This paper rarely uses the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA). It is occasionally a useful weapon, but we prefer pens to swords: in this field, the best route to good journalism is simply to build a relationship of trust with civil servants and politicians, then ask them interesting questions. And we’re well aware that the FoIA can be misused: we were appalled when the Bureau of Investigative Journalism used 1,400 FoI requests, costing the taxpayer about £650,000, to produce a report supporting the squeeze on public salaries. So we may be journalists, but we’re not knee-jerk defenders of the FoIA as it stands.
As information commissioner Christopher Graham argues, however, the Act is a very valuable piece of legislation: it may sometimes be difficult and expensive to administer, but the transparency it creates fosters management quality, organisational efficiency and democratic responsiveness. It’s exactly these benefits that the coalition’s open data and transparency agendas seek to produce – and these would be fatally undermined if the requirement for departments to push out more data wasn’t bolstered by a right for those outside government to pull out facts. Meanwhile, Graham is clear – as was the Justice Select Committee, which last year carried out post-legislative scrutiny on the Act – that most of the criticisms of the FoIA are less substantial than they at first appear.
Still more importantly, the FoIA upholds something fundamental to good democracy: the people’s ability to scrutinise their government. Lord O’Donnell and David Cameron are surely correct that the FoIA is a drag on the operation of government – but so is every democratic innovation, from the sovereignty of Parliament to the 2010 select committee reforms. Few would argue that we should be retreating on these other fronts: sometimes, public employees must suffer some inconvenience in order to keep a healthy power balance between the governing and the governed.
Rowena Collins Rice, the director general of the Attorney General’s Office, argued convincingly in the last issue of CSW that some of the FoIA’s provisions are unnecessarily burdensome. And nor are things perfect from the journalist’s perspective: CSW has found that even when there’s a strong public interest in releasing information, departments are expert at finding reasons to turn down potentially embarrassing FoI requests. But with so many powerful people at the heart of government hostile to the Act, any attempt by an established administration to revisit the law could have only one outcome: the curtains framing our view of government’s operations would draw closed once again.
It’s true, as Collins Rice told us, that the FoIA was produced in the “early days of a government that had been out of power for a long time”, and has “the sense of being an Opposition measure”. But that’s as positive as it is negative: Blair’s new ministers may have lacked the experience to spot all its design flaws, but – importing the idealism of every longstanding Opposition front bench – they pushed it through before their desire to appeal to the people was overcome by their interest in hiding their failures in government. The Freedom of Information Act might sometimes be uncomfortable, inconvenient, flawed and misused, but it’s also incredibly valuable to our democracy and, ultimately, to the honesty, efficiency and transparency of our public services. When there are so many laws and regulations that exhibit similar failings without creating such benefits, any attempt to water down our FoI laws would be no less than perverse.
Matt Ross, Editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk