David Cameron today announced plans few Lib Dems would disagree with: to free up a lot more public sector data.
As the Conservative Party website reports
Key proposals include:
- Items of local government expenditure over £500
- Details of all government contracts over £10,000
- Items of central government expenditure over £25,000
- Names and salaries of all civil servants earning more than £150,000 per year
- Data covering the last three months on the number of cases of MRSA and C.Difficile infection in each hospital
- Data on crime in each street
As anyone familiar with the issues of huge swathes of data being splurged out will know, the thorniest problem isn’t having the data, but understanding and making sense of it.
This, the Government hopes, will be done by the private sector – and perhaps also by voluntary groups. There’s good reason to think that hope will be borne out, as a host of websites have sprung up to help us make effective use of the data out there at the moment.
This change looks to be an incremental one, building on the changes that Labour have made in the past. It’s a welcome development, though government-watchers will be keen to spot the gaps and highlight exceptions to the new-found openness.
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And while we’re at it, how about a regular listing of all the payments the EU’s Common Agricutural Policy makes to landowners out of taxation raised from the rest of us!. The last I heard the Duke of Westminster receives about £330,000 every year and Prince Charles receives about £500,000 every year. Let us see a full list of who receives what every year. These CAP payments are made just for the privilege of owning land which has often been inherited tax free thanks to all the outrageous exemptions from Inheritance Tax for agricultural land – as well as for business assets and shareholdings, not to mention lifetime gifts, for the wealthy.
Unfortunately, we will never get serious reform of the CAP while we are in the EU. The only solution is to leave the EU, to the great advantage of reducing our public sector deficit. And as well as getting rid of the Common Agricultural Policy in the UK, a root and branch reform of Inheritance Tax is long overdue, to spread more widely the private ownership of wealth in each new generation, as is the party policy of the Liberal Party (www.liberal.org.uk). Liberal Popular Capitalism (see http://www.universal-inheritance.org) instead of conservative unlimited Dynastic Capitalism!
What a great policy that would be for the LibDemCon coalition, if only they were genuinely serious about wanting greater equality of opportunity!
Seems positive – move to a more transparent government hopefully, have to just hope that someone out there can collate it in a user friendly manner.
@DANE
Firstly, a substantial reform of CAP is due in 2013. Secondly, reforms were proposed for tackling that exact problem and the main opponent of those reforms was the UK*. Thirdly, please explain why you think leaving the EU would help our deficit in any appreciable way – last figures I saw suggested that the interest alone on our deficit cost about eight times as much as EU membership per year.
Please, at least research what you say before you say it.
*”In the autumn of 2007 the European Commission was reported to be considering a proposal to limit subsidies to individual landowners and factory farms to around £300,000. Some factory farms and estates of rich people would be affected in the UK, as there are over 20 farms/estates which receive £500,000 or more from the EU.[17][18] Similar attempts have been unsuccessful in the past and were opposed in the UK by two strong lobbying organizations the Country Land and Business Association and the National Farmers Union. Germany, which has large collective farms still in operation in what was East Germany also vigorously opposed changes which were marketed as “reforms”. The proposal was reportedly submitted for consultation with EU member states on November 20, 2007.”
Reminds me of an episode of The Thick of It.
“DunKhan”
Please try not to would-be condescend – it can be a tiresome LibDem EU-phile habit.
Net contribution to the EU will be £6.5 billion for 2010/11, which is already something, in view of the significance given to the recent £6.2 billion cuts announced by David Laws, added to which there are other much larger costs of EU regulations which Global Europe, Democracy Movement, etc. claim are in total highly significant in relation to the £42 billion annual debt interest.
Let us see the full amounts paid by the Common Agricultural Policy, not just those 20 or so amounts of £500,000 or more – which are themselves a disgrace. What has become of the proposed reforms to which you refer?. What is it that you are quoting? Why should there be any CAP payments? New Zealand abolished all agricultural subsidies at a stroke in 1984. Why should we not do the same?
Let us govern ourselves, reform ourselves, in spite of lobbying by the landed interest, instead of being governed and presented with elusive proposals for reform, over which we have no control, by the Brussels bureaucracy.
When did the secrecy for top civil servants’ salaries come in? ISTR they used to be published in Whitaker’s.