Transparent government, not transparent citizens: a report on privacy and transparency for the Cabinet Office

1. Privacy is extremely important to transparency. The political legitimacy of a transparency programme will depend crucially on its ability to retain public confidence. Privacy protection should therefore be embedded in any transparency programme, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. 2. Privacy and transparency are compatible, as long as the former is carefully protected and considered at every stage. 3. Under the current transparency regime, in which public data is specifically understood not to include personal data, most data releases will not raise privacy concerns. However, some will, especially as we move toward a more demand-driven scheme. 4. Discussion about deanonymisation has been driven largely by legal considerations, with a consequent neglect of the input of the technical community. 5. There are no complete legal or technical fixes to the deanonymisation problem. We should continue to anonymise sensitive data, being initially cautious about releasing such data under the Open Government Licence while we continue to take steps to manage and research the risks of deanonymisation. Further investigation to determine the level of risk would be very welcome. 6. There should be a focus on procedures to output an auditable debate trail. Transparency about transparency – metatransparency – is essential for preserving trust and confidence. Fourteen recommendations are made to address these conclusions

Concentration of Population in Tokyo: A Survey

The mono-polar concentration of population in Tokyo has been intensifying steadily in Japan since the mid-1990s. This demographic movement stands in sharp contrast to the tri-polar (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) demographic movement in the high growth era before the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Mono-polar in-migration reflects the change in industrial structure after the rapid yen appreciation and the two decades of stagnation caused by the bubble burst in an atmosphere of demographic aging and declining birth rate. One noteworthy recent feature of the population inflow into Tokyo is the increasing inflow of young females with post-secondary education, leading to even gloomier economic and social prospects in most outlying regions. This economic externality should be dealt with by means of well-designed policies which, benefitting from the experience of events several decades ago, avoid throttling the benefits of the market mechanism.This paper is based on a seminar presentation given in Japanese on July 11, 2015 at “Tokyo, a Mega-city in Asia,” organized by the Science Council of Japan. The seminar was produced by Prof. Kaoru Sugihara, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). Kenji Umetani, GRIPS professor at the time of the seminar, thanks Prof. Sugihara for kindly offering him the opportunity to present there

Doing the Möbius Strip: The politics of the Bailey Review

In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions associated with making both arguments at once. We theorise the split as ‘doing the möbius strip’, as both sides agree on the assumption that commercial and sexual choice is either present or absent for young women. In this way, they reframe the contradictions and inequalities that shape young women’s behaviours as a problem of propriety and decency

National Security Risks? Uncertainty, Austerity and Other Logics of Risk in the UK government’s National Security Strategy

Risk scholars within Security studies have argued that the concept of security has gone through a fundamental transformation away from a threat-based conceptualisation of defence, urgency and exceptionality to one of preparedness, precautions and prevention of future risks, some of which are calculable, others of which are not. This article explores whether and how the concept of security is changing due to this ‘rise of risk’, through a hermeneutically grounded conceptual and discourse analysis of the United Kingdom government’s national security strategy (NSS) from 1998 to 2011. We ask how risk-security language is employed in the NSS; what factors motivate such discursive shifts; and what, if any, consequences of these shifts can be discerned in UK national security practices. Our aim is twofold: to better understand shifts in the security understandings and policies of UK authorities; and to contribute to the conceptual debate on the significance of the rise of risk as a component of the concept of security

Revisiting ‘common-sense’ in a time of cultivated ignorance – a conversation with Errol Lawrence

An interview with Errol Lawrence, discussing the concept of common-sense racism, the adaptation of racist cultures, battles around public services and the role of the state and the continuing influence of The Empire Strikes Back

Helping out: a national survey of volunteering and charitable giving

This report details the main findings of a national survey of volunteering and charitable giving – termed Helping Out – carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) in 2006/07. The study was carried out for the Office of the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office. The main aims of the study were to examine: - how and why people give unpaid help to organisations, and what they think of their experiences; - what stops people from giving help; - the links between giving time and giving money; - how, why and how much people give money to charity; - what stops people from giving money to charity. There was also interest in estimates of the prevalence of volunteering and charitable giving. However, for a number of reasons (detailed in Chapters 2 and 10), prevalence estimates derived from this study should not be used to look at changes in these measures over time. Other study series are better suited to this purpose. In terms of volunteering, the study focused on formal help given through groups and organisations rather than informal help (given as an individual, e.g. to family and friends)

The Evaluation Market and Its Industry in England

This chapter presents an analysis of the evaluation market in England. It examines the context within which evaluation takes place and the structure and dynamics of the evaluation marketplace. It charts the growth and retrenchment of demand for evaluation in England over the past 20 years or so, the diversity of commissioning arragements, and the types of evaluation undertaken. The structure and dynamics of the supply side of the evaluation market in England over the past two decades are also considered. Specifically, these include the barriers to entry into the market, skill and expertise levels, training, professional regulation, and quality of outputs. The development of mergers, consortia, partnerships, and emergence of small-scale evaluation companies are identified as significant trends on the supply side