the Fiscal Council's role should be policy dictation or anything like that. It is good enough that it has oversight of what the Budgets could do or what they are saying. That is a really good piece of work and is difficult enough. The most recent Main Estimates document runs to, I think, 290-odd pages. Going through that document and understanding it is a job in itself. What the Fiscal Council does is excellent, and its report is excellent. The briefings that Robert Chote has given to the Committee and others have been excellent. I support the legislation going through and think that the Fiscal Council's role should very much be fixed at what it is currently. If you widen its remit, it becomes more cloudy, in my eyes. I would say this, because I am talking about open government, but we can support that sort of work through fiscal transparency and through open contracting, which puts down an anti-corruption marker. That gives people a better understanding of how Governments spend their Budgets. From a policy direction point of view, it should be the Executive engaging with citizens through a forum such as the Open Government Network. That would help with the transparency in finance as well.

Mr Tennyson: That is helpful. Thank you.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Before you go, Rebekah, I just want to get the wording right: you think that unless we do something, we are living on borrowed time, and if we do not do something, we will be excluded from —.

Dr McCabe: Yes. We will be expelled from the partnership.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Would you use the word "expelled" rather than "excluded"?

Dr McCabe: I think so, yes. We would lose our membership.

Dr Aiken: Do not worry about that. I am more than happy to put that in the letter. [Laughter.]

I just wanted to make sure that I was quoting you exactly. Do not worry: that will go in the letter.

Dr McCabe: Essentially, the Executive would be withdrawing their commitment to openness. That is what it would amount to.

The Acting Chairperson (Dr Aiken): Rebekah, Colm and Andrew, thank you very much indeed for your evidence.