According to Wikipedia:

In business, consolidation or amalgamation is the merger and acquisition of many smaller companies into much larger ones. In the context of financial accounting, consolidation refers to the aggregation of financial statements of a group company as consolidated financial statements.

I’ve been pondering the use of open data for holding companies to account again (see also here and here, for example) and a couple of ways forward seem to be crystallising out for me, at least in the way(s) I’ve been hacking some data sketches around. These ways loosely map on to the two senses of consolidation described above, I think?

In the first case, using open data sources to map out corporate groupings, or look at how companies start to consolidate into corporate groupings. The OpenCorporates folk are looking at doing this properly – based on share ownership of one company by another – but I’m looking for other signals and sources of data that allow us to associate company names within a wider corporate sprawl. For example, CQC data lists all the locations inspected by that body, along with the group or brand name (if any) under which a particular location operates. We can then use this information to identify all the locations associated with a particular brand or group.

Whilst doing this in the context of sponsoring organisations for school academies, it struck me that once several independent locations have been established or aggregated together as part of a group, if those groups are driven by “growth” strategies, we will presumably start to see merger and acquisition behaviours? [See also other possible courses of action that larger groupings may take: School Chain Locks Out Public Service Values?.] By using open data sources, we may be able to track the first – and then possibly second – phase of this sort of consolidating activity?

In the second case, part of the rationale for identifying corporate groupings is so that we can start to consolidate information about payments made to, and quality or evaluation reports relating to, the members of a particular group. That is, we can start to think about a form of consolidated accounting. For example, we can start to total up all the payments made by the public sector (across both national and local government) to a particular corporate grouping, possibly across several spending areas; or we can look at the quality reports relating to different contracts raised by a particular corporate group as a whole and make a judgement about the service levels delivered by that operator in general. This consolidated quality and/or financial reporting also provides us with a way of looking at the gross behaviour of a company grouping, and comparing it, in accountability terms, with national public services, for example.

I’ve long since been confused about what open data may or may not be good for in accountability or transparency terms, but now I feel as if it’s starting to make sense to me: as a way of shining some light onto the behaviour of private companies operating in the public sector, and also as a way of demonstrating just how much public money is sunk into some of them compared to finding made available to public bodies, for example.

If we could also get tax positions of companies and corporate groups more clearly illuminated as accessible data sources, along with information about their employment and payment practices (so we could, for example, run models on the extent to which the state is also likely to subsidise these companies’ operations through tax, housing and welfare benefits/payments made to their employees compared to those made to public sector employees), we could start to get a better idea about the way public money is actually being spent system wide?