DFID Business plan - transparency

Greater transparency across government is at the heart of our commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account, to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending.
This section will set out the information that will enable users of public services to choose between providers, and taxpayers to assess the efficiency and productivity of public services, holding them more effectively to account. By publishing a wide range of indicators, we will enable the public to make up their own minds about how departments are performing. We will use transparency to facilitate the choice and democratic accountability which will replace top-down targets and micromanagement.
All the data in this section will be made available free of charge, and we will regularly review whether our published data meets the needs of the public.

Information strategy

DFID is committed to being a global leader on transparency. DFID regards transparency as fundamental to improving its accountability to UK citizens and to improving accountability to citizens in the countries in which it works. The transparency agenda will also help us achieve our goal of delivering more value for money in the programmes we deliver. Greater transparency will improve the effectiveness of aid in reducing poverty.
We will implement the Government’s commitments on transparency and maintain our existing reporting obligations laid out in the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006. We will also continue to report full details of our aid programme to the OECD in line with the DAC Statistical Reporting Directives. But we will go further and faster.
Our information strategy is based on:

The Prime Minister’s government-wide transparency commitments and commitments under the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)
The UK Aid Transparency Guarantee, which commits DFID to making our aid fully transparent to citizens in both the UK and developing countries
Extensive internal and external consultations, including with external opinion leaders on aid transparency, such as MySociety, Publish What You Fund and Development Initiatives

All work on transparency will be taken forward at Board level by Richard Calvert, Director General for Corporate Performance.

We will publish the following new information online:

Full information on all new DFID projects over £500 (from Jan 2011) including those funded through the tri-departmental Conflict Pool and managed by DFID
Expand the project data included in our new project database to be in line with international best practice, providing more detail and more frequent updates
Make our data and information more accessible by changing the format of the information we publish, including through revised project documentation and country business plan formats
Online details for all new tender documents for contracts over £10,000 (from Sep 2010)
Names, job titles and annual pay rates for Directors and above (from Oct 2010)
Organisational structures covering all of the Senior Civil Service (from Oct 2010)

We will publish our data in a more accessible format through data.gov.uk. This will enable others to combine it with data from other donors to create maps, graphs and other visualisations that help show, for example, aid flows to specific countries.

In releasing this information we will continue to respect issues of data protection, commercial confidentiality and security. All published data will be in line with the Public Data Principles and registered on data.gov.uk. Data we use that comes from other organisations will go through rigorous internal quality assurance.

Transparency is an important principle for government in its own right, but is also of critical importance at the international level. We are working on integrating transparency throughout our partners in the international aid system, by:

Leading on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) to improve the international consistency of aid reporting and its suitability at country level
Requiring, over time, any civil society organisation that is in direct receipt of DFID funds to adhere to similar standards of transparency and accountability, and pushing multilateral organisations to do the same
Pressing other donors - bilateral, multilateral and non-traditional - to adhere to similar standards of transparency as set out in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)

In order to increase the effectiveness and value for money throughout the delivery chain, we will also work to improve accessibility. We are committed to working at the country and international level to improve the availability, quality and use of data in order to drive effectiveness.

Making information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand means that UK taxpayers and citizens in poor countries can more easily hold DFID and recipient governments to account for using aid money wisely. Transparency creates better feedback from beneficiaries to donors and taxpayers, and helps us better understand what works and what doesn’t.
Delivering this agenda will require a fundamental cultural and structural shift in DFID’s processes, and we are working to embed transparency across the whole organisation.

Last updated: 03 Oct 2011

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