I sought the debate so that hon. and right hon. Members, who, like me, have serious misgivings about the plans of the Department for Constitutional Affairs to amend the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regulations, could explore the arguments with the Minister before the consultation ends on 8 March.
The Government have a proud record of having introduced freedom of information legislation; however, they propose to put it at risk, and for what? To change the rules that allow public authorities to refuse FOI requests on costs grounds would be mean-spirited and certainly unworthy of my party, and of my Government, of whom I am immensely proud. The DCA’s proposed changes would allow authorities to refuse requests that they must currently answer. That would inevitably reduce the Act’s effectiveness, limit the scrutiny that it provides and undermine the important progress that has been made towards more openness and accountability.
The promise of a freedom of information Act featured in six successive Labour manifestos from 1974 to 1997, and I well remember these words:
“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 our people and delivering not just more open but more effective and efficient government for the future.”
That was the argument advanced by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister when he was Leader of the Opposition in 1996. The argument was right then and it is right now.
The Act was an important step forward, but I fear that the DCA’s proposed changes will take us in the opposite direction. The Act is widely regarded as a success. In a report, the Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs says that the Act has
“already brought about the release of significant new information and…this information is being used in a constructive and positive way by a range of different individuals and organisations.”
I had the privilege of serving as a Minister in the Wales Office and in the Ministry of Defence, and I confess that there were times when I found the demands for information under the freedom of information legislation irksome. Governments and local government do, and we must recognise it.
My right hon. Friend is right to emphasise the Labour party’s long and honourable commitment to freedom of information. I am a former Minister like him, albeit a former Minister in the Cabinet Office, who dealt with FOI legislation when it first came before the new Labour Government. Does he accept that strands in the broader context of government, including the higher reaches of the civil service, the quangocracy that surrounds it and leading members of the Government, were always dead set against freedom of information from the word go?
I understand my hon. Friend’s point. Like many colleagues in the Chamber today from all parties, throughout my political life as a councillor and as a Minister, the one thing I was a told was, “If you do that, it would be setting a precedent.” If we had not set precedents, we would still be living up trees.
I am proud of the fact that the commitment of my former Department, the Ministry of Defence, has impressed many observers. Information that the MOD has released includes anonymised details of investigations of alleged offences by soldiers in Northern Ireland, the types of boot used by the armed services, the number of service personnel failing drug tests and information about complaints of discrimination and bullying. On a lighter note, the MOD has also released its recipe for curried meatballs, and disclosed reports of UFO sightings in Wales, including a black object hovering over Rhyl, a flying disc over Newport and a spinning craft with legs flying over the valley where I live.
Yes, spinning.
In the response to the Constitutional Affairs Committee’s report, the Government said that they welcomed and shared the Committee’s assessment, adding:
“While the government is pleased by the significant success that FOI represents it will continue to build on that success.”
To me, that it is a commitment. The Government also went on to propose two significant restrictions to the Act’s right of access, but people have generally coped with them.
In general, freedom of information requests are answered free of charge, although applicants can be asked to pay for photocopying and postage costs. However, a Department can refuse to process a request if it estimates that the cost will exceed £600. Local authorities, national health service bodies and other public authorities can refuse if the estimated cost exceeds £450. The expenditure that can be taken into account are the costs of establishing whether the requested information is held and, if it is, of locating, retrieving and extracting it. Staff time is charged at £25 an hour.
The DCA proposes to include the costs of reading the information, consulting other authorities or bodies about the request and considering whether to release it—three more hurdles, all unnecessary.
The more time officials spend discussing a request, the more likely they are to feel entitled to refuse it. The more inefficient or long-winded a public body’s procedures for reaching decisions, the less chance a request has of being answered under the proposed new rules. I have grave fears that the proposed new regulations will invite abuse. Authorities will realise that by deliberately extending the hours that they spend, or estimate that they will have to spend, on a request, they will be able to ensure that a request for information is rejected.
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there are two significant perils in the Government’s proposals? First, there is the aggregation of requests. Hon. Members—I assume this applies to all hon. Members present—often make a series of requests to the same authority, and certainly within a three-month period. We would all fall foul of the new regulation straight away. Secondly, and even worse, if one includes an aggregation of requests, one will have to notify the deciding officer about the individual making the request.
The principle of freedom of information is that requests are considered blind and that they are not aggregated. The senior officers in, for example, a police authority about which I am concerned in North Yorkshire, would be able to find out who the individual was and deny their request simply because the individual had made a number of requests within three months. That would be nonsensical.
I rarely regret accepting an intervention, but that is the rest of my speech just delivered for me. I take on board the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I shall refer to it as I develop my argument.
The more people the authority decides to invite to a meeting to discuss the request, the easier it will be to reject it. Instead of just bringing in the officials directly involved, the authority might decide that it would make sense to bring in line managers and departmental heads. A two-hour meeting involving six people at £25 an hour each automatically adds £300 to the cost of the request. A few additional hours will usually be needed to find the information, then there is the time needed to read it and to extract the relevant passages, and we see how we move very quickly towards the cost limit. That work could easily bring the request up to the £450 or £600 threshold without much having been done. If there were any doubt, and the authority did not wish to release the information, it could add an extra few hours by consulting its legal department.
If the issue were important and involved a Department, a Minister might become involved. Is the Minister’s time and that of their private office also to be aggregated and added to the time that it takes to provide the information? That would take the risk over the cost limits. In theory, applicants would have a remedy: they could complain to the Information Commissioner. However, the commissioner, Richard Thomas, already has a substantial backlog of complaints.
The possibility that the time spent on requests might be deliberately inflated is not my main concern, however. Even if authorities are scrupulously fair in their estimates, requests that require officials to spend significant amounts of time considering or consulting on a decision are likely to be refused in any event. Requests that involve complex issues would be an obvious casualty and any request that raises a new issue for the first time is bound to require significant research and consideration before a decision is taken.
