As citizens gradually gain the ability to choose between service providers, Joshua Chambers hears Tory policy guru Oliver Letwin kick off a discussion about how government can help people to make informed decisions.

The old system of “monotone, monolithic monopolies” run by the public sector is over, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin told Tory conference.

Speaking at a fringe event run by localism think-tank Localis, he explained how this will look to the service user: “Mrs Jones is sitting with a broken hip and has various needs… The very best person to decide ultimately what is going to do the most to get Mrs Jones out of residential care, away from hospital and happy, is Mrs Jones.” In practice, Letwin said this will not only mean giving service users ‘personal budgets’ to manage, but also ‘direct payment’ models where people are given the cash to spend on whatever public service they think will help them.

As citizens gain more power to choose between providers, government will provide more information to help them do so – and to help them put pressure on public service providers. Speaking at a Policy Exchange fringe, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “As we move towards a new world of supplier diversity, data is going to be increasingly important – both in terms of enabling choice and control, but also in improving delivery and improving performance.”

He gave a practical example. “In schools, we’re going to be exposing the differences [in performance] subject by subject as well as school by school. That will be powerful – both for parents and for governors. It may be a surprise to find that your school is doing relatively well in science but relatively badly in English. That may not have been clear before, but it will become clear now and it enables governors to draw conclusions.”

Transparency presents practical challenges. Rishi Saha – who until recently was Number 10’s head of digital communications – was also speaking at the Policy Exchange fringe, and complained that “often the data is published in ways that are not that easy to use, and it can be quite inaccessible. There is a big challenge for government and for departments to make sure that when the data is published and produced, it’s there in an easy-to-understand format and not just in lots of PDF documents, which make it very hard to interrogate and compare datasets.”

He also said that government should decide its own role in publishing this data. “Should it be putting out raw information for other people – entrepreneurs, media companies and citizenship groups – to organise, or should it curate that information itself and publish it? I’m in the former camp.”

The best place to publish information is often not on government’s own websites, Saha said. He praised the work of Mike Bracken, the Cabinet Office’s director of digital, for bringing together departmental websites, but added that “there is an opportunity for government to be showcasing this data in more imaginative places, which we know are more highly trafficked than the government websites themselves.”

For example, Saha said that local newspapers could become curators of this information. “That is not only of great interest to democracy on a local level, but it’s also great for local newspaper providers. If you care about the future of local media in this country, that data could be a great new thing for local newspaper groups to be handling.”

There are, of course, risks in all this transparency: some civil servants, for example, fear that third parties will present data in ways that are misleading or politically damaging. But this, the Tories believe, is a price worth paying for greater transparency. The test of this agenda will be whether they still believe it when their opponents and the media are using this information to identify waste and pinpoint declines in service quality.

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Written by Joshua Chambers, CSW