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Transparency - the buzz word that bites

Governance | Celina Ribeiro | 9 Jun 2010

Last week’s announcement that the Department for International Development will set up a watchdog for aid spending could portend a new statutory funding world order, says Celina Ribeiro.

Transparency is the buzz word of the triumphant new government. But they are breaking from the grand tradition of buzz words. So far, David Cameron’s government actually seems to be ‘doing’ transparency as well as talking it. 

The blue-yellow coalition (not convinced that their alliance make them any more green) have started with a big, transparent bang, which is likely to become bigger and louder – at the very least for a while.

The first echoes of this bang hit civil society last Thursday when international development secretary Andrew Mitchell announced there will be a watchdog formed to monitor the results and impact of British aid spending overseas.

Any charity which has accepted government or indeed Big Lottery money in the last few years will no doubt be familiar with the oft onerous reporting requirements of accepting statutory funding.

But this, methinks, is something different. With massive, deep and soon-impending cuts across so much of the government’s activities, even the ring-fenced area of aid spending is under a new kind of pressure to wring every last inch of impact out of each ha’penny.

What is in store for health funding? Disability services? Arts organisations? Perhaps it is because of its privileged status as a ring-fenced funding area that international aid is the first area of civil society activity to have a watchdog announced for it. And it may well be the last. A government obsessed about cutting waste will have to think very carefully about the value of creating multiple new watchdog bodies designed to ensure value, but nevertheless there is a new temperature around transparency.

These guys are really, really serious about transparency (again, the cynical caveat ‘for now’ wants to insert itself into my sentences). If it's not the creation of little impact watch puppies across various parts of government spending, this new seriousness will inevitably involve a greater emphasis on proving and achieving results whenever seeking or reporting back on the receipt of taxpayer money.

Transparency is good and necessary and important. But in the marriage of transparency and frugality, let’s hope that a government facing social and economic disarray on levels not seen for a generation will not lose its appetite for that old buzz word ‘innovation’, nor of funding failures.

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Who's Who: Celina Ribeiro