Freedom of Information

This Labour government's implementation of the Freedom of Information Act must be one of the most cynical acts since they came to power. Here is the speech Tony Blair made at the Campaign for Freedom of Information's annual Awards ceremony, 25 March 1996. It includes these passages (my emphasis):

"And before I go on to talk about Labour's commitment to the area of freedom of information I would like if I might just to set this argument in context, because it is not some isolated constitutional reform that we are proposing with a Freedom of Information Act. It is a change that is absolutely fundamental to how we see politics developing in this country over the next few years. We did a press conference this morning, myself and Gordon Brown about insecurities...

As I said information is power and any government's attitude about sharing information with the people actually says a great deal about how it views power itself and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it. I want to say two things about this, one of which is very obvious, and one of which is less obvious.

The crucial question is does the government regard people's involvement in politics as being restricted to periodic elections? Or, does it regard itself as in some sense in a genuine partnership with people? And the government's attitude to what it is prepared to tell people and the knowledge it will share with them says a great deal about where it stands on that matter.

My argument is that if a government is genuine about wanting a partnership with the people who it is governing, then the act of government itself must be seen in some sense as a shared responsibility and the government has to empower the people and give them a say in how that politics is conducted.

Now that is an obvious point, familiar to any one who supports a Freedom of Information Act. I think less obvious is the second point, that in today's world, I believe that there is a limit to what government can do, and the power of society or community to act and to influence the lives of the individuals within it depends on a far more diverse and diffuse set of relationships than, if you like, a concept of government that would have been more natural or more easily explicable forty or fifty years ago. I don't believe it is possible for government to govern effectively now, unless it governs in some sense in a relationship of partnership with the people whom it is governing. It is one of the reasons why decentralisation of power is actually in the interests of government. People often say to me today: everyone says this before they get into power, then, after they get into power you start to read the words of the government on the screen and they don't seem so silly after all. You can see the point of them and all the rest of it.

I actually believe that if we want to make government effective in the modern world it simply is not possible to do that on the basis of government just handing down tablets of stone. In fact, you can see, in my view, both with Scott and BSE it would have been far better if government had been more open, far better actually for the proper conduct of government....

Our commitment to a Freedom of Information Act is clear, and I reaffirm it here tonight. We want to end the obsessive and unnecessary secrecy which surrounds government activity and make government information available to the public unless there are good reasons not to do so. So the presumption is that information should be, rather than should not be, released. In fact, we want to open up the quango state and the appointed bodies, which will of course exist under any government, but which should operate in a manner which exposes their actions to proper public scrutiny.

Freedom of information legislation exists in many other countries, including the United States and Canada and Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and France. The countries have sensible exemptions which the public here would understand and support. Information relating to national security, to law enforcement, to commercial confidentiality, to personal privacy, should of course be subject to exemption, as should the policy advice given by civil servants to ministers. But even with these kinds of exemption, there would still be vast swathes of government activity which would be exposed to public examination and to public debate.

And the Act would also be of practical use to individuals. In recent years we have finally been allowed to have access to our medical records, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Campaign for Freedom of Information. Why should we stop there? Why should what is held on other personal files not also be available for us to see? At present we have a mish-mash of rules which allows us to see some files and not others, partly dependent on whether they are held on computer or held manually. But I believe there is a strong case for taking a consistent approach to giving people access to what is held on file about them subject of course to those obvious exemptions.

It is not a question of absolutes, but it is a question of balance, and the present balance is surely wrong. It is wrong not merely in relation to the public sector. It is, as we have seen from the Awards that have been given, wrong in relation to the private sector as well. Of course, there will be elements which are so confidential, commercially for example, they cannot or should not be disclosed. But that would not obtain in the vast bulk of area and very often there will be a direct public interest in having information disclosed rather than actually concealed. A Freedom of Information Act would entitle the public to government information and would leave it to government to justify why information should not be released. I don't believe that its impact would simply be in the pure matter of legislation, in the detail of the legislation. It would also signal a culture change that would make a dramatic difference to the way that Britain is governed. The very fact of its introduction will signal a new relationship between government and people: a relationship which sees the public as legitimate stakeholders in the running of the country and sees election to serve the public as being given on trust.

That is my view of how government should be. I believe in the programme of constitutional change that the Labour Party has outlined. I think that a Freedom of Information Act is an important and essential part of that.

I hope you understand from what I have said this evening that I regard it not merely as simply a list of commitments that we give because at some point in time, someone got up and agitated for it and party conference passed a resolution. It is genuinely about changing the relationship in politics today.

There is so much disaffection from politics, so much disillusion with it, and one of the very clear and simple reasons is that we live in a modern and far better educated and far more open and far more assertive democracy and country - and it is good that people feel in that way. The irony is that the system of government is about fifty, sixty, seventy years behind the actual feelings and sentiments of the broad majority of people. A Freedom of Information Act is not just important in itself. It is part of bringing our politics up to date, of letting politics catch up with the aspirations of people and delivering not just more open government but more effective, more efficient, government for the future."


Ah what a hopeful, happy time that was. Everyone knew that Tony Blair was just months away from becoming Prime Minister and ushering in a new era of joy, light and happiness for all . Of course the truth was somewhat different, things could also get worse...


Moving to the present day and after nearly 11 years of labour rule the lie of the land looks somewhat different and the Freedom of Information Act is now being used by this Labour government to block the release of information. I am sure that you remember the "non-doms" affair back in the Autumn. At their October party conference, the Conservatives outlined a £25,000 charge for non-doms to pay for raising the IHT threshold to £1m. A week later Alistair Darling announced IHT changes and a £30,000 charge for non-doms. Coincidence was the claim by the Labour government, everybody else smelt a rat. A FOI request by The Telegraph to the Treasury regarding IHT produced the information/claim that the Treasury had been working on proposals for an overhaul of inheritance tax before the Tories had. A similar request to revel when the Treasury first proposed its £30,000 charge on non-doms has not been answered.

As the shadow chief secretary to the treasury Philip Hammond said: ‘When it suited Gordon Brown, the Treasury responded to an FOI request on the origins of their Inheritance Tax policy with amazing speed. Those documents showed that the IHT idea was only advanced by government after the Conservatives raised it. ‘People will draw their own conclusions about where Labour got the non-doms idea from.’"


Indeed we will Philip, indeed we will.