Politically contentious requests will also be hit. Inevitably, authorities will spend longer considering such requests, particularly if the consequence of disclosure may be to suggest that the policy the authority is pursuing is a mistake or is not working as intended. The mere fact that the request is contentious and the disclosure could have serious consequences for that authority could lead to it being refused under the new proposals. Secrecy would replace scrutiny in very critical areas and we should resist that.
When a request is refused on cost grounds, that refusal is absolute. The applicant cannot argue that the public interest in the issue is justified if the cost limits are exceeded. As long as the hours have been properly calculated, that will be the end of the matter. In its consultation document on the proposed changes, the DCA argues that the effects of the proposals will not be unduly severe because authorities will still be required to advise and assist applicants who reformulate requests to become more targeted and focused, and I certainly had experience of that when I was a Minister. Where a request is refused because too much information has been requested, the problem can be overcome by helping the applicant to narrow the request—of course it can. However, where a request has been refused because of the time needed to consider the issue, such an approach will simply not work. The DCA argues that the draft regulations will cap at £400 the costs attributed to consideration time or consultation time by a Department. It contends that it would not be possible for consideration time alone to take a request over the £600 limit. However, a combination of the two could take the request over that limit.
The draft regulations contain a second proposal. In some cases, all the requests made to an authority on any subject by an individual or organisation could be aggregated, a point referred to by the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) a moment ago, and they could be refused if the costs exceeded the limits of £600 and £450.
Let me give my right hon. Friend an example of that. In Newcastle and Gateshead, there is a housing market renewal pathfinder scheme, which is run by Newcastle city council and Gateshead council. Newcastle is Liberal Democrat controlled, and Gateshead is Labour controlled, but they run the scheme together. The meetings of the organisation take place in private, and I have asked to see the minutes of those meetings. I have been told that I can make a request for them, but it must be made under the Freedom of Information Act, and I must make a request for each meeting separately. I have now, therefore, made about 12 requests simply to get the minutes of a public body. I would fall into precisely the trap of aggregation that he has set out.
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. It is very difficult for us as parliamentarians to find ourselves frustrated when Parliament has clearly expressed its will on the matter.
As an afterthought, it is not just parliamentarians who are frustrated. I have had conversations with the editors of the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post, and they are extremely concerned about the effect the measures will have on investigative journalism. They do a good job in holding local bodies to account. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the proposed measures will inhibit them from doing the job they do so adequately in so many parts of the country?
I was about to come to that point in response to my hon. Friend. If the aggregation provisions are included, they could be used against a newspaper, which could then find that the requests made by all its journalists to a particular authority during a 60-day period were refused once the cost limit had been reached. The same would be true of any campaigning organisation or a Member of Parliament. Such requesters might find themselves allowed to make no more than a single request to a political authority during a period of three months.
Authorities would have to show that it was reasonable in some circumstances to aggregate requests, but the consultation paper suggests factors that should be taken into account in reaching such decisions, and I am not convinced that there is a case for them. I find two of the four factors set out to be particularly disturbing. The first proposes that authorities take account of the identity of the applicant. That undermines the basic principle of the Act: it should be applicant-blind. Decisions should depend on the consequences of disclosing information to the public at large, not the identity of the applicant.
The next factor is even more alarming. Page 14 of the consultation paper proposes that authorities should take into account the volume of requests made by an applicant in the past and whether the applicant has been “unco-operative or disruptive”. I am sure that nobody in this room would ever be unco-operative or disruptive in seeking information, but that measure appears to be a direct invitation to authorities to discriminate against applicants who have not shown them sufficient deference. I am sure that time and again, hon. and right hon. Members have had to be awkward with Departments or local authorities to secure information on behalf of their constituents. If the regulations come into force, that provision would be a reason to refuse information to a Member. That cannot be right, and certainly was not the intention of the Act when Parliament agreed it.
The applicant who regularly appeals against refusals may be made to pay a price for doing so. A campaigning newspaper like the South Wales Argus in my constituency might criticise the local council’s handling of its freedom of information requests, or use the information it has got under the Act to express disapproval of a council policy. It may be punished for its temerity by being refused further information on the grounds that it has been unco-operative or disruptive. Who will make that subjective decision? Who will decide whether a person has been unco-operative or disruptive? That causes me considerable concern. Those policies should have no part to play in the operation of the Freedom of Information Act.
Last May, my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor made a speech in which he said that
“our FOI regime is blind to both the identity and purpose of requests. It is rightly blind. The decision whether to disclose must be based on an objective application of the principles to the information requested, irrespective of who has asked, and for what reason.”
He went on to say:
“The information released must be evaluated against how it promotes empowerment, and how it improves good decision-making.”
For the life of me, I cannot reconcile those views, which I entirely endorse, with the proposals now being put forward by his Department.
My right hon. Friend is cogently outlining the problems and what I hope are the unintended consequences of the proposals. I am sure that we shall hear the Minister say that the Government have a duty to safeguard taxpayers’ money. Does my hon. Friend have the impression that the Government have done all they can to save money in implementing freedom of information legislation? They could use more efficient electronic record management, for example, rather than reach for these proposals, which will have the unintended consequences that my hon. Friend so graphically outlines.
I believe that there has been progress and there are opportunities to make further progress along that particular avenue, through greater efficiencies, using IT systems and so on. These regulations are not needed as far as that process is concerned.
What is the driving force behind these so-called reforms? The DCA says it is attempting to reduce the burden on public authorities imposed by more time-consuming and therefore costly requests. Is that aimed at a small number of people who use the Act regularly such as journalists? Only 10 per cent. of the requests come from journalists, with 60 per cent. coming from the general public and 20 per cent. from business and industry.
