Call For Proposals 2009 » Conflicts of interest

Describe your idea:

An aggregation of information on directorships, memberships and employment by those who influence public policy. Give unbiased information to explain the background of these people, and whether their decisions are likely to be altered by outside influcences.

Use currently available information to populate a database, providing a link within each entry to the organisation (with brief description) and those others in the database who are linked to the same organisation (eg fellow non-executive directors)

What problem does it solve?:

This allows easy access to information to ensure we are aware of the potential and actual conflicts of information, by those who purport to give impartial advice.

Many of those “in charge” of us plebians have many different sources of income. Some of these could be deemed relevant to their opinions, eg MPs pushing for more defence spending frequently are taken out on freebies by the defence industry; the King’s fund describes itself as independent but is almost entirely populated by people who’s day job is with firms who would benefit from privatatisation; etc ad infinitum. A charitable view is that given limited interview time, they tend not to insist on informing the audience of their potential bias.

Type of idea: A brand new project

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