Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin was giving evidence to the Commons public administration committee (PASC) earlier today (watch it here) on the government's business plans.
There were two aspects which struck me as particularly interesting.
First was what seemed like a hint that the transparency section of the Number 10 website is going to be expanded over the coming months to include more information about the impact of the structural reforms.
And second was the most coherent description I've yet heard about the government's approach to accountability.
More to come
Letwin's hint (not much more than that) about more web-based transparency came in a passing reference to improvements to the Number 10 site due this spring.
He noted that each department has established "the measures by which it thinks its fair to judge itself".
And reporting on this information will enable the public to judge whether the structural reforms are working and whether there are service providers which are failing.
The information he seemed to have in mind is already partly provided in the full business plans (for example pages 29-37 of the Cabinet Office plan) and covers items such as spending, "input indicators" and "impact indicators" but isn't currently on the Number 10 site.
It also seems possible that departments might add further indicators to those currently listed.
He indicated that users will be able to drill down to the level of the individual school, hospital or police force to judge their performance – although it wasn't clear if all of that data would be hosted on the Number 10 site.
Greater eDemocracy?
In a series of exchanges with Conservative MP Robert Halfon, Letwin also suggested that more interactivity is a possibility.
Halfon told the minister that business plans are currently "internet 1.0" in that they provide information but don't allow any comment or input from the public into the decision-making process.
He also suggested that open government should be "more Wikipedia than encyclopaedia".
Letwin insisted that this is the government's "direction" and asked the committee for suggestions on how to involve the public and make it "maximally interactive".
Halfon floated the idea of allowing the public to vote on whether they think the business plans have been achieved, and Letwin said he was open to considering it.
The minister also said the Spending Challenge website had resulted in "many hundreds" of ideas being taken forward, although I haven't personally seen the evidence for this level of government response.
Transparency and accountability
Having written some critical posts about the government's approach to accountability, I think it's only fair to set out Letwin's defence of the ideas.
The minister said the starting point for the business plans is "the distinction between things the government controls and things the government hopes to achieve in the wider world which are not directly under its control".
He said the previous government's target-driven approach "sought to establish a set of things in the external world that it was hoped government would achieve" and then have people try to "pull levers" to achieve them.
"Our assessment is that the defect of that approach is that the levers very often have nothing at the other end." [See also this post for a good discussion of Letwin's point]
Letwin said the government aims to create structural changes (rather than micro-management from Whitehall) in which there are new frameworks where other people have incentives to do the right things.
He said this wouldn't deliver perfect services, but would improve things.
But the question, he told the committee, was how to make sure the structural changes are carried out. That "led us to develop a business plan for each department" which would "plot a course of action" and allow it to be delivered over time.
And he said they also differed from targets because the individual departments had drawn them up, rather than having them imposed on them by Number 10.
Letwin also set out how the improved transparency and open data fitted into this approach.
He suggested that as interested amateurs "start mashing up the data" and allow comparisons to be made between areas, the public can then use structures such as (in relation to crime) 'beat meetings' and elected police commissioners to press for change and hold those responsible to account.
And the evidence is...?
I think it was fair to say Letwin pretty much had the committee eating out of his hand, and there was a fair degree of cross-party consensus about the principle of the business plan approach.
Still, there was one really telling set of exchanges where Letwin was asked what evidence he had that this approach would work.
He fell back on citing his "deepest instincts" about how the world works, and delivered perhaps the most worrying (and contradictory) line of the session:
"The evidence has to do with an intuition about how people best come to realise their potential."
Maybe it's just me, but that does seem a slightly flimsy basis for restructuring the British state.
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