The Government have published a report that they commissioned from a consultancy called Frontier Economics on the costs of the Act. It showed that the total cost, across the public sector, including the cost of the Information Commissioner and the information tribunal, was around £35 million annually. That is not a large sum when one compares it with the whole spend of Government throughout the country. Indeed, the Minister is quoted in last week’s Press Gazette as saying that the £25 million that central Government spend annually is “money well spent”. I agree with her as far as that is concerned.
The report costed the savings that might come from two proposals in the draft regulations at about £12 million a year. It calculated that taking account of reading, consideration and consultation time would allow authorities to reject about 8,100 requests that they have to deal with now, and that the aggregation proposal would allow 12,000 requests to be refused. It is not clear whether there has been double counting of those two options, but cutting out 20,000 requests to save less than £12 million annually strikes me as blunt and brutal, and quite contrary to whole intention of the Freedom of Information Act. If my hon. and learned Friend the Minister or any of our ministerial colleagues want a few tips on how to save some money, I can buy them a cup of tea in the Tea Room and tell them some of the things that we discovered on Select Committee on Public Accounts that would make people’s hair stand up. I am quite happy to make that offer to any of my ministerial colleagues.
Finally, I have a high regard for my hon. and learned Friend. She has a distinct and quite definite independent streak, and she is not slow to speak out. I certainly found that out when I was the Minister taking the Armed Forces Bill through the House and she was serving on the Committee as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to another Minister. She gave me some grief, and rightly so, because she was not happy with some of the things that I was saying and proposing. We disagreed, but I respected her powerful argument and the passion with which she employed it. I cannot believe that my hon. and learned Friend is too comfortable with the proposals. I hope that I and others who might catch your eye, Mr. Cook, will persuade her to reconsider and leave the consultation document where it belongs—on the shelf, gathering dust.
Order. Hon. Members may be wondering why I am pausing, but I am trying to see how many want to contribute to the debate, yet some individuals are reluctant to stand. So, I am going to sit down and invite hon. Members please to indicate whether they wish to speak.
rose—
Thank you. The reason for that is that the Chair is required to commence the first of the three winding-up speeches at 3.30, which gives us 38 minutes. I would ask hon. Members who seek to contribute please to bear that in mind when they make their contributions, and also when they accept and respond to interventions.
I quickly congratulate the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on initiating this debate on an incredibly important issue.
If one thing signified a change of Government and a change of spirit in the nation, it was when new Labour held out as one of its flagship initiatives its freedom of information legislation. The right hon. Gentleman referred to a quotation by the Prime Minister from before he was the Prime Minister, and I shall do likewise. In 1996, the Prime Minister expressed his personal commitment to freedom of information by saying that
“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 gave a cheer for that, and I would still give a cheer for any Prime Minister who maintained that high standard in their view of the relationship between Government and the people.
Freedom of information has always been about one thing: accountability. Freedom of information raises the level of informed public debate, enabling individuals outside to judge matters of public policy on the basis of that information. I long ago came to the conclusion that it is not ill informed debate that Governments fear; it is informed debate, understanding and the facts that relate to the debate that they fear.
The extraordinary thing is that the law on freedom of information has been fully in effect for only two years. What is behind the drive to introduce, propose or set out for consultation new regulations? Like many of us, I regard the cost argument as very curious. We are talking about a very small sum of money in the general scheme of things—about £30 million a year as it stands. The Government seek to reduce that, but I think of their other schemes. It does not take much imagination to give a catalogue across 10 years of some of the schemes and the waste, which runs not to tens of millions of pounds, but to hundreds and even thousands of millions. The scheme that perhaps most caught the imagination early on was the dome.
I am therefore concerned about the Government’s proposals and the two significant changes that they hope to bring about. The first is, as the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, that authorities could take account of the costs of the time spent reading the information, consulting other bodies about it and whether to release it, in deciding whether the £600 or £450 limit—depending on whether the request was to local government or central Government—had been reached. The time spent searching for and extracting the information would be included, as it is at present. My second concern—this is the damaging thing—is that authorities could also aggregate unrelated requests made within a 60-day working period by the same individual or organisation, if it were reasonable to do so under the circumstances, and refuse them all if the combined costs exceeded the £600 or £450 limit.
That strikes at the very means by which we learn much information. I see in this packed Chamber a representative of The Guardian, which brings to the public’s attention information that it has sourced through freedom of information applications. The right hon. Gentleman referred to his local paper. For us in the west midlands, the local paper is the Express and Star. I think of the extraordinary role played by the Yorkshire Post in giving ordinary people knowledge about some of the costs of local government structures and the police and how money is spent, and in discovering whether policemen who had been disciplined were still on the force. Those might seem like little things, but the construct is true. How can we judge whether something is appropriate unless we have access to the information?
There is another great organisation called the House of Commons, but many hon. Members now have to resort to freedom of information legislation. I see to my left the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), who is well known for pursuing details that are not easily available through our processes of tabling parliamentary questions.
So what is behind the proposal? It is, in fact, an endeavour to cut off the public’s wider access to information. I cannot see any other rationale among those that have been put forward to support the decision. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) and the Minister know my position full well—it is the position that many, many Labour Members of Parliament held when they were first elected on that bright sunshiny day, 10 years ago.
I hope that this debate will focus our consciousness. How can we have accountable Government and accountable local authorities if we cannot have access to the information that informs judgments? Why are the regulations coming into force—or, from the point of view of the Executive, why do they hope that the regulations are coming into force? How can this be if we assert ourselves and argue that the Government should stand fast by the intent that they first expressed so long ago?
rose—
Order. There are five contenders for the 31 minutes available. Hon. Members should please bear that in mind.
I shall be extremely brief, Mr. Cook. As you say, other Members want to speak, but I must also apologise because I shall not be here for the end of the debate due to a Select Committee commitment. I am therefore obliged to be extremely quick.
