If you're interested in how UK ministers discussed devolution when it was being introduced, you might be finding out more about it. But if you want to know what cabinet colleagues said to Margaret Thatcher and John Major at their final cabinet meetings, you're going to be disappointed.

That's the likely consequence of two decisions published last week by the information commissioner's office. In one he ruled that it was in the public interest to reveal the minutes of a cabinet committee which discussed devolution policy in 1997, when the newly elected Labour government was considering how to implement its manifesto pledges on the subject.

In the other he decided that it was in the public interest to keep secret the records of the final cabinet meetings held while Lady Thatcher and Mr Major were prime minister.

This is in keeping with the overall approach of the ICO, which is that like any other freedom of information request, an application for cabinet papers is to be considered on the merits of each individual case - so that it will sometimes demand disclosure and sometimes back the case for secrecy.

Someone who has seen the final Thatcher and Major minutes has told me they are boring and predictable. That argument can cut both ways. It diminishes the value in releasing them, but it also may reduce the harm it could cause.

The government however seems determined to resist all FOI requests for cabinet papers as undermining of the principle of collective responsibility. It is planning to make them all absolutely exempt from freedom of information for 20 years.

In this context it's worth recalling some very striking remarks by the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer last month, who as a cabinet minister until 2007 was in charge of FOI policy. I felt that these remarks did not receive the attention they deserved.

Speaking on the Today programme, he called for radical changes in the notion of collective responsibility. He argued not only for more openness for "underlying papers relating to policy" but also for "more open discussion about how we get to particular policy conclusions". He wants internal government discussion and disagreement to be more open until policy is finalised.

As he says, this would be a very major change in how we do politics. It's not clear how it would work in practice, but it seemed to me strange that these provocative and challenging thoughts from someone with his background did not prompt more debate. Maybe we were all trapped in focusing on the issue of MPs' expenses.

It also occurred to me that perhaps the group of people who are the biggest obstacle to such a change are actually the voters themselves. Since the electorate doesn't seem to like voting for clearly disunited parties, it doesn't give politicians much of an incentive to be open and honest about internal party disagreement.

Here's a question for you to mull over. If you are one of those people who want more openness and honesty in politics, are you happy to vote for an obviously disunited party, or are you part of the problem?

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I know from personal experience that making freedom of information requests to public authorities is something they sometimes find irritating - but at what point does it become vexatious or irresponsible?

This question is raised by some recent rulings on what constitutes legitimate use of the Freedom of Information Act.

In a decision published last week, the information commissioner determined that the local government ombudsman was right to dismiss an FOI request as 'vexatious'. This was the 48th request in a series made to the LGO by one individual in a six-month period.

The complainant is clearly concerned about the effectiveness of local authority complaints procedures, having submitted hundreds of FOI applications on the topic to various authorities. However the commissioner found his arguments "unconvincing" and "not considered to be properly anchored in sound evidence", concluding that the "the request could fairly be considered obsessive and manifestly unreasonable" and was therefore vexatious.

Under the FOI Act, a request can be refused if it's vexatious, but this has to be an issue about the request itself, not the person making it. Just because you are a really annoying person is not sufficient grounds for turning down your freedom of information applications.

In this case the request, along with many other requests by the same person, was made through the whatdotheyknow site. This site is certainly regarded as very vexing by numerous public authority FOI officers, who particularly don't like the way it automatically publishes all the correspondence in connection with a request.

In a different case, the High Court has just ruled that there is nothing necessarily wrong in making a meta-request - a request about how your other requests have been handled. The journalist Matt Davis put such a question to the Home Office, suspecting that he was getting worse treatment than the general public in the 48 requests he'd made to the Home Office (this was over a two-year period).

The Home Office argued that such meta-requests "are an arguably permissible, but irresponsible, use of the Act" which "could be used as a 'backdoor method' of obtaining information which had previously been withheld." But these arguments were rejected by the judge, who backed the earlier opinion of the Information Tribunal
that "meta-requests should be dealt with in the same way as any other requests".

So if your FOI request is turned down as vexatious, is it irresponsible to put in a meta-request about how it was handled?

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Is it possible to get a complete picture of how much public money is spent on local councillors in terms of pay, allowances and expenses?

Some of my colleagues have been researching this question for a forthcoming BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Political Club, about the creeping professionalisation and stealthy public funding of British party politics.

The programme's producer, Giles Edwards, put a freedom of information request to all the UK's local authorities to obtain this information for 2007/8. He has been sent the relevant data by 465 councils - which is all of them, apart from one.

Essex County Council is the exception. Initially it rejected the request on the grounds that the material is intended for future publication. However it is now 15 months after the end of the financial year in question. Essex still maintains that it can't comply, stating that its figures are so late because of serious problems with accounting software, which has meant having to re-do the whole exercise by hand,

If you want to know how much public money is collectively spent on the nation's councillors - apart from those in Essex - then listen in to The Political Club.

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