Transparency is vital to enhancing public confidence and trust in UK public service markets.
The contribution of public services to the UK's economic and social prosperity is greatly enhanced when public service providers - whether public, private or voluntary - are open about how the services they provide are performing. For outsourced services, transparency has the potential to enhance public confidence and trust by helping taxpayers to see how their money is being spent and give them the power to hold government and service providers to account for performance.
The Government has committed to strengthening transparency of outsourced public service provision and has already opened up some information to the public as part of its drive to be the most open and transparent government in the world. In his first few weeks in office, the Prime Minister committed to publishing details of all contracts over £10,000 on Contracts Finder. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, has championed a range of transparency and open government initiatives over the course of this parliament including contract transparency. The 2013-2015 UK National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership pledged to build on existing transparency in government contracting to "look at ways to enhance the scope, breadth and usability of published contractual data". Justice Minister, Simon Hughes, has pledged to extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency for outsourced public services. Similarly, Labour has called for freedom of information legislation to cover private companies providing public services.
Private and voluntary sector providers have welcomed these calls for increased transparency. In September 2013, the CBI published Licence to Operate which called on all providers to actively work with their commissioners to drive transparency. In 2014 it set out four practical changes to boost contract transparency for outsourced public services. Similarly, the NCVO have been pushing for greater transparency in public service contracting on behalf of voluntary providers.
As part of a suite of recommendations for improving public sector markets, the Institute for Government's Making Public Service Markets Work report recommended that transparency measures should be built into government contracts, obliging suppliers or contractors to publish information about contract performance.
In January 2014 the CBI, ICO and the IfG convened a roundtable to discuss options to promote greater transparency through contractual arrangements. Following this event, the CBI and the Institute for Government recommended that a set of standardised transparency provisions should be developed for government contracts.
Building on this support, the Institute for Government convened a taskforce to draft these standardised transparency provisions that would commit commissioners or service providers to publish pre-agreed information on contract performance to the public. The taskforce comprised of representatives from business, the voluntary sector and government as well as key advisory bodies including the ICO, NAO, NCVO and Open Data Institute.
This short paper summarises the work of the taskforce and presents the set of standardised transparency provisions recommended for inclusion in the Government's existing Model Services Contract, and, potentially, other large service contracts.