Government colludes in watering down FoI Act

26 Apr 07
The government was twice attacked this week over proposed restrictions on its own Freedom of Information Act.

27 April 2007

The government was twice attacked this week over proposed restrictions on its own Freedom of Information Act.

The first attack came as a Conservative private member's Bill aiming to make MPs' correspondence and expenses exempt from FoI disclosure looked likely to be re-presented to the Commons on April 27 after an unexpected gap appeared in the parliamentary schedule.

The government refused to reject the Bill and gave its MPs a free vote, prompting Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker to comment: 'This is outrageous… They are colluding with [Conservative MP] David Maclean to wreck freedom of information in this country.'

The Bill's first report stage last week failed after LibDem MPs and other opponents tabled 20 amendments, and so denied the Bill sufficient time to reach a final vote.

Over half of those indicating support for the Bill last week were government whips, ministers or parliamentary private secretaries. The 12 government ministers supporting the Bill included Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, children's minister Beverley Hughes and health minister Andy Burnham.

Answering questions in the House on April 25, Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted the government was neutral. But a LibDem spokesman accused the government of supporting the Bill as it would make its own plans to introduce tighter restrictions on FoI requests easier to clear through Parliament.

Last month the Department for Constitutional Affairs extended its consultation on new fee regulations, which would allow public bodies to count the cost of the time it took officials to 'consider' a request against the £600 threshold above which requests can be deemed too onerous.

The DCA has also proposed aggregating requests to prevent large requests being broken into smaller pieces to circumvent the £600 effective 'cap'.

At the Commons constitutional affairs select committee on March 24, the minister in charge of the policy, Baroness Ashton, defended the proposals, saying they were necessary to curb the 5% of requests that took up 45% of the time officials spent on FoI.

She hoped that a revised fee regime would prompt people intending to make large requests to come to individual arrangements with the public body concerned to release information over a period of time.

'But that's not what your proposals will do,' said committee chair Alan Beith. 'You're asking for a machine-gun and saying “but we're not going to use it”.' Ashton responded: 'If there are alternative ways of solving it, then we are open to those as well.'

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