Archive for April, 2007

Article: 266 ways the state can enter your home

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

I wrote my first big column for the Times today on the Centre for Policy Studies’ report on entry powers. As part of their study, I made several freedom of information requests to try and discover the extent to which some of these entry powers are used. As a postscript, Harriet, it transpires has expired, though her High Court case goes on…

Come on, open up in the name of the cow inspector
The Times, April 23, 2007
Heather Brooke on the alarming growth of the State’s right to enter your property

Harriet the Cow must have been surprised when at 9:30am on January 10 her peaceful field in Herefordshire was invaded by ten government officials and 12 police officers. This hit squad had erected a road block to seal off the area and used bolt-cutters to force their way into the enclosure. They had not asked permission to enter, nor did they need to. Under the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies Regulations 2006 – one of the State’s 266 statutory powers to enter private property – they were perfectly within their rights to force their way on to private land without the occupier’s consent and without a magistrate’s warrant.

Harriet, you see, had the misfortune to be on land where there had once been a BSE-infected cow and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had decided that she must be destroyed as a risk to the public. Harriet’s owners, David Price and Liz Davis, had argued that the nine-year-old Jersey cow was a pet, bought as a present for their son. They had documentation showing she did not have BSE nor was she ever going to be slaughtered for meat.

Harriet’s case is not so unusual. In a study published yesterday by the Centre for Policy Studies, Crossing the Threshold: 266 ways the State can enter your home, Harry Snook, a barrister, lays out for the first time the explosive growth in the State’s powers to enter private property forcefully and without permission. The old adage that an Englishman’s home is his castle is long dead.

Not content with spying on us as we walk the streets, drive our cars and go about our public business, the State is now intent on sticking its nose right into our living rooms. In the past few decades the number of new powers of entry becoming law has increased from fewer than ten in the 1950s to more than 60 in the 1990s. The laws are often vague, providing sweeping power to officials and little protection for private citizens.

(more…)

Tags:
Posted in Articles, Freedom of Information | 1 Comment »

Today’s vote to make MPs unaccountable

Friday, April 20th, 2007

As I write, MPs are today debating whether to exempt themselves from their own freedom of information law. This goes directly against explicit claims made by the House of Commons to improve public information and engagement.

Barry Wintrobe, academic and author of the Number 10 petition against the Bill has sent over a collection of MPs’ rhetoric in this regard which highlights the utter hypocrisy of today’s action.

“It serves no-one if we make it difficult for voters to understand what their elected representatives are doing. Too often the impression is given that the House of Commons is a private club, run for the benefit of its Members, where members of the public are tolerated only on sufferance. … the Commons can make itself more accessible to those outside, both as interested visitors and as citizens wishing to be more involved in proceedings, it can do more to make it easier for people to understand the work of Parliament, and it can do more to communicate its activity to the world outside”

It is also worth mentioning that the Bill’s sponsor, David Maclean, is not just an ordinary backbencher but a member of the House of Commons Commission, the institutional governing body of the Commons.

As previous media stories have suggested, this Bill may be informally supported by the Commission and Speaker (eg Guardian: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foi/story/0,,1998096,00.html & http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foi/story/0,,2061414,00.html).

Posted in Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 1 Comment »

MPs seek to exempt themselves from own law

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

After being terribly lazy and not pitching any articles for a while, I am back in action with a piece in today’s Times.

What do MPs think they’ve got to hide?
The Times, Thunderer, April 19, 2007
By Heather Brooke

Tomorrow MPs will debate exempting themselves from their own law of openness. The prospect of escaping scrutiny from prying eyes is so tempting that MPs do not realise the colossal damage they are doing to their own reputations.

They are so shortsighted that all they can see is that they are fed up with questions from the press and the public who want to know the details of their expense claims for travel, staff, postage and “additional costs”, as well as who they are meeting – whether big businesses such as Tesco or special interest lobbying groups. Before the Freedom of Information Act 2000, MPs didn’t have to tell the public any of this. Now several rulings from the Information Commissioner and Information Tribunal are forcing greater transparency.

