Guidance

HM Treasury and open formats for documents

Updated 14 August 2015

Overview

It has recently been announced that all government will be moving to publishing documents in newly agreed open formats. Mike Bracken discusses the reasons for this on the main GDS blog.

What follows is the HM Treasury plan to implement these changes, both internally and on GOV.UK.

What the standards apply to

The open standards guidelines apply to all new documents published on GOV.UK.

In this context, ‘document’ means something with a narrative – for example, formatted text, images, spreadsheets and presentations.

HM Treasury user groups

The Treasury is made up of user groups that are intrinsically linked to other government departments and agencies. Within HM Treasury we provide technology that complies with open formats, however we have no control on its adoption by other groups (see below) associated with HM Treasury.

• Bank of England
• RBS Group
• Eurostar
• Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
• Northern Rock Asset Management

How and when to publish documents in open formats

HM Treasury has a modern, flexible IT estate that closely aligns with the needs of our users. We are keen to move to the new standards as soon as possible, and have the tools to do so.

Staff in HM Treasury are able to save documents in open formats (eg .pdf, .odt) using existing publishing tools. This includes the ability to open, save and modify ODF 1.2 and PDF/A.

At the same time we recognise it is right that we ensure our partners, suppliers and stakeholders are able to effectively communicate with us. It is necessary to ensure that the documents we produce can be opened, edited and saved by the people we work with. We also need to ensure that those with particular needs who use specialist tools, such as screen readers, can continue to work without being disadvantaged.

In order to do this properly, we will phase the adoption of open format into 3 stages.

Phase 1: External publications

Target date: 28 February 2015 (Completed)

This applies to documents designed primarily for people to read, rather than to edit or interact with. All documents for ‘viewing’ must be available in one or both of the following formats:

• HTML5
• PDF/A

Examples of Treasury GOV.UK publications already consistent with these standards are the ISA qualifying investments: consultation on including peer-to-peer loans and Tax and tax credit rates and thresholds for 2014-15.

Phase 2: Sharing and collaborating

Target date: Annual review (January 2016) A separate set of standards applies to documents that users will want to edit or share. This type of document must be published in Open Document Format (ODF). The most common examples of this are:

• .odt (Open Document Text) for word-processing (text) documents
• .ods (Open Document Spreadsheet) for spreadsheets
• .odp (Open Document Presentation) for presentations

HM Treasury has decided to review this annually until it is confident that all of its associated parties have adopted open standards. This will ensure that there are no interoperability issues when sharing or collaborating on files with its partners, supplier, other government department and agencies.

Phase 3: Business applications

Target date: Annual review in tandem with Stage 2

HM Treasury uses a number of business applications and other tools that are dependent on propriety formats. We have identified these but acknowledge that the cost and risk associated with any change to these significantly outweighs the benefits.

However we now have policies and checks in place to ensure that new application or tools will not be proprietary specific. This will enable us to migrate our application estate over time, without incurring any extra costs.