The United States is celebrating its annual ‘Sunshine Week’ – a national campaign focusing on the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors coordinates the campaign and journalists are the main participants but the focus is on the common citizen – enlightening the general public on the their right to know and empowering them to engage with government at all levels.

I’ve long campainged to set up a similar initiative in this country. It now seems that some momentum is building with the recent efforts of the Society of Editors, Press Gazette and various newspaper editors to fight against our Government’s propsed curtailment of freedom of information.

For those interested in the ongoing public consultation into the Government’s attempt to curtail our open government law, I have uploaded my submission here. It takes the form of a section of general comments followed by a shorter section related to specific questions asked in the highly restrictive ‘consultation’ document.

General comments

Format and costings used in the Consultation Exercise

1. The questions are framed to imply implicit support for the Government’s proposals and the assumptions on which these proposals are based. Therefore this exercise fails to meet the requirements of a proper public consultation.

2. The fact that these highly-restrictive questions are based on a false premise further invalidates this exercise as a public consultation. There have been several attempts by members of the public to obtain the raw data behind the figure put forward by the Government as the total cost of implementing the Freedom of Information Act. To date, both the raw data and the methodology used by Frontier Economics have been kept secret. It is a central tenant of academia and, indeed, the scientific method, that for a conclusion to hold merit, the raw data and methodology behind it must be published. In the absence of such evidence, one must consider the conclusion as nothing more than mere unsubstantiated speculation.

3. The costing method appears to be based on political motivation or ‘spin’ rather than empirical evidence. This supposition is supported by the fact that no effort appears to have been made to account for the costs of continued government secrecy. For example, the House of Commons has spent at least £17,000 fighting FOI requests from the public for a detailed breakdown of MPs’ expenses. Numerous councils have spent tens of thousands of pounds blocking requests by the public for restaurant and fire safety inspections. Public funds have been used to pay external and internal lawyers to find ways of blocking disclosure. Such wasteful and unnecessary costs are a direct result of the poor drafting of the legislation and an absence of forthright central guidance. Keeping information secret is more costly than public disclosure yet these costs are not included in the Government’s calculations. In the United States where this data is available, it has been found that for every dollar spent declassifying old secrets, federal agencies spend approximately $134 creating and storing new secrets. ( “Secrecy Report Card 2006″ conducted by OpenTheGovernment.org. Available online at: http://www.openthegovernment.org/article/articleview/193/1/68?TopicID=.)

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Another reader of this blog has been threatened with prosecution if he dares publish information received under the freedom of information law.

The Office of Fair Trading released data to the requestor in response to his question, but then threatened him with criminal charges under the Enterprise Act 2002 if he discloses the FOI response to anyone else! He forwarded the following email that he received today from the OFT:

Sent:14 March 2007

Subject: Freedom of Information Act Request

Dear Mr X

Freedom of Information Act Request – OFT’s Response to the DTI’s Consultation Document on “The Removal of Barriers to the Sharing of Non-Consensual Cedit Data”

Thank you for your letter of 14 February in which you requested “a copy of [the OFT's] response to the …[DTI's] Consultation Paper dated 11th October 2006 entitled “The Removal of Barriers to the Sharing of Non-Consensual Cedit Data..”

We have considered your request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and, under this Act, we have a duty to confirm the existence of the information requested and supply it unless there are good reasons for not doing so. I can confirm that the OFT holds information that is within the scope of your request and that it is attached at the end of this e mail.

I would point out, though, that the information contained in this e mail is subject to the restrictions on disclosure in Part 9 of the Enterprise Act (“EA”) 2002. In practical terms, this means that any unauthorised further disclosure of this information could be in breach of section 241(2) of the EA, which is a criminal offence.

If you have any further queries about this e mail, please contact me on 020 7211 8735.

Yours sincerely

Nigel Bussey
Information Access Team
Office of Fair Trading
The Office of Fair Trading
Fleetbank House, 2-6 Salisbury Square, London EC4Y 8JX
Switchboard (020) 7211 8000
Web Site: http://www.oft.gov.uk/

A whopping 184 submissions arrived on the desks of Government in response to the consultation on changing the Freedom of Information Act. That’s a lot of civil servant reading and ‘thinking’ time. Can we now add this cost to the total amount wasted by politicians in their attempt to undo a law they implemented just two years ago?

Vera Baird, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs, stated that a summary of the responses will be published online soon. When asked when the final regulations would be laid before Parliament she said: “We will analyse the responses to the consultation exercise before considering laying regulations.”

So no date yet then.

A new petition on the No.10 e-petitions website calls for signatories opposed to the Private Member’s Bill that would exempt the Westminster Parliament from its own FoI Act.

The petition is sponsored by Barry Winetrobe at the Centre for Law at Napier University and he’s hoping that with enough supporters, this bill will be rejected.

Please sign up and spread the word to colleagues etc, via your websites, blogs, email groups etc.

You can write to your MP to oppose the Government’s proposed changes to the fees regulations of the Freedom of Information Act at their postal address: House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA or by using the WriteToThem website – which will help you identify your MP and send them a message for free.

An Early Day Motion opposing the changes has been promoted by an all-party coalition of MPs – Tony Wright (Lab), Alan Beith (Lib Dem), Dominic Grieve (Con), Richard Shepherd (Con), Mark Fisher (Lab) and Simon Hughes (Lib Dem). Ask your MP to sign EDM 845 on Freedom of Information.

If your MP has already signed the EDM you can still write and tell them of your concern. Public pressure is the only way to stop these changes becoming law.

Finally, there are still a few days to respond to the government’s consultation paper on the draft regulations, which runs until 8 March. The consultation paper is available from the DCA website. The questions are very narrowly drawn and based on flawed reasoning, but there is no need to limit yourself to the seven questions.