Most in this Chamber have form on the issue of freedom of information in one way or another. We have lived with it for many years and taken pride in delivering for the first time a law on freedom of information. Naturally, we want to protect it. So we are concerned at proposals to restrict the 2000 Act so soon after its implementation. Let us be clear: the only intention of the proposals is to restrict the operation of the Act. It is worth asking about the underlying rationale. Well, there must be two: first, the Act is costing more than we want to pay and we would like to reduce the cost; and secondly, it is proving so onerous and irksome that we would like to restrict access to it. A way has been found to achieve both those objectives in one set of regulations.
Why should that happen? It is extremely puzzling, especially when the regulations are set alongside the other bizarre development—an attempt, through a private Member’s Bill, to remove the House of Commons and Members of Parliament from the orbit of the Act that they themselves passed. You couldn’t make it up. Furthermore, I gather that there is all manner of usual-channels collaboration to ensure that that happens.
This must be utterly bewildering to the outside world. We have done something that we are proud of, and it is beginning to operate—unearthing information and improving the quality of our democracy. Then we say on the one hand, “Oh, by the way, we’d like to remove ourselves from it,” and on the other, “We’d like to introduce some restrictions so that it does not work so effectively.” It is utterly bizarre.
The Public Administration Committee, which I chair, considered the legislation. We looked at it in draft and spent a lot of time making sure that we could improve it—and we did, in a number of ways. At the heart of the arguments was public interest. Where did that lie in particular cases? Should certain information be withheld or disclosed, and who would decide where that public interest was to be found? That is at the centre of the whole approach to the issue and of the legislation.
The question has arisen recently in respect of decisions being taken about which Post Office branches may or may not close and whether a list exists. One of the excellent media sources in the south-west, the Western Morning News, made a freedom of information request on that topic. The answer came back that, if such a list existed, it was not in the public interest for it to be in the public domain at this stage. It will be crucial for all communities that may well be under threat of losing their post offices to prepare their campaigns to keep them. How does the hon. Gentleman respond to that?
The examples being given are telling. I could extend the hon. Gentleman’s point to the press generally, which hon. Members have mentioned. One of the great advantages of the freedom of information regime is that instead of simply making up stories, at which they are traditionally rather good, the press now have a discipline of finding the facts about cases. Then they can make up stories about them. It is a great advance and it is utterly puzzling that we should now want to go into reverse.
The point that I am trying to get at is that the public interest argument was central to the whole basis of the legislation, yet it is entirely absent from the proposals before us. They do not answer the fundamental question: what value do the Government put on freedom of information? Is it £35 million? Perhaps it should be double that. How do they know that £35 million is too high a value? How do we evaluate the examples that hon. Members are giving? That is the question behind the issue. I would put an extraordinarily high value on the contribution that freedom of information makes to the quality of our democracy and society. The Government must be able to answer the question about what value they put on it. Again, that is at the heart of the issue. In making the proposals, they have not even attempted to make that balancing, evaluative test, which is at the heart of the legislation itself.
I love the passion that the hon. Gentleman brings to his argument. The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) mentioned the Yorkshire Post and the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) has just mentioned cost saving. The reality is that many freedom of information requests made by the Yorkshire Post have pulled out from local authorities, particularly police authorities, huge expenses that have been squandered—£28,000 for a shower for the chief constable, £65,000 for a 4x4 BMW, £6,000 for—
Order. The hon. Gentleman should be brief.
All that came out, and only because of freedom of information.
So that we do not get a consensus that we do not really want, let me extend the hon. Gentleman’s argument a fraction further. One of the reasons why it is not a good idea to exclude Members of Parliament from the legislation is that we have to produce the same kind of information—the list of expenses that we all have to claim. Of course we find that irksome, but an exclusion would have an effect on the pattern of claims—exactly the same effect to which the hon. Gentleman points in other areas of public life. We should not fool ourselves about that.
I conclude by saying that public value is completely absent from what is proposed, yet it was completely central to the legislation. My conclusion, which has been hinted at already, is that the fundamental reason for wanting freedom of information has not yet entered the bloodstream of the Government. That is the truth of the matter. When we were passing the law, we always knew that unless it produced that culture change and entered the bloodstream of every public body in the land, it would not be doing its job. What has happened tells us, unfortunately, that it has not yet entered the bloodstream of the Government.
I know that that law has entered the bloodstream of my hon. and learned Friend the Minister. She is a believer, although she will have to defend the indefensible in a moment. We know that she does not believe in it; she is too principled. One of the penalties of being a Minister is that they have to read out things that they know are not true. That is a considerable quality, which some of us have not managed to achieve. That goes to the heart of the issue. Parliament passed and believes in the legislation, which is producing lots of good effects. It would be absurd and bizarre if we started rolling it back.
rose—
Order. One of the previous contenders has slipped his moorings and appears to have left port. My previous anxieties about getting everyone in have somewhat eased. We now have 21 minutes and only two Members are seeking to catch my eye. I call Tim Farron.
Thank you, Mr. Cook. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on securing this debate, which is extremely important, as has already been said. He made excellent points in his speech, although I do not entirely agree with the lavish praise that he heaped on the 2000 Act. Many of us felt at the time that the Act was far too weak. Indeed, Lord Clark of Windermere, who is a constituent of mine, ostensibly resigned because the Act was not made of the stuff that he wished it was.
It is all the more depressing, therefore, that we are having this debate about potentially narrowing the Freedom of Information Act, rather than expanding it or widening its scope. Liberal Democrat Members would certainly like to see it expanded and the limitations on access to information reduced. One complaint that I have about the Act as it stands is that public bodies can refuse freedom of information requests on cost grounds, because that already permits them to give allowable, but nevertheless spurious, reasons for refusing access to vital information. Now, of course, the Government propose to allow agencies to take account of areas of work that could increase the overall cost in each case, and such powers are bound to be abused in some quarters. Even if they are exercised without malice, they are bound to increase the number of requests that will not be properly answered.
