GREENWASH
MoS wins battle to expose Prince’s secret eco lobbying of Ministers... only for the Government to defy order
DETAILS of how Prince Charles secretly lobbies Ministers on environmental issues have been covered up by the Government – despite the Freedom of Information watchdog ruling they should be made public.
Civil servants have mounted a desperate legal challenge to prevent The Mail on Sunday obtaining details of the Prince’s private meetings with at least two Ministers.
After a year-long battle, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has ruled that the Department for Transport should reveal what occurred when Charles received John Hayes, then a Transport Minister, and Brandon Lewis, the then Housing Minister, at Clarence House on September 10, 2014.
But just hours before a deadline to provide the information expired last week, the Department said it would be spending taxpayers’ money to challenge the ruling rather than reveal the details.
The DfT claimed the gag should be imposed because the Prince’s dealings with Government are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. But in a rebuke, the ICO insisted: The MoS should be granted the information under EU laws, which require public bodies to disclose information about policies and decisions that could have an impact on the environment;
It was likely the meeting was ‘convened for the Prince to promote his views on certain issues’, and would reveal his ‘areas of interest’;
There was overwhelming public interest in revealing details because ‘the Prince of Wales’ contact with government Ministers raises legitimate questions about [his role] in a parliamentary democracy’;
The meeting could not be considered private, as the DfT argued, because Charles has ‘not in the past avoided controversy with his public statements’ and previously revealed details of his advocacy work in an authorised biography.
The Government’s decision to appeal will leave the Prince – who is due tomorrow to give a landmark speech to the Paris Climate Summit – vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy.
Only last week, he gave a TV interview in which he suggested that the ongoing civil war in Syria was partly the product of climate change and drought.
This newspaper had asked for details about the discussion under EU right of access laws known as the Environmental Information Regulations (EIRs), designed to ensure public bodies are transparent when policies have implications for the environment.
The Department of Transport initially argued that the meeting had not been about green issues and, as a result, the request should be treated as a traditional Freedom of Information request.
By reclassifying the application, it was able to evoke a change in the law that states the Prince’s communications are exempt from FoI requests. But the MoS insisted it was an EIR issue and complained to the ICO.
In a decision notice dated October 20, 2015, the ICO found that much of the information about the meeting was environmental and should have been released under EIRs.
The ICO stated: ‘Having studied the information in question, the Commissioner is satisfied that much of it does relate to both measures and activities likely to affect both the state of the environment directly and factors which in turn affect those elements.’
The ICO also revealed that the meeting was attended by a third individual who is a senior figure within an organisation of which the Prince is president. Charles is president of 14 charities and the ICO does not name any of them. However, it does say the identity of the individual should be made public.
The ruling could have far-reaching implications for the Prince as he attempts to make his personal views known to those in power.
The ICO said while Charles was within his rights to write to Ministers, he should also expect those comments to be made public. ‘The Prince himself had previously permitted some details of his advocacy work to be revealed in his authorised biography,’ it noted.
‘Although the information itself is unremarkable the fact that the information reveals the areas of discussion between the Prince of Wales and Ministers means that it cannot be considered trivial.’
This is not the first time the Government has tried to block details of the Prince’s contacts with Government Ministers.
It reportedly spent £400,000 trying to stop The Guardian getting access to a series of so-called ‘black spider memos’ sent to Ministers between 2004 and 2005.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court found in favour of the newspaper and ordered the release of the letters, which showed the Prince had been lobbying on subjects as diverse as troop supplies in Iraq and the Patagonian toothfish.
A spokesman for Buckingham Palace declined to comment and referred the matter to the DfT.
A spokesman for the department said that it would be inappropriate to comment further in the light of its appeal.
It’s likely that Prince Charles wanted to promote his views