UK Government Watering Down Its Freedom of Information Act

Richard Norton-Taylor

July 23, 2015

UK faces more secret government with clampdown on information 

Whitehall mandarins - the permanent government - are fighting back, with the enthusiastic support of present and former cabinet ministers.

The 2000 Freedom of Information Act was introduced by a new Blair government despite opposition from senior civil servants. It will now be watered down, making it even more difficult for the public and the media to discover the truth.

From the start, Whitehall managed to introduce a host of exceptions in the act, including the activities of the security and intelligence agencies and anything relating to “national security”, a term I have mentioned before covers a multitude of sins.

To cite one example relating to events many decades ago: in a preface to The Defence of the Realm, his official history of MI5, Christopher Andrew says “one significant excision” demanded by Whitehall was “hard to justify”. 

The censored passage relates to a chapter entitled the “Wilson Plot” - a reference to attempts to smear the former Labour prime minister and destablise his government.

I asked the Cabinet Office to release the information. It refused, quoting the exemption relating to security matters.

Exemptions in the FOI Act are reinforced elsewhere. Whitehall weeders explain the withholding of documents due to be released to the National Archives by referring to section 3(4) of the Public Records Act.

This states that official papers can remain secret, indefinitely, “for administrative purposes”, or “for any other special reason”.

The person responsible for decisions taken under the Public Records Act is the Lord Chancellor, currently Michael Gove.

Gove was reported in the Financial Times last month as saying that “thinking time”, time spent on “considering and redacting” any releases, should be taken into account when calculating how much it costs Whitehall departments to retrieve information under the FOI Act. 

A visit to the National Archives will tell you just how much time and energy is spent weeding official files, deciding what information should be released, and what kept secret.

Official secrecy is expensive; openness much cheaper. Excessive secrecy is even more costly, in more ways than one.

The FOI Act has revealed much about government that would otherwise be covered up, including letters written to ministers by the Prince of Wales and, most recently, the disclosure that British pilots have been engaged in strike missions in US or Canadian aircraft over Syria.

The government has now set up a commission to review the act, with a remit to consider whether it “adequately recognises the need for a ‘safe space’ for policy development and frank advice”.

The body, chaired by former Treasury mandarin Lord Burns, will include Jack Straw, the former Labour foreign and home secretary who (like Blair) has made no secret of his opposition to the FOI Act.

The act already exempts from disclosure information relating to policy-making in government, and communications between ministers, and disclosures that “would, or would be likely to, inhibit the free and frank provision of advice”, or “would otherwise prejudice, or would be likely otherwise to prejudice, the effective conduct of public affairs.”

These exemptions are subject to a public interest test outweighing the need for such secrecy. As Maurice Frankel, director of the freedom of informationcampaign, has pointed out, the information commissioner and information tribunal have sometimes ordered disclosure where exchanges are anodyne, the material is old, or the case for openness is overwhelming. “If that balancing test is removed, mistakes, bad decisions, and policy failures caused by deliberately ignoring the evidence, will be concealed”, says Frankel.

When the UK government announced the FOI Act review last week, it cited Britain’s first place ranking in the Web Foundation’s open data ranking.

The government was confusing open data with open government.

Open Government is normally agreed to consist of three main pillars: transparency, participation and collaboration, the foundation points out.

Open data, the foundation points out, is data “anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose.”

It accuses the government of “misleading the public by blurring the distinction between the two…”. A damning critique.