To follow an earlier line of argument, the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) talked about costs and asked what price the Government put on freedom of information. What are we saving? The proposals have ostensibly been introduced to save not quite £12 million. Is it worth it? The Government are curtailing the liberties of every citizen in the country to save £12 million. However, they are preparing to take away our liberties under an identity card scheme that will cost 500 times that amount, at a conservative estimate. We could scrap that scheme and have plenty of money to ensure that we had much wider access to information.
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that his point not only applies to the Government, but goes back to the culture of secrecy in this House, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) referred? We often apply for information through the House, but we are told that the cost of providing it is disproportionate. I have found that out to my cost many times over the years. If we ally that with the inability to elicit information through the 2000 Act, what price the essential function of every Member of this House of holding the Executive to account?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He is absolutely right, and I sympathise with him. I, too, have been given that reason for not having many of my written questions answered. As he suggests, the issue extends to other bodies beyond the Government, such as national park authorities, local councils and a variety of other quangos. We have to drag information out of those bodies, and it is important that we can do that.
Of course, we have to ask what the motivation is for seeking this £12 million saving. If the figure is just £12 million, it is a rather odd and relatively small saving to seek. Have this supposedly reformist Government gone native?
Is not one possible answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question about motivation that a Government who started off with great hopes and intentions on that bright, sunny day—to borrow the phrase used by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd)—have progressively gone into a bunker and forgotten their principles during eight or nine years in government? In effect, they are trying to do a U-turn because they regret the right thing that they did earlier.
Yes, I was just getting to that, and I am sorry that I did not see the hon. Gentleman trying to intervene earlier, because I have half made his point. I fear that the Government have, as he says, learned the lessons of their reforming and have decided to go native. They feel pressured by a monster than they cannot control, even though that monster is not nearly as scary as it should be.
Let me briefly run through some examples of how the Act has worked and been of great value in my constituency. We have a good, campaigning local newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette, which is pretty famous. It made a freedom of information request to the local police authority about the impact of new speed cameras. Whatever one’s view about the impact and usefulness of speed cameras, it was only by using the Act that the newspaper discovered that new speed cameras had led to a 753 per cent. increase in the number of speeding tickets. That valuable information is of use and interest to the public.
I mentioned national parks a moment ago, and there are two in my constituency—the Yorkshire Dales national park and the Lake District national park, which has just gone through the interesting experience of losing its chief officer. Various issues were not revealed at that point, but they all related to the good and proper use of public money. They would not have been revealed at all had the newspaper not been able to use the Act. I am sure that the authority did not want to answer the newspaper’s irksome and difficult questions and that it would have taken every opportunity not to do so, had it been able to. However, the proposed changes could present authorities with that opportunity in future.
I am pursuing an issue that alarms me greatly. I discovered that social services departments are increasingly forcing people who are going into care to cash in investments that they had taken out partly to pay off mortgages, which could put their partners and families at the risk of losing their homes. I am trying to find out what flexibility there is out there for discounting such investments, and the Act is my only obvious route for securing that information. It will be very difficult for those involved to find and produce it, so it is all the more important that the scope of the Act is widened, rather than narrowed.
To conclude, the proposals are a fundamental threat to the relationship between the individual and the state. From the perspective of public bodies, freedom of information requests are no doubt irksome, embarrassing and potentially dangerous, but any move that makes it less likely that they will be put in an irksome, embarrassing and dangerous position should be resisted at all costs.
I am particularly grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) for being clever enough to secure this badly needed debate. He introduced it admirably and set out the issues very well.
I am interested in the issue because I introduced the Right to Know Bill—a private Member’s Bill—in 1992. I inherited it from the then Labour Opposition, who had drafted it in the naïve assumption that they would be elected at the polls that year and who therefore had an excellent, fully drafted Bill in their hands. Thanks to the great amount of advice that they received from bodies such as the Campaign for Freedom of Information, they learned—as the world had done over the previous 10 years from Australia, New Zealand and Canada—which parts of freedom of information legislation were good and which were difficult. Having learned those lessons, countries around the world generally conceded that we had, in anticipation of being in government, drafted a state-of-the-art Bill with plenty of teeth, plenty of thought and plenty of learning from bad experience.
Of course, we were not elected then, but when we were, I was fortunate enough to be on the Cabinet Sub-Committee that looked at translating our policy and our original Bill into a formal Government Bill. That was a salutary experience, in that one saw a good policy and a good Bill gradually weakened, despite the extremely good leadership of Lord Clark of Windermere, or David Clark as he was then, who was the Cabinet Minister responsible for the issue. He fought a subtle and clever campaign to salvage what he could and he got a better White Paper than one would have expected had one looked around the table and seen the various Cabinet Ministers who were prepared to undermine it.
Will the hon. Gentleman name them?
In the interests of freedom of information, let me say that those people are well known. They know who they are, as does anybody who has taken an interest in this subject. However, the issue was not the individuals; some of the Ministers around that table, like the Minister with us today, had long, honourable and interesting records. None the less, the Government’s overall attitude was ambiguous, to put it politely, and the legislation that we passed was much weaker than it should have been. The comparison was with the legislation of the Irish Government, who, like us, had learned from the experience of the 1980s, but who had done a much better job and introduced a much more forceful measure.
So the Government have form on the subject; they have always had mixed, ambiguous views. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn noted, there are plenty of Ministers, such as the Lord Chancellor, who would give the measure warm and sincere words; and there are probably good Departments doing good work individually in relation to it. I was interested in what my right hon. Friend said about the record of the Ministry of Defence.
Most particularly to the Government’s credit, they selected or appointed an excellent Information Commissioner in Mr. Richard Thomas. Without him the Act would have been far less effective. He is the one thing keeping it—and hope—afloat. It was a brave appointment by the Government, but the Act should be stronger, and we need it to be stronger. If we are interested in good government locally or nationally we need freedom of information; it makes for better decisions. It concentrates the mind, in all government bodies at every level, if the information that they have can be shared with the public. The more information there is, the better government is.
