Locatum

Weird starting with Francis Maude again but his "bonfire of the quangos" Public Bodies Act quietly came into force last week with Royal Assent. Putting aside the rather lacklustre execution to date of the quango cull it was the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) that attracted the most comment in a rather under-reported story. Now the RDAs certainly are not perfect and for many have failed to deliver on some of their purposes, notably in getting match funding to accelerate economic development. You could as I do call this a problem of execution rather than function or you could see it as an exemplar of all that is wrong with quangocracy with all the placemen, red-tape, inertia etc beloved of red top ridicule. Just for a moment step back and consider QUANGO - quasi autonomous non governmental organisation - organisations to which government has devolved power, which operate at arms length from Ministers and which in government parlance are referred to a Non Departmental Publ...

Francis Maude has today been quoted on Twitter that the Cabinet Office is busy talking to 250 companies in a bid to "identify data sets that will boost growth". Leaving aside how much what I know to be a rather over-pressured and under-resourced CO can do and how much knowledge it has, it rather begs the question, not of who they're talking to (though that should be open too) or even the data sets that might be identified (or the methodology by which that is arrived at - that ought to be open too) but rather whether indeed the sought after, mythologised even, 'growth' and the jobs and tax revenues that will allegedly follow can be acheived. Even if you believe the Euro 40bn (once you've read the report you won't) much of any 'value' to be gleaned comes from savings to government from being the beneficiary of improved knowledge and decision making - valuable yes, growth no. The big win to be had from big data is analytics; while sales and marketin...