It is more than 20 years since the Freedom of Information Act came into force. Now more than ever transparency is an important aspect of public life and indeed a democratic necessity.
In Episode 3 of the Guardians of Data podcast we discussed these issues with our guest was Maurice Frankel OBE, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information .
The following is an abridged transcript of the podcast.
Question: What was life like before the Freedom of Information Act? How easy was it to obtain information from the public sector?
Answer: It was extremely difficult in most cases; unless the information you were asking for, was helpful for the public authorities position, in which case the authority would be prepared to release it. But if you asked for information which might question its position, then it was very difficult to get the information and officials, council leaders and ministers would treat the information as if it was their own personal information, and they’d sometimes be affronted that you would even ask and expect that information to be disclosed.
What were the other challenges in terms of getting the FOI Act onto the statute books?
Well, the fact is, the government realized and Tony Blair realised, once the legislation was going through Parliament that, this was something that would cause them problems. And, it came to the point at which, the government privately threatened to pull the FOI Bill from Parliament if further improvements to the bill were made during its parliamentary progress.
Jack straw, who was the Home Secretary and the Justice Minister, confirmed this in his memoirs; that the government actively considered dropping the FOI Bill, for fear that it had gone too far, that it was providing too much openness; that explains why they put it off for so long.
You mentioned the cost limit. There was a story recently about an author who had a number of FOI requests about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor refused on costs grounds. Do you think there’s a case here for the cost limit rules to be changed so FOI requests cannot be refused on the grounds of costs if there’s a strong public interest in disclosing the information?
Well, I think there’s a good case for that. We argued for that when the FOI Bill was going through Parliament because, it was obvious that you had an absolute limit on what could be disclosed based on the time needed to find it, essentially. And there was no way through that. And that limit applied in the same way to a request about the purchase of government stationery and to information the government held about a life threatening disease or potential pandemic. And, the case for treating those differently and recognising the public interest in serious cases, I think is very strong. Now the government will argue that everybody will make a public interest case for disclosure. But everybody does make a public interest case for disclosure of information about commercial interests, law enforcement matters and so on. And the exemption does not, collapse in every case simply because somebody makes that argument. Tt gives way when there is genuine evidence which justifies a disclosure of otherwise exempt information. I think the same could take place if there was a public interest test applying to the cost limit.
You mentioned previously with regards to inquiries and their power to seek information from government. The Covid inquiries are ongoing. We’ve about the use of unofficial communications such as WhatsApp, Signal and Google Chat by ministers and advisers and in some cases, them using disappearing messages. What does that say to you about attitudes to transparency when it comes to the major decisions, particularly around Covid?
Well, a chunk of the history will have been lost forever. It may be that there’s enough been recorded, to make up for that in the main areas. But I think the use of auto deletion, or messaging software, is a very unhealthy development. And if it’s possible to prevent officials using it, even where they need to use messaging software for efficiency purposes, they should not be able to use software, which automatically deletes messages once they’ve been read. I think that is inimical to proper record keeping practices, to accountability and to the operation of the Freedom of Information Act.
Do you think that the fallout from the Epstein Scandal and the Covid Inquiry so far, is going to lead to improvements in government transparency, or is it going to lead to more unrecorded decisions?
Well, I think the surprising thing is that very embarrassing material has come out of the Post Office Inquiry. For example, about the real reasons for continuing with various practices, despite the fact that it was well known that the Post Office was subject to the Freedom of Information Act and was receiving Freedom of Information requests. So I think what is perhaps more surprising is how much of that information has survived, despite the existence of FOI. I mean, when the Act was being discussed in the early days, the government would argue that people would use post-it notes to record sensitive information so that these could be pulled off the documents when an FOI request was received. And so they believed that the threat of disclosure would prevent anything significant, which could be embarrassing being recorded in a permanent form at all, and that’s not proved to be the case. And I think that is probably because, first of all, the chances, I think officials will recognise that they’re dealing with vast volumes of documents, and very few of those were ever requested under FOI. And that means the ordinary incentive to carry on, recording information in the ordinary way or sending recorded information to colleagues, in the ordinary way, carries on, despite what in practice, maybe a hypothetical possibility of an FOI request being received at some later stage. So the information is, is not that vulnerable, to pre-emptive destruction, to prevent disclosure. I think that is perhaps a reassuring, result of these inquiries.