We need to strengthen the legislation rather than weaken it. The proposals, as hon. Members on both sides of the House have said, will undoubtedly have a weakening effect. The idea of incorporating the timing of consultation and consideration, and the aggregation—the bundling together—will inevitably weaken the legislation. It will do so not in itself, because the sums and timings concerned are small, but because it gives any authority, Minister, local government department or public agency that wishes not to reveal information a perfectly respectable, wholly legal and unchallengeable way of refusing any request. That will completely sink the legislation.
There are several things about freedom of information that are very important, including empowerment of the individual. Most of the individual requests—the 60 per cent. that have been referred to—are fairly uncontentious. However, they are very important for enabling the individuals concerned to get a grip on their lives, by finding out what is on police or Army records—the things that give a person a sense of identity or of participating in their own life. Those aspects of the matter are important and probably will not be affected by the regulations often or much; they will not be used in relation to them. They will be used in the public sphere of journalists, politicians and people who are crusading on an issue; it is their activities that will be caught, easily, without the need for the relevant bodies even to break step. They will sweep up, if they wish to; many of them will not, and it is not right to make a doomsday speech, claiming that this is the end of the legislation. The Act will continue to be applied throughout the country, but anything that is painful for the Government or contentious—the cutting-edge issues that make the Act so important—will not even be at issue. It will be possible to ignore them, and that is wrong. It will make for worse government, at local and national level.
Hon. Members on both sides of the House have asked the reason for the change to the regulations, and I am sure that the Government believe—under pressure from the Treasury, with the new spending round—that it is to do with cost. However, that is laughable. We have always under-financed the Act, from day one. We should have spent a huge amount of money that was comparable, say, to what went into advertising the delights of the national lottery. If we had had that sort of advertising campaign, about the potential of the Act and the relevance of freedom of information to the lives of people and communities, it would not have cost a huge sum but it would have changed public awareness and use of the measure. We have never put money behind it, and the idea of cutting a few million pounds by reducing the number of requests is shameful. Hon. Members have rightly complimented the Minister on her integrity, but I hope that she will swallow the part of her speech that argues the change is being made on financial grounds. That is an appalling and laughable argument that bears no scrutiny. The sums involved are nugatory compared with the political and democratic benefits flowing from the Act.
On the financial side, which is of course only one narrow aspect of the matter, does not the Freedom of Information Act, properly applied, save public money by revealing excesses and improper expenditure, thus improving central and local government?
Of course; the hon. Gentleman is completely right. The Act can do that, although not invariably or inevitably. It saves money by helping Government to understand and properly debate important decisions, and avoid those that would be wrong, misguided or costly. Indirectly, it can have the effect that he mentioned. We see examples of that happening all over the world under other regimes, and it is certainly true here.
Money is not the explanation of what is proposed, and it cannot really be that our wonderful civil service or local authority officers are so burdened that they cannot deal with a few requests; the numbers are small, and in a really participatory democracy the legislation would be used much more, which is perhaps what the Government fear. The idea that we should not welcome that effect is nonsense. It is a question not of price, but of value: what value do we put on our democracy and the scrutiny of it? That is what we are discussing. Behind it, we are discussing a yet bigger issue. In the current generation, Parliament is getting weaker and weaker in relation to Governments who are growing more and more mighty. We have almighty Government and a Parliament that in its recent manifestations over the past 20 or 50 years—certainly over the past 100 years—has been getting weaker.
The imbalance between the Executive and the legislature has reached a critical point. If we pass the regulations they will be only a small drop of water in the balance, but that will tip it in the wrong direction for Parliament and the public realm, and the investigative press. Heaven knows, with a few honourable local and national exceptions, we do not have a rigorous investigative press that fights on our behalf to scrutinise and call to account local or national government. Thank heavens for the few journalists and titles that do so, but we can never say at the moment that we have a rigorous press or Parliament. If the regulations go through, it will be much easier to neuter Parliament and anyone in the public realm who wants to ask difficult and pertinent questions. We would be fools to allow them to be passed.
I am sure, as every other right hon. and hon. Member who has spoken has said, that the Minister does not believe in the brief that she has before her. It will be difficult for her to present it. I hope that she will persuade her colleagues quietly to bury the regulations. They are not important financially, but they are very important to the quality of our parliamentary democracy.
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on his introduction of the debate. Several eloquent speeches have given good reasons for opposing the regulations. It is heartening to find the spirit of ’97 alive and well among Labour Members; it is only a pity that that spirit appears to have been dampened in the inner circle of Government. I hope that the powerful speeches, particularly from Labour Members, will have some influence on the Minister and her colleagues. The arguments have considerable merit.
There were, in 1997, the year of reforming zeal, several constitutional changes, but my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) was right to say that before the Freedom of Information Act was even formalised there had been a process of rowing back from its original state. I remember talking to David Clark, who was a very good Minister and seems to me to have been the first Cabinet Minister to be sacked for attempting to implement his party’s manifesto too successfully. Nevertheless, the Act is in force, and works. Change is proposed not because it does not work, but because it does.
That represents a fundamental threat to those who now believe that information needs to be suppressed rather than released. It may be inevitable after a long time in government that people find more reasons to suppress information than to release it, because the information is about their record rather than that of a previous Government, but that is very sad. As Members have made clear today, releasing information is good for accountability, and it is a fundamental democratic right.
It is also the case that releasing information leads to better government and, as a matter of fact, to cost savings. I very much agree that worries about costs are secondary to the principles involved, but even on that narrow ground, releasing information can lead to cost savings. If we in this House do not have the ability through parliamentary questions or freedom of information to scrutinise Ministers and the decision-making process and to discover the facts that will lead to informed debate, what are we here for, and what possible incentive is there for the Government to behave in a way that is responsible, that gives good value for money and that bears in mind issues of accountability? Asking Ministers of any party or any Government to behave with absolute integrity when there is no proper way of finding out what they are doing is asking a great deal of them.
