The state of FOI
As the House of Commons now moves to reform its expenses system, it's worth asking what this whole episode tells us about the state of freedom of information in the UK. I've come to the following conclusions so far - and would be very interested in your thoughts on them.
(1) Freedom of information has been proved to be a valuable tool in promoting accountability for the spending of public money. Whatever its other merits or demerits, this surely can't be denied.
If an FOI Act had not been passed, this information would never have entered the public domain. It would not even have been collated in one place. Possibly some individual scandals might have emerged, but nothing approaching the scale of what has now come out. And so without FOI, there wouldn't have been anything like the same pressure for reform of what is now universally regarded as an unacceptable system.
(2) However, FOI legislation itself can be insufficient to change behaviour. The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2000; some MPs took note and started to worry about its implications for their expenses; the Act then came into force in 2005. Yet from the material published by the Telegraph, this clearly did not deter many MPs from their questionable claims.
Maybe they did not envisage the eventual level of disclosure; maybe they had convinced themselves that the House of Commons Commission would manage to block the FOI requests, or that the Parliamentary attempts to exclude MPs from FOI would succeed; maybe, captured by a form of groupthink, they just reckoned that there was safety in numbers.
The FOI Act has only made a big difference because people used it, in this case a number of journalists - freelance Heather Brooke, the Sunday Telegraph's Ben Leapman, and the Sunday Times' Jon Ungoed-Thomas - who were determined to ask questions and fight their case through the courts against the resistance of the House of Commons authorities.
(3) The drive to transparency over MPs' expenses wasn't much to do with the Information Commissioner. He ruled that [55Kb PDF]:
"It is not necessary for fully itemised amounts to be disclosed in order to meet the legitimate interest of members of the public in knowing how public money has been spent".
It was at the next stage in the appeals process where the Information Tribunal overruled the commissioner and demanded the release of full details [157Kb PDF]. Unsurprisingly, there are those within the Information Commissioner's Office who look back at that initial decision and think that it was not their finest hour.
(4) And of course the Telegraph revelations are based on a leak, not on the redacted material that the Commons was about to be forced to release under FOI. This more limited material would undoubtedly still have provoked a huge public outcry and some reform of the system, but would probably not have exposed some of the most dubious practices, mainly because of the FOI amendment [45Kb PDF] which has outlawed disclosures relating to MPs' addresses.
(5) In short, freedom of information was a necessary but far from sufficient condition for the publication of all this data.
(6) Nevertheless, freedom of information is now in a stronger and more established and entrenched position. In many countries, the introduction of FOI has led to a backlash from public authorities discomfited by it - for example in Ireland where the government introduced up-front fees for FOI requests, which dramatically reduced the number made [141Kb Powerpoint document].
Here in 2007, the government under Tony Blair did seek to bring in restrictions, plans then abandoned by Gordon Brown when he took over. More recently, some FOI campaigners have worried that remarks by Justice Secretary Jack Straw about the review of the 30-year rule could indicate plans to curtail access to internal government policy documents.
However, it seems to me that in the wake of the expenses scandals, politicians in the UK will now find it very difficult to propose any curbs on freedom of information.
(7) On a more journalistic note, the Telegraph has placed an enormous quantity of data and level of detail in the public domain during this period, well in excess of what is normal even for a very big, long-running story. Much of their reporting hasn't really distinguished in tone and prominence between various degrees of misbehaviour, whether it has been cheating and duplicity, extravagance and greed, devious exploitation of the laxity of the arrangements, seizing eagerly at what's on offer, more marginal playing of the system, inadvertent error, the puzzling but explicable or amusing trivia.
This may just be the inevitable consequence of the vast quantities of material that the newspaper possesses, some of which is complex and capable of multiple interpretation, and the difficulty - if not impossibility - of properly evaluating its full significance in the time available.
Some of my colleagues see this as a flaw in the Telegraph's reporting, but there are others (if fewer in number, on the basis of my conversations) who regard this as a good thing - founded on the principle of just putting the information out there and letting the public assess it.
The relevance of this for FOI-based journalism is that information requests can often extract large amounts of data, whose full significance is not immediately apparent. In the future, we may see more examples (although presumably on a much lesser scale) of the media publishing quantities of material without telling their audience what the "story" is.
(8) Finally, in keeping with the spirit of the times, an apology of my own. In the past, I expressed the opinion that the persistent attempts by the House of Commons to prevent full publication of material about expenses was doing more harm to its reputation than would probably be caused by the eventual release. Doubtless there are cases where the reputational damage from insisting on secrecy is greater than that potentially resulting from release of the material in question - but this isn't one of them. Sorry I got that wrong.
A 
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~23~RS~)
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
Great last point! Who could ever have thought what was hidden away.
I'm sure that there will be much more uncovered - another blogger has started to look at the relationship between safe seat vs expenses abuse
http://markreckons.blogspot.com/2009/05/mps-expenses-and-safe-seats-correlation.html
Complain about this comment
How much longer can the BBC resist the winds of change? The Stasi-like "It's all in the database" adverts demanding licence fee payments seem more apt than ever now that our publicly-funded state broadcaster is more secretive about its affairs than even our politicians. Soon the MPs will occupy the moral high ground over their BBC interviewers.
