Vice-President of the Government presides over meeting to create Transparency Office

News - 2014.7.29

The Vice-President of the Government and Minister for the Presidency, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, presided over the meeting held at Moncloa Palace to implement the Transparency and Access to Information Office, which will become the agency responsible for guaranteeing effective application within the General State Administration Services of the principles and rights stemming from the Transparency Act.

Moncloa Palace, Madrid

The meeting, which was also attended by the State Secretary for Parliamentary Relations, José Luis Ayllón, and the Under-secretary of the Ministry of the Presidency, Jaime Pérez Renovales, among other officials from the Ministry of the Presidency and the Ministry of the Treasury and Public Administration Services, forms part of the work to coordinate and develop the Transparency, Access to Public Information and Good Governance Act for its entry into force in December.

These efforts include the implementation of a Transparency Office, which is to be given subdirectorate-general status. In order to be formally set up, a reform of the organic structure of the Ministry of the Presidency will be approved at the Council of Ministers meeting on Friday, 1 August. This office will not imply an increase in the number of units within this ministerial department as the new structure also provides for the merger of another two subdirectorate-generals.

Transparency Website

The Transparency and Access to Information Office will be responsible for the Transparency Website, the IT development and technical maintenance of which has been undertaken with internal resources through the Directorate-General of Administrative Modernisation, Procedures and Support for e-Government, which falls under the State Secretariat of Public Administration Services.

Besides concentrating all the information stemming from the new active disclosure obligations of the public authorities, the Transparency Website will provide an interactive mechanism enabling citizens to exercise their right to access information.

To that end, the Ministry of the Presidency has been working for months in coordination with all ministerial departments of the Government of Spain to create the information units defined in the law. These will form a key part of the system, in terms of both the information of interest published by the public authorities and in response to any questions or queries coming from the public at large.

Furthermore, the Government of Spain plans to submit the Transparency Council Statute to the State Council and work on drafting the regulations that will govern the law, whilst at the same time developing civil servant training programmes on transparency-related issues in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Administration Services (Spanish acronym: INAP).

Pool Moncloa