11 Departments have not monitored the costs of implementing transparency, and have estimated costs only where associated with investment requiring a business case. Estimates provided for this review suggest that the additional staff costs of providing standard disclosures of pre-existing data range from £53,000 to £500,000 annually by department. Examples, such as the police crime map, where departments have repackaged information to promote greater accessibility and use has led to further costs: in this case set-up costs of £300,000 and annual running costs of more than £150,000. However, there are also cases such as the releases of public weather service data where the costs are minimal. While these costs are relatively modest, they would be more substantial if additional information were collected to secure purposeful, standardised information to fill the gaps noted in paragraph 8. Pursuit of transparency objectives is therefore likely to increase cost pressures.
12 Few departments are tracking benefits of transparency - a key requirement in monitoring success and learning what works. Public interest in different types of data release has varied widely. The website www.data.gov.uk has had more than 1.75 million visits since it was launched in January 2010. However, more than four-fifths of its visitors leave from either the home page or the data page on the website. This suggests that they are not accessing data during their visit, although it does not take account of other potential access points for the data, for example, linked third party websites or applications. While many departments told us that there had been limited interest in the standard releases, there has been much greater interest in releases related to the operation of public services. The police crime map website has had an estimated 47 million visits between February and December 2011. The Department for Education has reported an 84 per cent increase in the use of its comparative data on schools, compared with the same period last year, since it was consolidated in one location and data were made more accessible.
13 Alongside potential benefits from transparency, departments face risks, including:
• risks to privacy when information is provided at more granular levels. Departments have conducted privacy risk assessments where they saw privacy as an issue. More generally, the Government commissioned an independent review to consider how transparency can proceed while privacy is protected. The Cabinet Office intends to respond to its recommendations in a forthcoming White Paper;
• fraud risks with increased transparency around contracts and payment details - fraud attempts to a value of £7 million directly related to transparency releases have been found in local government, highlighting the need for effective anti-fraud measures; and
• other potential unintended consequences of transparency. Given the breadth of information released as part of the transparency agenda, it is likely that wider unintended consequences might result, but the Government has done little to identify or assess the nature and scale of any such effects, either benign or adverse.