Freedom of Information Act will have teeth

only if it is seen as a symbol of honesty

From Mr Maurice Frankel

   Sir, Vernon Bogdanor ("Whitehall should play by a new set of rules", September 5) suggests that civil service advice of the kind revealed by the Hutton Inquiry will be exempt under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, which comes fully into force in January 2005. The position is actually more complicated than that.

   The exemptions which could apply to civil service advice, assuming it does not involve national security, are all subject to a public interest test. The information commissioner, who enforces the Act, could order disclosure if he considered that the public interest in openness outweighed the public interest in confidentiality.

   By setting up the Hutton Inquiry, the government itself has accepted that the balance here favours disclosure. The information commissioner is hardly likely to have done less.

   The sting in the tail is that miniters can veto decisions of the commissioner taken on public interest grounds. How ready will they be to do so? In two recent cases under the current open government code, Downing Street overruled the parliamentary ombudsman to block the release of information whose disclosure was required by the code. In both cases the motive was clearly to avoid embarrassment.

   That suggests a pessimistic prognosis for the FOI Act - unless the government recognises that it will damage what limited public trust it retains by treating the rules of openness with such disdain.

   People who may have no intention of using the act itself see it as an important symbol of honesty in government. They will see the veto as the opposite.

   Ministers, who are presumably looking at ways of restoring their credibility, should commit themselves to the Act - and start by renouncing the veto. As the Act already provides ample rights of appeal, first to a tribunal then, on a point of law, to the courts, there should be no need for it.

Maurice Frankel

Director,

Campaign for Freedom of Information

London EC1N 7RJ