I’ve been in a ranty mood all day today, so to finish it off, here are some thoughts about how we can start to use #opendata to hold companies to account. The trigger was finding a dataset released by the Care Quality COmmission (CQC) listing the locations of premises registered with the CQC, and the operating companies of those locations (early observations on that data here).
The information is useful because it provides a way of generating aggregated lists of companies that are part of the same corporate group (for example, locations operated by Virgin Care companies, or companies operated by Care UK). When we have this aggregation lists, it means we can start to run the numbers across all the companies in a corporate group, and get some data back about how the companies that are part of a group are operating in general. The aggregated lists thus provide a basis for looking at the gross behaviour of a particular company. We can then start to run league tables against these companies (folk love league tables, right? At least, they do when it comes to public sector bashing). So we can start to see how the corporate groupings compare against each other, and perhaps also against public providers. Of course, there is a chance that the private groups will be shown to be performing better than public sector bodies, but that could be a useful basis for a productive conversation about why…
So what sorts of aggregate lists can we start to construct? The CQC data allows us to get lists of locations associated with various sorts of care delivery (care home, GP services, dentistry, more specialist services) and identify locations that are part of the same corporate group. For example, I notice that filtering the CQC data to care homes, the following are significant operators (the number relates to the number of locations they operate):
When it comes to “brands”, we have the following multiple operators:
For these operators, we could start to scrape their most recent CQC reports and build up a picture of how well the group as a whole is operating. In the same way that “armchair auditors” (whatever they are?!) are supposed to be able to hold local councils to account, perhaps they can do the same for companies, and give the directors a helping hand… (I would love to see open data activists buying a share and going along to a company shareholder meeting to give some opendata powered grief ;-)
Other public quality data sites provide us with hints at ways of generating additional aggregations. For example, from the Food Standards Agency, we can search on ‘McDonalds’ as a restaurant to bootstrap a search into premises operated by that company (although we’d probably also need to add in searches across takeaways, and perhaps also look for things like ‘McDonalds Ltd” to catch more of them?)
Note – the CQC data provides a possible steer here for how other data sets might be usefully extended in terms of the data they make available. For example, having a field for “operating company” or “brand” would make for more effective searches across branded or operated food establishments. Having company number (for limited companies and LLPs etc) provided would also be useful for disambiguation purposes.
Hmm, I wonder – would it make sense to start to identify the information that makes registers useful, and that we should start to keep tabs on? We could then perhaps start lobbying for companies to provide that data, and check that such data is being and continues to be collected? It may not be a register of beneficial ownership, but it would provide handy cribs for trying to establish what companies are part of a corporate grouping…
(By the by, picking up on Owen Boswarva’s post The UK National Information Infrastructure: It’s time for the private sector to release some open data too, these registers provide a proxy for the companies releasing certain sorts of data. For example, we can search for ‘Tesco’ as a supermarket on the FSA site. Of course, if companies were also obliged to publish information about their outlets as open data – something you could argue that as a public company they should be required to do, trading their limited liability for open information about where they might exert that right – we could start to run cross-checks (which is the sort of thing real auditors do, right?) and publish complete records of publicly account performance in terms of regulated quality inspections.
The CQC and Food Standards Agency both operate quality inspection registers, so what other registers might we go to to build up a picture of how companies – particularly large corporate groupings – behave?
The Environment Agency publish several registers, including one detailing enforcement actions, which might be interesting to track, though I’m not sure how the data is licensed? The HSE (Health & Safety Executive) publish various notices by industry sector and subsector, but again, I’m not too clear on the licensing? The Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA) publish a couple of enforcement registers which look as if they cover some of the same categories as the CQC data – though how easy it would be to reconcile the two registers, I don’t know (and again, I don’t know how the license is actually registered). One thing to bear in mind is that where registers contain personally identifiable information, any aggregations we build that incorporates such data (if we are licensed to build such things) means (I think) that we become data controllers for the purposes of the Data Protection Act (we are not the maintainers and publishers of the public register so we don’t benefit from the exemptions associated with that role).
Looking at the above, I’m starting to think it could be a really interesting exercise to pick some of the care home provider groups and have a go at aggregating any applicable quality scores and enforcement notices from the CQC, FSA, HSE and CFOA (and even the EA if any of their notices apply! Hmm… does any HSCIC data cover care homes at all too?) Coupled with this, a trawl of directors data to see how the separate companies in a group connect by virtue of directors (and what other companies may be indicated by common directors in a group?)
Other areas perhaps worth exploring – farms incorporated into agricultural groups? (Where would be find that data? One register that could be used to partially hold those locations to account may be the public register of pesticide enforcement notices as well as other EA notices?)
As well as registers and are there any other sources of information about companies we can add in to the mix? There’s lots: for limited companies we can pull down company registration details and lists of directors (and perhaps struck off directors) and some accounting information. Data about charities should be available from the Charities Commission. The HSCIC produces care quality indicators for a range of health providers, as well as prescribing data for individual GP practices. Data is also available about some of the medical trials that particular practices are involved in.
Having identified influential corporate players, we might then look to see whether those same bodies are represented on lobbiest groups, such as the EU register of commission expert groups, or as benefactors of UK Parliamentary All Party groups, or as parties to meetings with Ministers etc.
We can also look across all those companies to see how much money the corporate groups are sinking from the public sector, by inspecting who payments are made to in the masses of transparency spending data that councils, government departments, and services such as the NHS publish. (For an example of this, see Spend Small Local Authority Spending Index; unfortunately, the bulk data you need to run this sort of analysis yourself is not openly available – you need to aggregate and clean it yourself.)
Once we start to get data that lists companies that are part of a group, we can start to aggregate open public data about all the companies in the group and look for patterns of behaviour within the groups, as well as across them. Lapses in one part of the group might suggest a weakness in high level management (useful for the financial analysts?), or act as a red flag for inspection and quality regimes.
Hmmm… methinks it’s time to start putting some of this open data to work; but put it to work by focussing on companies, rather than public bodies…
I think I also need to do a little bit of digging around how public registers are licensed? Should they all be licensed OGL by default? And what guidance, if any, is there around how we can make use of such data and not breach the Data Protection Act?