PS. Balen Report.
Complain about this comment
I spent a while in the USA over quite a long period.
I seem to recall that holders of elected office in the Senate / House publish full disclosure of known wealth, income, taxes, receipts for expenses (regardless of purpose) and have done so for a long while.
Doesn't seem too much of an ask to expect our bunch to do similar things, does it?
The so-called "rules" in the Green Book have had coach, horses, a herd of cattle, a motorway load of vehicles and massive shoals of fishes driven through them
Any one else noted that the rules do say that expenses should be "necessarily incurred in the performance of the role as MP"?
Patio heaters? Jacuzzis? Wallpaper? Wisteria removal? Gardening?
The appalling truth is that MPs have never been properly challenged by tax-inspectors who are detached from their normal rottweiller tactics to spend just a few days a year inside Parliament.
I'd like to see MPs (and Lords) take a number and queue up to have their claims examined with the same intensity that happens for normal people and businesses.
Had that approach been taken 20 years ago, this mess would never have developed.
Who controls HMRC tax inspectors? Why - the Treasury. Funny that Brown is now so keen to sort out the mess, when his "own" staff in HMRC could have stopped it in its tracks.
Complain about this comment
The Freedom of Information Act had almost nothing to do with the disclosure of MPs expenses. FOI does not permit the publication of personal details (such as expenses) to any third party. Ever. It allows 1) An individual to see records held about them by another person or agency (e.g. you can see your own doctor's notes, but you cannot see your spouse's doctor's notes)
2)Publication of anonymised data if it is within the public interest, and can be retrieved within a reasonable time period.
Complain about this comment
The above comment by poshpeckhamite that the FOI Act does not allow the disclosure of third party personal information is not correct. The Information Commissioner has required the disclosure of expenses of senior officials, finding that although this is personal data, the disclosure would not breach the Data Protection Act. The Information Tribunal has made a similar ruling in relation to the publication of MPs' expenses, which has been upheld by the High Court. As a result, the detailed expenses information (including individual receipts) for each MP is due to be published in July. The Daily Telegraph disclosures are based on a leaked disc of the information that is to be published, although in some respects the disc contains more detailed information than the House of Commons was going to publish. MPs' addresses are going to be withheld from the information published by the House of Commons. Items on receipts for which MPs have not made a claim will also not be released by the House of Commons.
The statement that the FOI Act allows individuals to see records held about them is also incorrect. Such records are exempt under the FOI Act because individuals have the right to obtain their own personal data under the Data Protection Act.
Katherine Gundersen
Campaign for Freedom of Information
Complain about this comment
I think overall the introduction of the FOI Act has been beneficial - although there is the inevitable skewing of behaviour that results. What the Telegraph has done is entirely different - and no principle of journalism was involved, merely principles of circulation. Were the Telegraph to have focussed on the egregious cases that would have been one thing, but the effect they have had is to pour petrol on the dwindling respect the public has for our political system. The issue that concerns me is not whether a few MPs were borderline fraudsters but whether parliament will be able to do its job in future. The media take no responsibility for presenting a balanced view of MPs activities, and why should they? The Telegraph are sawing through the joists that support the roof over our head for no other reason than to sell papers. Rather than getting rid of the rotten wood, that will simply bring down the house on all of us. Nobody takes responsibility for political or journalistic integrity because all of us have some measure of responsibility. The result will be a plague on all our houses, and the governmental system we all deserve. To quote Ben Franklin: "there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other".
But back to the question - yep, FOI is in a pretty reasonable state - it's everything else that's going pear-shaped!
Complain about this comment
We do live in a perverse society where:
- quango BBC hacks are paid a lot more than my elected MP
- BBC campaigns (such as for having unpaid access to FOI) have the weight of its enormous publicly funded budget, where as my MPs early day motion will barely be mentioned
- the quango Information Tribunal and Commissioner can overrule an elected parliament (notwithstanding the fact that that Parliament could have, and I reckon should have) exercised its veto
- the BBC continues to publish its own opinions (e.g. Nick Robinson) on a daily basis, breaking its own rules.
- the BBC continues to take an increased license fee despite the recession and despite negative inflation
The BBC is supposedly accountable to the BBC Trust whose chairman made the most foolish remark the other day suggesting that a frozen license fee would threaten the BBCs independence. He must go or be sacked after making such a ridiculous remark. After he has said that, any notion that the BBC is accountable to anybody can be forgotten
The BBC is the only public organisation that freely broadcasts its own opinions on political matters and effectively acts as a lobby more powerful than any other lobby could ever hope to be, especially with its 50% of broadcast media and its obscene budget. When did the NHS or the police or any other publicly funded institution have its say on MP's expenses, the Freedom of Information Act or anything else? It may have the microphones, cameras and access to transmitters, but to abuse these for their own ends is scandalous
MPs made a grave error in giving in to media pressure and foregoing pay rises that they were entitled to. Even worse was the madness of making up the difference using expenses. Some of the greatest excesses are inexcusable. Even the BBC cannot be blamed for that.