Why were the proposals made in the first place? Several reasons have been suggested. I shall refer to the one in the Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs report of 13 June 2006. Baroness Ashton had been asked to elaborate on why the review was considered necessary, and she told the Committee that staff apparently
“are spending huge amounts of time simply finding files before we even get to the point of reading them”,
and that staff spent
“weeks and months…trying to find all of the information that is relevant.”
The Committee rightly concluded:
“We would be concerned if there were cases where public authorities were spending weeks finding information. Since authorities may already include this time within their calculations of chargeable limits, we do not consider that it would justify a review of the fees regulations, but it would demonstrate a serious shortcoming in some public authorities’ records management systems.”
That is drily but pertinently put. It succinctly demolished Baroness Ashton’s argument.
The Select Committee demolished Baroness Ashton’s argument, and it is up to the Government to demolish the arguments of those who are opposed to the regulations. In a letter to Lord Falconer on 11 December last year, the BBC stated:
“The BBC believes these proposals would dramatically curtail the ability of BBC journalists and others to put into the public domain material which merits disclosure in the public interest. In this way the proposed changes would actually obstruct the aim of increasing openness and transparency in public life that lies behind the government’s introduction of FOI.”
That is a succinct summary of what Members have said in this debate.
Of course, the BBC would be caught by the aggregation proposal as well. Presumably, if one BBC journalist were to submit a request that took the organisation to the limit, the BBC, our primary investigative organ of the media, would be prevented from putting in further requests for three months. That is what the regulations suggest, and of course it is completely ludicrous. It would put the BBC’s ability to submit FOI requests on a par with an individual who may wish, quite properly, to look at their Army records. No one wishes to restrict that in any way, but to compare the two is, frankly, not sensible. The BBC has an entirely different role, as do the rest of our media, our campaigning organisations and, dare I say it, Members of Parliament and others in public life who hold the Government to account. That is part of our role, and it should not be compromised.
The ease with which requests could be rejected if the proposals go through unamended is bizarre. I believe that that is the word that the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) used. “Insidious” is the word that I would more readily choose. There is already a £600 limit—a so-called appropriate limit—for requests made of central Government. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said, there is a question whether that is an appropriate limit in any case, but even if it is, we are now told that the costs attributable to considering a request will be capped at £400, and the costs attributable to consulting will also be capped at £400. Therefore, a request that is simply considered and consulted on could exceed the limit before its merits are even considered. I am sure that if a request is particularly difficult, there will be no difficulty in consulting a large number of civil servants and Ministers, all of whose time will add up quickly to £400.
Let us be in no doubt as to what the proposal is. It is a method of stopping any freedom of information request that is embarrassing or difficult from getting off square one. That is what it is about; that will be the result. Other Members were generous in saying that that is unintentional. Unfortunately, I do not agree.
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the Government insisted on their regulations, they could constructively allow appeals to the commissioner on applications that are turned down, and allow a public interest defence to be raised? Without those, the whole thing would be a disaster.
That would certainly be better than nothing, but it would be dangerous. First, the Government have shown no commitment to a proper public interest test. We saw that when the original Bill was watered down. Secondly, the commissioner, for whom I have tremendous respect as a matter of fact, is already overawed by the amount of work that he has to undertake. The hon. Gentleman’s suggestions would be the best of a bad job, but by no means a satisfactory consequence of the regulations.
I am afraid that the pendulum has begun to swing back against freedom of information. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase put his finger on it exactly: it is not in the bloodstream. That is a good way of putting it. The pendulum has swung back as far as the Government are concerned—some civil servants and Ministers never wanted freedom of information in the first place. It has swung back, dare I say it, in this House with the absurd proposal to exempt Members of Parliament from the Act. That came to notice thanks to David Hencke of The Guardian. Nobody else had picked up on it, and I intend to oppose it all the way through—it must be resisted.
The swinging back of the pendulum is shown by the fact that the House of Commons Commission, which is supposed to represent us, resisted for two years a modest freedom of information request of mine to break down the travel costs of MPs. It fought that at vast cost to this House in barristers’ fees and so on, and it lost. Next week—by Valentine’s day—it is required to produce the information, but it fought for two years against that modest request.
Unfortunately, people are resisting the basic culture of freedom of information. I had hoped that we had changed in 1997, but we are rowing back. Those who are in this room are well known as defenders of freedom of information. We must ensure that those outside this room, elsewhere in this House, feel equally strongly about it.
Before I sit down, let me make a plea directly to the Minister. I served with her on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and I have tremendous respect for her. I say that genuinely, not as a debating point. Members will know that I do not say such things unless I mean them. I do not believe, knowing as I do where she is coming from, that she can possibly believe that the regulations are the correct way forward. Whatever else she has to say today, I hope that she will be able to convince her colleagues in the Government that the proposals are indefensible. They will do the Government no good in terms of their standing with the public, and they will ultimately lead to worse government. I believe that she knows that in her heart of hearts. The proposals are an attempt to kick the legs from under the Freedom of Information Act, and the Liberal Democrats want no part of that.
I begin by congratulating the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on opening the debate so ably. Obviously, open government is less secretive. It is better government, and there is more public involvement and public trust. Decisions taken in secret that remain secret hardly lead to good or better public services and better value for money for the taxpayer. Open government actually costs much less.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) mentioned the millennium dome, which was a total disaster financially. One could add to that the foot and mouth crisis, the NHS information technology fiasco, the Child Support Agency meltdown and the Criminal Records Bureau problems, all of which have cost large amounts of money. Much of that expenditure could have been avoided if there had been more open, less secretive government. Extra scrutiny of public expenditure through FOI can result in big savings in public money, and that point was made by the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) a moment ago.
