News 6th January 2017

Assessment of UK’s 2013-15 Open Government Action Plan published for public comment

by Tim Hughes

The Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) – which is charged with tracking the progress of countries on OGP – has just published its latest report for the UK for public consultation. This progress report, prepared by Ben Worthy from Birkbeck University, assesses the implementation of the commitments in the UK’s second open government action plan, which covered the period 2013 to 2015.

The headline figures are:

• 6 (out of 21) commitments were fully completed
• 11 were substantially completed
• 3 were only completed to a limited extent
• 1 was withdrawn

Below is the blurb from the OGP, with details on how to respond to the consultation. The deadline for responding is 18th January.

In United Kingdom, the IRM researcher summarized his findings:

“The UK’s second action plan commitments on beneficial ownership, aid transparency, Sciencewise, and OpenDataCommunities are some examples of major contributions to government openness. Four commitments were closer to completion. However, progress overall in the rest of commitments was sustained from the assessment at mid-term. The third action plan has several commitments that flow from two priority areas and star commitments including beneficial ownership and extractives.”