The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee has published its report on The Cabinet Office FOI Clearing House, and was heavily critical both of the Cabinet Office’s approach to FOI and, ironically, its opaqueness. Read Martin Rosenbaum’s great summary here.
My conclusion chimes with the Committee’s arguments. FOI is under threat from poor compliance, funding, and high-level secrecy. If FOI needs one thing, beyond money and reform, it is care and support.
1. Politicians should like FOI. They should make speeches and extoll its virtues. A few have, including Gordon Brown and David Cameron, but most remain silently sulking. Openness can actually be good for politicians, as well as politics, pre-empting trouble and scandal and even getting a reputational payoff. Publish and be damned can be a sensible strategy.
2. Politicians shouldn’t moan about FOI. Tony Blair called himself a nincompoop for passing the law, which is fine, he can call himself that. The problem is that the Prime Minister criticising a law sends signals to everyone else that the law doesn’t matter, and they should dislike it too. That is not fine.
3. Politicians should stop hiding. There’s concern at a general slow-down of FOI. Openness problems, like Orwell’s famous fish going off, start at the top. Government by Whatsapp, hiding lobbying meetings and refusals to answer FOI requests are all part of a wholesale undermining.
4. This creates what I call a collective irresponsibility-the more people in government don’t play the FOI game, the harder it is to punish wrong-doing.
See my written evidence to the committee here.
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