Latest Rail News

19.10.15

A commitment to transparency

Many organisations, particularly publicly accountable ones, say they favour transparency – and many take some steps towards it.

But data-dumps and a ‘Transparency’ page on your website aren’t enough. Information needs not just to be available – it needs to be accessible, searchable, indexable and capable of being ‘interrogated’, as the jargon has it.

Those to whom your organisation wants to open itself up need to know when new information will be made available, and exactly what is and is not within the scope of the transparency policy.

For that reason, Transport for London’s  new transparency measures should be welcomed. These are the actions it has pledged to take:

  • Publishing all replies to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests online. This will commence in 2016. The precise date will be announced by the end of the year;
  • Publishing a schedule, which will set out when TfL will publish regular information and datasets. This will make it easier for stakeholders to plan their scrutiny of this material. The first schedule will be available in December 2015;
  • Making webcasts of Board meetings available for longer than the current six month period, via TfL’s YouTube channel. This will start from December 2015 and will mean the recordings can still be viewed when they are no longer available on the Greater London Authority website;
  • Reviewing how information is presented on TfL’s website. Work is already underway to make it easier to find and interpret the data published;
  • Identifying any gaps in the information TfL publish about the number of customers using each service and standardising the presentation of this information. This will make it much simpler to understand the number of journeys made;
  • Publishing an update twice a year on the progress made by TfL to further increasing transparency, including making more open data freely available.

This is an excellent and truly useful set of reforms that prove TfL has a genuine interest in transparency, rather than just paying lip-service to it.

Some other public organisations in rail, notably the Office of Rail & Road, are also doing well on transparency. Network Rail, after a strong start, could learn a lot from this list. Its own transparency pages do contain a wealth of published data, but it is scattergun, opaque and there is no schedule (or, sometimes, even any logic) as to what it updated and when.   

Comments

There are no comments. Why not be the first?

Add your comment

Rail industry Focus

View all News

Comment

The challenge of completing Crossrail

05/07/2019The challenge of completing Crossrail

With a new plan now in place to deliver Crossrail, Hedley Ayres, National Audit Office manager, major projects and programmes, takes a look at ho... more >
Preparing the industry to deliver trains for the future

04/07/2019Preparing the industry to deliver trains for the future

The move to decarbonise the rail network involves shifting to cleaner modes of traction by 2050. David Clarke, technical director at the Railway ... more >

'the sleepers' blog

On the right track, Sulzer is awarded RISAS accreditation for Nottingham Service Centre

29/06/2020On the right track, Sulzer is awarded RISAS accreditation for Nottingham Service Centre

Following an independent audit, Sulzer’s Nottingham Service Centre has been accepted as part of the rail industry supplier approval scheme (RISAS). The accreditation reinforces the high-quality standards that are maintained by Sulzer’s... more >
read more blog posts from 'the sleeper' >

Interviews

Andrew Haines, CE of Network Rail, tells BBC News his organisation could issue future rail franchises

24/06/2019Andrew Haines, CE of Network Rail, tells BBC News his organisation could issue future rail franchises

Andrew Haines, the Chief Executive of Network Rail, has told the Today programme on Radio 4's BBC’s flagship news programme that he would not rule out his organisation issuing future r... more >
Advancing the rail industry with management degree apprenticeships

08/05/2019Advancing the rail industry with management degree apprenticeships

In answering the pressing questions of how current and future generations of managers can provide solutions to high-profile infrastructure projects across the UK, Pearson Business School, part of... more >