It's not always the case that I find myself agreeing with Policy Exchange, but I would tend to agree with their assessment of the UK government's attempt to improve the transparency of public spending (as reported by the BBC News website):
'Ministers were "naive" to believe an army of "brilliant people" would spring up to analyse raw spending data for them, a think tank chief says.
The coalition published vast amounts of previously secret data online in the hope that "armchair auditors" would pore over it to discover waste.
But Neil O'Brien, of Policy Exchange, said the new industry never took off as the data was largely "unusable".
"That was a bit naive. Things like the Coins database [a database of all expenditure transactions - as I understand] are out there, but in a basically unusable format and if they want that to be a serious driver of transparency they need to enable users to use it in a simpler way."'Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I wonder just how naive ministers actually were!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20221398