I can see why MPs could succumb to the belief that it would be much easier to operate outside the public spotlight. All those awkward questions; all those pesky reporters; members of the public moaning; – it probably gets on their nerves. The danger is, though, that you don’t have to travel far down this road before you’ve forgotten the central tenet of democracy – government by and for the people.

That seems to be why a Private Member’s Bill that would exempt Parliament entirely from its own freedom of information law has sped through readings and committee stage like a hare. It reveals the extent of our MPs’ self-serving hypocrisy. It’s one law for the lawmakers and another for everyone else.

This Bill, introduced by David Maclean, the former Tory Chief Whip – and unopposed by the whips – will become law in the summer unless it is voted down or talked out. Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, who has made himself unpopular in the House by leading the charge for more transparent expenses, isn’t confident that his colleagues will vote against the amendment to the Act and so will try to talk the Bill out tomorrow.

I hope for the sake of our legislators that he succeeds. If their activities, funded from the taxpayers’ purse, are shrouded in secrecy the result will increase public mistrust. Secrecy benefits only two types of people: the incompetent and the corrupt. It does not benefit the politician who works diligently on behalf of his or her constituents – and it most certainly does not benefit the public. Good governance can only ever be open governance.

If it reaches the statute book, this Bill will be a self-inflicted wound for politicians, who already are suffering from crumbling levels of public trust. Any MP that values his or her reputation should be outraged and ashamed that it was allowed to get this far. The people must be welcomed into the heart of our democracy; not have the door slammed in their face.

Tags: ,
Posted in Articles, Freedom of Information, Politics | No Comments »

The truth is in the data – or lack of it

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Following on from the previous post, I received an answer yesterday to my FOI request seeking the full costs of the Government’s survey commissioned from Frontier Economics, the first consultation, and the ‘consultation on the consultation’.

I discovered that while the Government is content to spend taxpayers’ money on the cost of being accountable to the taxpayer, it is not content to record the amount wasted by bureaucrats. Their response to all my queries, a remarkably terse:

I am writing to advise you that the information you requested was not recorded, therefore not held by the department.

Read their response here (word 216kb).

Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »

Consultation on a consultation

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Bureaucrats’ love of bureaucracy never ceases to surprise me. Another example comes by way of the recent Government climbdown on emasculating the freedom of information law.

Not able to bring themselves to admit the whole exercise was a massive time-waster, the Government has instead initiated a consultation on their previous consultation. Apparentely, they didn’t like the answers they got the first time round, so they are trying again (London Mayor Ken Livingstone did the same thing with his push to expand the congestion charge westwards).

On March 29th, the Department for Constitutional Affairs published a supplementary consultation paper on the draft fees regulations inviting views on the principle of amending the existing regulations. Many of us had complained that the consultation questions were so narrowly drawn and based on such false premises and flawed data that it invalidated the whole exercise. So while the climbdown is welcome, this new delay means we can now add to the Government’s waste of taxpayer money another £10,000 or so along with many more hours of expensive civil servants’ time.

This is the price of secrecy: inefficient and incompetent government.

Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »

Courts failing to protect privacy

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

A journalist who came on one of my courses has been in touch to tell me about a freedom of informaton success.

Rupert White from the Law Gazette battled many months of delay and obstruction from the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA), the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Courts Service while trying to find out what protections, if any, were in place to ensure that personal information is properly kept in line with the Data Protection Act. Particularly he wanted to know if the departments had ever conducted audits on the personal data kept to check its accuracy and that it was in complaince with the law.

He discovered that in the six years since the privacy law was passed, neither the DCA, the CPS nor the Courts Service has ever done a full audit so they have no idea whether the personal information they hold is correct or in accordance with the law.

This is a serious breach of people’s privacy. As Rupert writes: “The CPS’s case management system holds sensitive information on people being prosecuted, the Courts Service holds records of court cases in progress, and the DCA holds a vast amount of information on workers and the public.” There is much scope for error in these records and without audits, there is nothing to stop inaccurate information finding its way onto the databasese or even the wrong people.

Posted in Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | No Comments »