I agree with you, Maurice, that having had over twenty years of FOI, we are seeing the government disclosing more information, sometimes embarrassing as well and certainly the inquiry system is disclosing more information perhaps, than the Freedom of Information Act would have allowed. So together, I think I agree we have made progress. But do you think there is still room for improvement? Do you think certain public authorities need to improve more than others?
Well, I think there’s room for improvement across the board. I think there’s a number of things. I think the first thing is, authorities are sometimes too keen to impute bad motive to a requester, just as requesters are sometimes too keen to impute bad motive to a public authority for withholding information.
I think a second problem is that, public authorities are not making proper use of Boolean searches,. That is, they’re not searching for search term A combined with search term B, but excluding search term C. They are simply looking for hits under particular search terms and not intelligently, using the ability that their systems in many cases, must have to narrow the request by proper use of the of search language. So I think that needs to be looked at.
And I also think that the Act itself needs to be amended, to address some of the shortcomings that it creates. And, chief of those is, the reasonable extension to consider the public interest test. So the twenty working days is extendable by an unspecified reasonable period to consider the public interest test. I think that extension should be got rid of, just as the Environmental Information Regulations have got rid of it (and Scotland’s Freedom of Information Act, has never adopted that approach).
Where do you think FOI is going? If we get a change of government, do you think you’ll be back on the campaign trail trying to save FOI?
Well, we are always aware of the fact that the Act could come under threat at any time. The number of times we have had to come in and try and defend the Act against attempts by, initially the Blair Administration, then the Coalition Government, Conservative Government, to stop attacks on FOI is remarkable.
I mean, we had attempts to remove Parliament itself from the scope of the act in the early days. There was an attempt to expand the cost limit so that the cost limit of effectively 18 hours or 24 hours of time spent looking for information would apply not to a single request, or to all similar requests within a sixty working day period, but to all requests by a requester to the same public authority, whether they were related or not. And that would mean that, and not just from the same individual requester, but from the same organisation. So it would mean that major news organisations would be limited to one or two requests to the Home Office in a in a three month period, spread amongst all of their journalists. This was seriously put forward by the Blair Administration in the early days. And so, I don’t underestimate the threat to FOI.
The most recent serious threat we had was, the government setting up the Independent Commission on Freedom of Information, in the mid-nineties, where the unspoken aim was to remove information about policy making from the scope of FOI altogether. We did a very detailed analysis of all Tribunal decisions over, I think, a sixteen month period, relying on section 35, and showed that in very many cases, the exemption worked as it the government had intended it to work. That is, it protected sensitive discussions, from disclosure even after the decision had been taken. But that in a number of cases where the public interest justified it, that information was disclosed and the Tribunal accepted that that was the exemption and the public interest test working as it was supposed to, and that there should be no change to that that position. And so I think that was a very important milestone in the Act, because that resulted in the government before the final report was published, announcing that it hoped the Independent Commission would not require any weakening of the Freedom of Information Act, whereas a weakening of the Act had been the whole purpose of setting up the Commission
And just finally, some words of inspiration for our new professionals please Maurice.
Try and understand what the rationale for bringing FOI in actually was, and that was that openness serves the public interest. It serves the interest of accountability. It deters bad practice and it exposes unacceptable conduct. Those are all things which authorities, should be endorsing. And the FOI officers in particular, should see that as the benefit of freedom of information. And in my own experience where I’ve been provided information in the right spirit, it does change your view of the authority you’re dealing with. It does make you more willing to accept what they tell you, and more willing to have confidence in their decisions. It increases public trust in the organisation which can only be a good thing.
You can listen to the full Episode 3 podcast with Maurice here.
