The government spent nearly five years fighting the release of papers which illuminate tensions within Whitehall over the introduction of Scottish devolution and which have now been disclosed.

Last month, the information commissioner ordered the Scotland Office [129Kb PDF] to release hundreds of pages of material which was originally requested under freedom of information in February 2005. The commissioner's office took over four years to assess the case before reaching this decision.

The documents relate to the Sewel Convention, the commitment made when the devolution law was being passed that Westminster would not normally legislate on devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish Parliament. It is named after the junior Scottish Office minister Lord Sewel, who announced the policy.

It is clear from the papers that the early workings of this convention were the subject of much tricky negotiation between the Scottish Office and other parts of the British government. The disclosures reveal the concerns within the Scottish Office over the attitudes of officials in other departments.

In one memo from November 1998, Iain Jamieson of the Scottish Office legal team wrote:

"These problems simply demonstrate just how unsatisfactory it is to allow Westminster to continue to legislate on devolved matters, other than quite exceptionally. Some Departments simply do not appear to have woken up to the fact of devolution."

In June 1999, another official, David Rogers wrote:

"I can see the difficulties but we're in a weak position re Whitehall. If we make it too difficult for them the buggers will just run roughshod over our convention on the basis that these Bills should be regarded as part of inherited landscape - Scottish offoce [sic] Ministers were consulted etc."

And in the same month, John Elvidge, who had been temporarily seconded from the Scottish Office to the Cabinet Office, wrote:

"I'm not surprised that this has proved problematic. The reason I didn't reply from Cabinet Office to the March letter was that settling procedures with the Welsh raised Whitehall hackles so much that I saw no prospect of a reasonable discussion if the issues about the Scottish Parliament were opened up simultaneously."

Sir John Eldridge is now the Scottish Government's top civil servant.

Lord Sewel himself soon became worried about the way the convention had started to operate in practice. In June 1999, his office circulated a memo saying that he was:

"greatly concerned about the procedure that is being adopted in relation to the Bills other than the FSA [Food Standards Agency] Bill. He feels we are taking the 'Sewel Convention' too far. He registered his concern at yesterday's Cabinet Committtee."

Since leaving government, Lord Sewel has repeated his view in public remarks that the convention had been used too widely.

I asked the Scotland Office for this material after the commissioner's judgment was announced. They only agreed to send me hard copies, but someone else has managed to get them to post electronic versions at the FOI site What Do They Know.

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Freedom of information can be a troublesome matter for some academic institutions - and this is well illustrated by the surprising content of some e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and published on the internet a few days ago.

The CRU is a leading centre for the study of climate change and has played a key role in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's also a focus of criticism for a vociferous band of climate change sceptics, who have started hunting through the large quantity of hacked e-mails with enthusiasm.

Whatever these e-mails may or may not say about climate change is outside the scope of this blog. But they are certainly interesting from the FOI point of view.

I should note that it is not yet possible to confirm beyond doubt that the hacked e-mails are all authentic. However, I have discussed them with the university press office and the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones, who is the author of many of them. They both say that there are so many documents that they have not yet been able to check that they are all genuine. But it's certainly clear that some are real, and neither the university nor Professor Jones made any attempt to question the authenticity of any of them.

Several of the e-mails suggest that Professor Jones apparently had considerable unease at the requirements of the FOI Act (although I should point out that actually the material involved would be more likely to come under the Environmental Information Regulations, which lay down similar disclosure obligations).

According to one of the hacked e-mails, Professor Jones made the following remark with reference to two of his critics who want access to his data: "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

According to another, he advised a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.

And according to yet another, he wrote: "Think I've managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit."

But perhaps it is the following extracts from this one which best conveys Professor Jones's apparent feelings of coming under siege from information requests:

"When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [Climate Audit] was all about... I don't know who else at UEA may be getting them... We're away of requests going to others in the UK.
 
"The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers! If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn't yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I've written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all. This legislation is different from the FOI - it is supposed to be used to find put why you might have a poor credit rating !
 
"In response to FOI and EIR requests, we've put up some data - mainly paleo data. Each request generally leads to more - to explain what we've put up. Every time, so far, that hasn't led to anything being added - instead just statements saying read what is in the papers and what is on the web site! ... We've never sent programs, any codes and manuals.
 
"In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise results will be out in 2 weeks time. These are expensive to produce and take too much time, so from next year we'll be moving onto a metric based system. The metrics will be # and amounts of grants, papers and citations etc. I did flippantly suggest that the # of FOI requests you get should be another."

When I put the allegation to Professor Jones that the hacked e-mails suggested he had supported deleting e-mails in breach of FOI, he said: "We haven't deleted any emails. I delete my own personal emails a year at a time regardless of subject as I have too many, but the university still has the emails."

Professor Jones also told me that he concurs with the view expressed by some other academics that freedom of information may be too intrusive into academic matters. He said: "My e-mails were personal. This is all about academic freedom. I'm just a humble scientist trying to do research."

The University of East Anglia denies that its FOI team reached an agreement with Professor Jones to "ignore" certain information requests. Its spokesperson told me:

"In some areas, there are persistent and motivated groups or individuals whose applications create a volume of work which is extremely demanding. Nonetheless, we try to respond to all such requests within our guidelines."

It adds that it consulted the Information Commissioner's Office on how to handle a large number of similar requests for climate data.

According to its latest published caseload [166KB PDF], the ICO is investigating one complaint against UEA over a request for "information about research, reviews, conclusions and reports into climate change studies".

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If you want to make an information request to the EU's directorate-general for employment, its webform asks you to indicate which of the 27 member states you are from. Strangely it also offers you one other option - you can say you come from Wales.

Why the employment DG has made this unique concession to Welsh nationalism is not immediately obvious. But this is one of the intriguing minor mysteries about the operation of the European Commission's access to information processes which is revealed in a report published yesterday by the campaign group Access Info Europe [1.32MB PDF].

Access Info asked the commission's main policy DGs for their internal guidance on how to handle requests made under the regulation on public access to EU documents [120KB PDF].

They were prompted to do this by the leak earlier this year of a vademecum from the trade DG. This internal handbook advised officials to write two separate reports of meetings, a factual one which could be easily disclosed and an assessment or evaluation which could be held back without the need to redact passages from just one document.

It also warned against "recording statements which may turn out to be politically embarrassing for those who have made them". And the guide added: "Avoid making personal comments in e-mails with third parties which may be the object of disclosure... (eg don't refer to the great lunch you have had with an industry representative privately or add a PS asking if he/she would like to meet for a drink)."

The commission defended these instructions on the grounds that they "make it easier to get reports out" and "avoid having to go through blanking out" documents, although the handbook has since been rewritten.

The new Access Info survey reports on what it calls "serious problems" in how its requests were treated, outlining numerous obstacles to access and discrepancies in the procedures of other DGs.

Although most complied, the competition DG refused to supply its guidance since it had been "prepared for purely internal purposes". (Contrary to first impressions the photograph does not show the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes looking in a bucket for her department's policy on this - in fact, this is her announcing a crackdown on price-fixing in the plastics industry at a press conference earlier this month).

And the campaign group criticises DGs who leave it unclear how members of the public should file requests, demand personal details from the requester, and make the process difficult for people who don't know English.

But as for the actual guidance obtained by the research, "the main finding was that after the shock of reading the DG trade vademecum, none of the documents released held anything particularly controversial. They were in the main part professionally written documents designed with the obvious intention of helping officials handle access to documents requests".

I've always wanted to find a way to write the headline above - now I just have.

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