Rory Geoghegan:

Basic accountability is not possible in a culture of non-disclosure, as seen in the Worboys case

If nothing else is learnt from the Worboys debacle, let it be the need for less secrecy across policing, the criminal justice system and public services generally. There is a bias against sharing information even between public bodies, never mind with the public itself. It must change.

Secrecy runs from top to bottom. In the Worboys case, not only was the Parole Board hearing that decided his release held in secret, but his victims learnt of it only through the media – and without their crowdfunded legal challenge they would not have got to the truth and Worboys would be out. Basic accountability shouldn’t depend on the ability to raise money.

Nor is it right that those living in high-crime areas have the Data Protection or Human Rights Acts cited as reasons they cannot find out what happened on their street the night before. As a bobby on the beat, I’d often find myself asked by residents what had happened when police, ambulances, and crime scene tape littered their estate in the morning, and find it hard to answer satisfactorily. Overbearing interpretations of these laws too often fail to properly recognise the public interest in favour of disclosure.

Secrecy breeds mistrust. Even as knife crime rises, most stabbings go unreported: the lack of transparency, in part, preventing the issue from becoming one of widespread and public outcry. But the outcry is seismic when that knife crime happens to take place in front of a local primary school at home-time, with parents witnessing a 14- or 15-year-old boy literally running for his life, before being stabbed repeatedly and run over.

It’s not just the public who find themselves shut out from knowing what is going on. The judiciary rarely – if ever – discover what happened to those they sentence, having little or no insight into the effectiveness of the punishments they dish out, or whether deportation orders for serious foreign national offenders are ultimately fulfilled.

The issue is exacerbated by the decline of local media and a postleveson suspicion of contact with journalists. On the one hand, for local newspapers, public services – like policing – are the bread-and-butter, a fact recognised by John Whittingdale MP, who has argued that the decline of local media is bad for justice. On the other, a lack of transparency and unwillingness to talk to journalists hinders public understanding and the effective functioning of a free press.

By the same token, David Lammy’s recent review of race and criminal justice flags up the huge value and importance of publishing sentencing remarks and opening up closed decisions to public scrutiny, echoing US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous remark that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.

There were attempts at encouraging more openness earlier this decade, with the launch, for example, of the police.uk crime mapping website. But it remains underexploited, failing to adequately fill the public appetite for information or to close the gap between public perception and the reality of crime – never mind the wider criminal justice system.

Some of the most effective police and crime commissioners have recognised the issue. Matthew Scott in Kent is working on plans to open up police data so that much more is available by default; Julia Mulligan in North Yorkshire is pushing to use data, that otherwise lies dormant or out of sight, to help keep vulnerable women safe and reduce crime. But there is so much more to be done.

There is a compelling social justice dimension to this: we know that crime disproportionately affects the most vulnerable, and that they rely on public services the most. The lack of transparency makes it even harder to hold the authorities to account or to ensure the political system properly responds to their needs and concerns.

So, in the wake of the Worboys judgment, a Government committed to better public services should reboot the drive for transparency. It may come at a short-term cost

– in exposing areas of weakness, inefficiency or even incompetence – but the longer-term prize is worth having: more effective public services that are so vital for the poorest and most vulnerable in Britain today.

Rory Geoghegan is head of criminal justice at the Centre for Social Justice