Defying clarity

Despite being established 18 years ago, little is known about the Cabinet Office’s “clearing house” for Freedom of Information requests. But a court battle set in motion a chain of events that is starting to shed some light on one of the most shadowy parts of government.

Parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee launched an inquiry last June into the Cabinet Office’s handling of FoI requests after a judge concluded there was a “profound lack of transparency” over the clearing house’s operations.

The Cabinet Office subsequently promised its own internal review into the unit, which offers guidance to departments on how to respond to FoI requests.

PACAC published the findings of its 10-month quest for answers last month. MPs called for the Cabinet Office to show stronger leadership in coordinating the handling of requests and

“drive a cultural shift” across government towards actively supporting FoI principles.

Hours before this report was published, the Cabinet Office finally unveiled details of its planned in-house review, which will be led by Home Office non-executive director Sue Langley.

Ahead of the PACAC report and Cabinet Office update, CSW spoke to FoI experts who gave evidence to the committee to find out their concerns about the secretive unit and what they think needs to change.

FOI: Why is it important and what has gone wrong? The Freedom of Information Act 2000 provides access to information held by public authorities, with the aim of aiding transparency. But the government’s performance in responding to requests has worsened over the last decade. The percentage of

FoI requests granted in full dropped from a high of 62% in 2010 to a low of 40% in 2021.

The Institute for Government says the speed with which departments deal with requests has been “declining since before the pandemic”, often missing the 20 workingday deadline for responses.

Government responded to 87% of FOIs on time in 2020, a 10-year low, although this increased to 88% in 2021.

Journalists, politicians

The Cabinet Office has set out proposals for an internal review of its secretive FoI clearing house. Tevye Markson looks at the backstory

and researchers have all raised concerns about the role the mysterious clearing house may have played in this descent into everdeteriorating transparency.

What do we know about the clearing house?

“One of the big problems we’ve got with the clearing house is we don’t actually know very much about what it does,” says FoI expert Ben Worthy, a senior politics lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.

Little was known about the unit until campaign group Open Democracy took the Cabinet Office to a tribunal last year. It argued the department was obstructing access to information it was entitled to seek under FoI rules.

Ahead of the tribunal, the Cabinet Office published documents revealing that the clearing house was established in 2004 and is run by a small number of staff, who have a range of wider responsibilities.

It said responsibility for

FoI policy transferred from the Department of Constitutional Affairs and its successor, the Ministry of Justice, before reaching the Cabinet Office in 2015 where it now sits as part of the FoI and Transparency team and wider Cabinet Secretary Group.

Open Democracy secured a judgement in April 2021 ordering the government to release further information on its operations.

A Cabinet Office spokesperson told CSW that the function was set up “to ensure there is a consistent approach to dealing with FoIs across government and that requests for particularly sensitive information are handled appropriately”. FoIs can be referred to the unit if they related to national security matters, the royal family, significant live policy development or implementation issues, or are round robins requests, they added.

The spokesperson claimed “robust” processes ensure requests are considered without knowing the identity of the requester, however the government accidentally leaked evidence to a Politico journalist suggesting otherwise.

“From what I pieced together, it was initially there as a kind of support mechanism, officially, for coordinating FoI requests,” Worthy says.

“It seemed that in the first few years, it was actually designed to disappear. Slowly, there were fewer and fewer requests going to it,” he says. “And then suddenly, more recently, it popped up again.

“Formally it’s there to help coordinate and offer guidance. The big problem is to which extent guidance becomes giving people orders or interference. And that’s the grey area where, on at least some occasions, it fell away from offering guidance to seemingly issuing orders about what should be done.”

The key criticisms levelled at the clearing house are that it causes delays and that there is a near-total lack of transparency about its operations.

“There is a lot of delay in the FoI system already, even when it’s working well,” says Martin Rosenbaum, a former BBC political journalist who trains reporters on how to use FoI legislation.

“[The clearing house] exacerbates that problem. Particularly for journalists, that’s obviously a very big issue. You can get information a few weeks or months later and it’s no longer really relevant to whatever you were planning to do with it in the first place.”

All this secrecy sends a bad message about the importance of transparency, Worthy says. “When you’ve got a government who seems pretty keen on secrecy, and you’ve got FoI requests resulting in less and less disclosure and more and more delays, what it looks like is a wholesale undermining of the idea of transparency.”

A Cabinet Office spokesperson told CSW that the government “remains fully committed to its transparency agenda, routinely disclosing information beyond its obligations under the FoI Act and releasing more proactive publications than ever before”.

What needs to change?

FoI has been around long enough not to require very much coordination, says Worthy. He argues the clearing house has “outlived its usefulness” but says it would be easier to make a judgement if the Cabinet Office was more open about what it does.

Worthy says it would help if senior ministers made “more supportive noises about the idea of transparency”.

Rosenbaum thinks the criteria for requests going to the clearing house need to be narrowed and wants those that are referred to be “dealt with really quickly”.

He agrees senior figures need to argue for “a much more open and transparent way of working and willingness to be open and transparent to outsiders”. PACAC acknowledges encouraging evidence of this in the last year. But it also calls the government’s decision to exempt the new Advanced Research and Invention Agency from FoI a concerning “slide away from transparency”.

Cabinet Office review Speaking before details were finally revealed, Worthy, Rosenbaum and Open Democracy’s Jenna Corderoy were not optimistic that the Cabinet Office’s review would be a meaningful examination.

Rosenbaum suggested Cabinet Office officials “panicked” when PACAC began its work, thinking “we’ve got to be seen to be doing something, so let’s announce our own inquiry”.

He said the eight-month delay in appointing someone to lead the review showed it was “obviously not a big priority” and wasn’t being taken seriously.

Corderoy said the Cabinet Office had spent “a good three years” trying to stop her from accessing information about the clearing house. “I don’t think that they care about this,” she said. “What has changed?”

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “We do not recognise these claims and strongly disagree with this characterisation of the clearing house.”

“One of the big problems we’ve got with the clearing house is we don’t actually know very much about what it does”