Defeat for fat-cat bid to keep the public in the dark
THE public’s right to know about corruption, incompetence and grotesque waste in the public sector wins a major boost today.
In a victory for a Daily Mail campaign, ministers will reject demands from NHS, police and town hall bureaucrats for the neutering of the Freedom of Information Act.
Councils, quangos and other state bodies had wanted greater secrecy.
Instead they will now be forced to publish full details of the pay and perks of staff pocketing more than £150,000 a year.
The ‘fat cats’ will be named and barred from using data protection laws to keep information hidden.
The public sector will also be made to state how many staff are taking home £50,000 or more a year – in a bid to save taxpayers’ cash.
Cabinet minister Matthew Hancock said he had decided to act after the Mail highlighted ‘public sector abuses’ with a s eri es of ‘ i mportant investigations’.
This newspaper has used the FoI Act to expose scandals including the rampant abuse of public money by town hall chiefs. We revealed how hospitals were paid millions of pounds to hit targets for the number of patients who died
on the Liverpool Care Pathway. FoI was used as well to lay bare the MPs’ expenses scandal.
Since the autumn, the act has been under grave threat from a Government-commissioned review.
In particular, councils and other public sector bodies demanded that the press and public should have to pay a fee for each request.
Introducing charges would have dramatically undermined the legislation – making it far harder for abuse to be uncovered.
But, when it publishes its report today, the FoI Commission will say ‘use of the act by the media gives rise to some very important investigations that are clearly in the public interest’.
It will add that ‘a fee for information requests could hamper those investigations in future’.
In his response to the Commission’s report, Mr Hancock will kill the idea of introducing a fee altogether. In a statement to MPs, he will say the press must remain free to ‘ pursue important investigations that are in the public interest’.
He will also announce that rules on transparency that currently apply to Whitehall only will be extended across the entire public sector.
Where staff earn £150,000 or more, quangos, town halls, the police and NHS will have to publish full details of their salary, allowances, fees, pension contributions, expenses, bonuses and compensation for loss of employment. This will expose the huge pay-offs many have been given when quitting or retiring early.
Mr Hancock said: ‘There should be no excuses for hiding taxpayerfunded pay packets. The Daily Mail has used the Freedom of Information Act effectively to highlight public sector abuses, as well as pursue a series of important investigations. After ten years, we took the decision to review the Freedom of Information Act and we have found it is working well. We will not make any legal changes to FoI.
‘ We will spread transparency throughout public services, making sure all public bodies routinely publish details of senior pay and perks. After all, taxpayers should know if their money is funding a company car or a big pay-off.’
Mr Hancock will also announce that he is not legislating to reinstate the so-called ministerial veto, which is used by the attorney general to quash the release of sensitive information.
The Government was prompted to look again at the law when, in March last year, the Supreme Court ordered the release of sensitive letters from Prince Charles to ministers giving his views on areas of government policy.
The judges ordered the publication of the ‘black spider letters’ in response to an FoI request, despite the Government wielding its veto over the release.
MPs said this went against the original intention of the act, which said that ministers should have the final say. They were also unhappy about the wishes of Parliament being overridden by the judiciary.
Mr Hancock will say that, in future, the veto will be issued at an earlier stage.
Currently, if the press or a member of the public applies for a document, and this request is rejected by a public body, they can lodge a series of appeals to the Information Commissioner and tribunals, ending with judges. The veto is exercised by ministers only at the end of the procedure, which can drag on for years.
In future, the veto will be used after the Information Commissioner has ordered a document should be released to the public.
The veto has been used seven times since the FoI Act came into force, most notoriously in relation to the release of Cabinet papers on the build-up to the Iraq war.
The FoI commission, which i ncludes Jack Straw and Lord Howard, has been gathering evidence for months on whether the act should be restricted. Among the submissions were dozens from town hall chiefs, education bosses, the NHS and police, intent on squashing the public’s right to know.
Their claims included that elderly care and children’s services would suffer unless the act was curbed. At the same time, tens of thousands of ordinary members of the public pointed out the vital role the law played in exposing corruption, illtreatment and ‘fat cat’ pay and perks across the public sector.
An alliance of press and media groups wrote to the Prime Minister to warn against any attempt to undermine the law that was crucial for l ocal j ournalists seeking to expose wrongdoing and waste.
At one point during the official review, the Russell Group of universities, which represents Oxford, Cambridge and 22 other leading institutions, demanded they should be exempted from the act, because they are private institutions and not public bodies, even though they receive public money. The group claimed the laws were not fair and undermined efforts to compete with new privately-run higher education colleges, which are not subject to freedom of information laws.
GREED OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR FAT CATS
Mail, November 9, 2015 ‘Highlight public sector abuses’