A passionate plea to protect public’s right to know EXPOSED
... the word that strikes fear into Ministers who want to curtail Freedom of Information
TONY BLAIR said in his autobiography that introducing Freedom of Information was the worst decision he ever took. It looks like David Cameron has come to the same conclusion as he lines up to curb this incredibly important right: the right of the British public to know exactly what their Government is doing in their name.
Over 20 years ago I summoned one of the top bureaucrats in the Department of Health to the Cabinet Office to tell him I wanted to publish the death rates for every hospital in the country, so that peo- ple could know what sort of health care they were getting.
‘But Minister,’ he said, ‘Surely you don’t want tabloid headlines shouting “House of Death” over the picture of one of our worst hospitals, do you?’
‘Better that than letting the deaths continue,’ I replied. Regrettably, despite my tough words, he won the battle and mortality rates did not get published until many years later.
I still wonder whether the 1,200 people who died unnecessarily at Mid Staffs Hospital would have survived if I had won that Whitehall skirmish.
Sadly it took the persistent courage of some determined whistleblowers to expose that monstrous failure of the NHS, and bring care standards into the 20th Century.
If we had had Freedom of Information in those days, I am certain those lives would have been saved.
That is how important Freedom of Information is. It can save lives. It can root out corruption. It can save the taxpayers money. It can unmask injustices. It can expose failing policies. It can make Government more accountable. The Freedom of Information Act was probably the best innovation of the Blair Government. In Opposition David Cameron was fond of saying that ‘Sunlight makes the best disinfectant’. He was right then, but he is wrong now.
Now the Government is attempting to restrict Freedom of Information under the pretence of a cross-party review. One need only look at the appointees, including Jack Straw, who has long called for the law to be more restrictive, and Lord Carlile, whose attitude to transparency can be gleaned from his accusing the Guardian of treachery when they published the Snowden revelations, to see the real purpose of this review.
Indeed they have got off to a spectacularly bad start by refusing to publish the names of the departments and people who have given evidence. So the future of Freedom of Information is going to be decided on the basis of secret-sourced evidence.
It is no surprise that the Sir Humphrey Applebys of the world want to keep the public in the dark, but Ministers should know better. Yet last week the Cabinet Minister Chris Grayling condemned the policy on the grounds that it was used by journalists to create newspaper stories! Exactly. That is how governments are held to account. Just take a few examples.
Using Freedom of Information rights journalists discovered that there were radioactive leaks at Hinkley Point power station. They exposed racism in the Metropolitan Police, showing that 120 officers had been found guilty of racist behaviour between 2002 and 2012. They exposed the dismissive attitude of our diplomatic staff in the British embassy in Warsaw to the upcoming surge of immigration from Poland, including an email from one entitled ‘Invasion, what invasion?’ shortly before hundreds of thousands of Poles came to Britain. One of the first ever Freedom of Information requests showed how many millions had been lost propping up the pound in the ERM crisis.
They showed that a high profile knife amnesty in 2006 had failed, with knife possession back up to pre amnesty levels in very short order. This last example demonstrates Freedom of Information at its best. It allowed the public to know exactly how effective, or ineffective, a loudly proclaimed public policy was. This is incredibly important to democracy, but it is incredibly uncomfortable for Ministers. In that last case the Government had been taking credit for its ‘crackdown on knife crime’, but the information release then showed how ineffective it was. This, of course, is why Mr Blair came to hate it, and now apparently so does Mr Cameron.
Most famously it was central to exposing the MPs expenses scandal. More recently it allowed us to find out that Cyril Smith had put pressure on Rochdale police to stop them investigating allegations of sexual abuse against children.
But the stories governments hate most are those that expose their own activities that they are trying to keep secret. So, for example, this year it was revealed through Freedom of Information requests that British pilots were embedded in US squadrons flying attack missions over Syria, after Parliament explicitly denying permission for UK forces to be involved. Other requests showed that, despite the blood curdling rhetoric of Ministers, only 40 out of 250 returning jihadis in the UK face prosecution. These are embarrassing stories, but they are stories that the public absolutely has a right to know.
As it is, getting information under the Freedom of Information Act can already be like drawing teeth. The truth about Prince Charles’ letters to Ministers about various policies was only dragged into the public domain after the courts overruled not just Ministers, but also the Attorney General. There was a clear constitutional and public interest argument here, but the political establishment closed ranks and set their face against it.
There is no doubt that much of what has been revealed by Freedom of Information has been embarrassing to the Government, and so has generated stories across the media. But that is no reason to reduce transparency, and restrict the ability of citizens to monitor their representatives.
The fact is, if Government makes an error, in every case except potentially those of the highest national security there should be a strong presumption in favour of disclosure. Time and again information is withheld from the public for no good reason, other than to spare the blushes of the powerful.
Government already holds all the cards. As it stands they use every trick to avoid disclosing information, even resorting to writing comments on post-it notes, so they can be removed before documentation is made public. They should not be allowed to take away one of the few defences the public has for discovering and preventing incompetence, corruption and misconduct amongst the most powerful people in the land.
They already use every trick to avoid disclosure