However, it was unfortunate that the precedent was set in the time of Margaret Thatcher when the BBC propaganda machine was at its most viscous. Had a Labour government been in power then things may have been different. The expenses scandal has its roots in that era when the BBC was the effective opposition to the government, whether it was from the news, documentaries, plays or weekly left wing night lectures from Ben Elton (we now get them from Steve Punt at least Ben Elton was funny).
Yes, of course, they couldnt win. The pressure on politicians from the BBC if they had taken the rises would probably have resulted in lost seats. Should they have made their case to the country? Well, yes. But how could they have done that? They may have got a piece in a national newspaper if they were lucky. But would they have got their message on to mass media? Well, possibly, except the message would be whatever the BBC decided it would be. Once those over paid hacks got to them and once the political editor of the day had had his final say, what would have been the point, especially as the views of the political editor are a walking, talking self-fulfilling prophesy?
The only time the BBC's lack of editorial integrity comes to light is when it affects a foreign government. When this happens the threat of bad publicity, slanted publicity or, perhaps worse, no publicity that our MPs face, doesnt work. The BBC has been banned from quite a few countries over its time. It has been forced to produce the censored Balen report. It gets away with foisting propaganda on us, but is sometimes found out when trying it abroad.
For what it is worth I believe that the FOI act will do more harm than good in the long term. It will stifle decision making in times of crisis and will strangle innovative thinking. I think it will also have the effect reducing the quality of MPs to the point where any government will be practically useless and the country will be virtually run by Nick Robinson, Esther Rantzen and the BBC. Perhaps we are too late.
Complain about this comment
I wholeheartedly agree with your conclusions. Whilst it was ultimately the Daily Telegraph that got the scoop and is to a large extent taking the "glory" for the revealing the scandal of MPs' expenses, it was the investigative journalist, Heather Brooke, who five years ago made an FOI request about MPs' expenses. From that initial request it then took five years to get to where we are today. So without FOI, the whole chain of events would never have got going. If only the FOI Act came into force twenty years ago, I, as a taxpayer, would not have had to contribute to funding my MP's retirement pad in the country!
Complain about this comment
I was always against the Freedom of Information Act. It only ever exposes dumb crooks (e.g. certain MPs). The smart ones cover their tracks, FOI Act or no FOI Act. It also makes other organisations very leery of disclosing information to the government. For example 20 years ago the CEO of my then employer lectured a large group of staff, telling us a great deal about our main, US-owned, competitors strategy. Some bold soul asked how he knew all this. Thats simple, he replied, They have a freedom of information act in America and we got all this information from the U.S. government.
Complain about this comment
BTW, the Beeb's software stripped a lot of punctuatuiion out of my last post. I can write good English even if they can't print it!
Complain about this comment
Re. point 6, and the introduction of up-front fees in Ireland. It is interesting to note (not really shown on the presentation to which you linked), that despite the introduction of up-front fees, approx 80% of FOI requests made in Ireland are made by members of the public, with only 8% made by journalists. I work in FOI for a large public authority, and can say that for us, members of the public account for only 38%, with journalists responsible for at least 23% (this is likely to be higher, as we know that some journalists submit requests from 'personal' email addresses - why, we don't know; perhaps they think we'll withhold more if we know they're journalists (wrong)).
I find my own comparison - our experience (free) vs Ireland (at cost) -interesting, insofar as it certainly looks like journalists use FOI less when they have to pay for it; that would make sense from my own experience, given the number of trivial requests we receive from journalists during 'quiet news weeks', when they're having a little fish for a story which they probably know doesn't exist. Even those ridiculous requests that get rejected by us still need to be logged, acknowledged, considered, etc. etc. It all takes time and money, yet those same journalists are all too keen to highlight how public money is being wasted. Oh the irony...
Complain about this comment
#8 misscharleyfox
In all this talk of scandal and shock, it is timely to remember that it was a Labour Government that proposed and implimented the FOI act. It is also of interest that this was all due to be published in July anyway, albeit just before the summer recess, so the Telegraph has made a big issue out of something that was about to happen anyway. Oh! and while on the subject of the "Public Have A Right To Know, Telegraph", is it not owned by those, upright citizens, keen to see the public purse gets it's fair share, tax haven specialists? Just a thought. Perhaps we should extend the FOI act to those very same proprietors of the hollier than thou, Telegraph?
Complain about this comment
~12 me,
Crikey! that was quick, over on Andrew Neil's blog they are two hours behind, well done Martin Rosenbaum, good job
Complain about this comment
Will we see similar revelations about the expenses of local government officers now?
Complain about this comment
re #12
Believe me, I am no fan of the Daily Telegraph in general. I think you'll find that the MPs expenses which were due to be published in July would have been heavily redacted/edited and therefore, we would not see the real extent of it as we are seeing now.
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS