5 The Cabinet Office, in partnership with departments, has significantly increased the amount and type of public sector information released and met a high proportion of its commitments. Twenty-three out of twenty-five commitments for central government in the Prime Minister's letters due by December 2011 had been met. The www.data.gov.uk website, launched by the previous Government in January 2010, indexes public data releases. The number of data sets catalogued within www.data.gov.uk has grown from 2,500 in January 2010 to 7,865 in December 2011.
6 To date, compliance with transparency good practices has been mixed. The advisory Transparency Board developed a draft set of public data principles, which outline good practice for releasing and presenting information. Compliance with some principles is strong. Most of the data releases on www.data.gov.uk are openly available for re-use, with 86 per cent published under the Open Government Licence and three-quarters in formats whereby data can easily be reprocessed. However, in other areas there has been less progress. For example, the Cabinet Office has not yet defined how departments should prepare and disclose data inventories to facilitate wider use.
7 The transparency agenda itself does not define requirements concerning data quality disclosure. The Cabinet Office has deferred the commitment for departments to produce data quality action plans from November 2011 to May 2012, to incorporate them in the next versions of departmental Business Plans. Data released under the transparency agenda ranges from audited figures and National Statistics data, subject to data protocols and reviews, through to administrative sources of varying status. In some cases, there are judgements to be made between speed of release and data quality. For example, the Treasury's guidance on spending data publication states that to produce timely data, information should be released as it was originally recorded in financial systems, unless there are material changes to the data. While the Treasury has urged departments to improve the quality of the spend data, and has required all main departments to produce data quality improvement plans, it has not required them to disclose the level of data quality to the public. The lack of common categorisation of spending, and late publication of data by many departments, hinder comparability.