The Act is working reasonably well. I would not say that it was working perfectly—the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) was right when he said that quite a lot can be done to try to improve the legislation. There are delays at every stage. Whitehall Departments continually extend their original consideration beyond the 20-day deadline, and continually extend their internal reviews. When requests have been made and turned down twice, they go to the Information Commissioner and often sit in a six-month queue in Warrington before they are even considered. I urge the Minister to devote Government energy to tackling some of the problems to strengthen the public’s right to access public information, rather than finding ways to restrict that right.
A number of hon. Members have made it clear that the legislation is not costing a great deal. The report by the consultant from Frontier Economics came up with a figure of £35.5 million for the cost across the public sector, including the Information Commissioner and the tribunal. That is not a vast amount; in fact, it is a small sum. Let us compare that with what the Government spend every year on the Central Office of Information: it is about 8 per cent. of the cost of the COI. That puts that into perspective. The National Audit Office, in a report on 14 December, pointed out that the Government could save £660 million by completely restructuring their office supplies procurement. When we consider the cost of freedom of information in that context, this is a small sum, as was made clear by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher).
The upper limits of £600 and £450 are not often reached. The Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs has recommended that no changes be made. The Information Commissioner stated that the fees regime was working reasonably well. He went on to say that it had
“all the advantages of being simple, clear and straightforward and not being a deterrent.”
Why change the system? Why, indeed. Of course, the Government have to bear down on costs. I understand that the Department for Constitutional Affairs has received a pretty miserable settlement from the Chancellor for the next financial year. It has to have a beady eye on areas of expenditure where costs can be driven down—we accept that. However, a saving of roughly £12 million—just 4 per cent. of the cost of the COI—means that I do not think that we are talking about cost. Are we talking about abuse of the system? Manifestly, we are not. There is evidence that some commercial organisations have been getting carried away, but that could be dealt with separately. Is the system delivering what it is meant to deliver? It is working reasonably well, despite the flaws.
If one looks at various local newspapers and how they run campaigns to try to extract information from local bodies, one comes across a lot of examples. Indeed, a number of hon. Members have pointed out examples already. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills referred to two local newspapers, while the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale referred to his local newspaper. I have had a look at one of the newspapers from my part of the world, the Cambridge Evening News. I asked for some examples of news that has broken thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and there have been a number of interesting stories.
In November 2006, the Cambridge Evening News ran a story about how 30 police officers and 26 members of civilian police staff in Cambridgeshire were on long-term leave due to illness. In June 2006, a story was run, again based on FOI, about the cost of interpreters to the Cambridgeshire police: it was more than £700,000 a year, the equivalent of 35 extra bobbies on the beat. In May 2006, through information that had previously been refused, the newspaper discovered:
“Stop-and-searches by police led to almost 200 arrests in Cambridge last year, with nearly a quarter of those in the city centre.”
The paper has run various campaigns that are linked to the health service, and in March 2006 it discovered:
“Hospital bosses raised more than £1 million from their car parks last year at Addenbrooke’s and the adjacent Rosie Maternity Hospital.”
It also ran a story in February 2005 about violence and intimidation being part of daily life for staff at Addenbrooke’s, with more than 170 incidents of aggression against those staff, with many being punched, bitten, kicked and spat at.
All that information would not have come out were it not for the Act. Hon. Members have given numerous other national examples of how the Act has been used. The right hon. Member for Islwyn pointed out that there are dozens of examples in his former Department, the Ministry of Defence, of how the Act was used by members of the public and outside organisations to access information.
So, if we ask, “Why change the system?”, the answer is simple. Ministers want to curtail the flow of information. Maybe they are embarrassed that too many revelations have been coming out of Government. Surely the changes in the regulations will transform the working of the Act. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills pointed out, the reading, consideration and consultation with lawyers proposals will mean that many more requests will hit the limit. Ministers will effectively be able to stop any request that they feel is inconvenient. It will be, as the right hon. Member for Islwyn pointed out, a charter for public servants who want to be obstructive. Tens of thousands of requests will be removed from the system altogether.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central mentioned the Irish example. Ireland introduced various amendments to the Irish Freedom of Information Act in 2003, which included the introduction of a range of fees. In her annual report for 2004, the Irish Information Commissioner reported that following the introduction of fees and changes similar to those proposed here, requests for non-personal information declined by 75 per cent. She said that the decline in the use of the Act went far beyond what the Government intended when they decided to introduce fees and called for a review of the scale and structure of the charges. That is what happened in Ireland after similar changes to those proposed by the Government.
Let us consider the impact of aggregation. A number of hon. Members have mentioned it and its impact on specialist reporters. They have also discussed the impact of the new acting in concert rule, which would mean that the whole staff of a newspaper would be aggregated and the newspaper could be restricted to one FOI request a month. If the newspaper in my region that carried out the campaigns I mentioned earlier had been restricted to one request a month, many of those stories would never have been brought to the attention of the public.
The Society of Editors has been outspoken on the subject. It has made it clear that it believes
“that the proposals on charging and attempts to reduce the level of information requests are fundamentally flawed. They would undermine the ideas behind the legislation and interrupt valuable progress.”
The inimitable Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information has used language that is far stronger.
The 12-week consultation has been ridiculously short. I understand that after the process ends on 8 March, the regulations will be introduced on 19 March—an even shorter period. I join with other hon. Members in urging the Minister to think again. Any legislation that is virtually brand new needs more time before any worthwhile assessment of it can be made. We need much more time for a proper, mature assessment of the workings of the legislation. The regulations would effectively neuter and destroy the Act, and I urge the Minister to use all her persuasive powers as an eminent, learned QC to talk to her colleagues and to tell them that the Government must think again.
I am grateful for the personal comments made about me; I am also glad that this excellent debate has taken place.
Let us remind ourselves that the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) is a member of a party that has not brought in any kind of freedom of information legislation. The measure has been six manifestos in the making, and there was no doubt an internal struggle to get it through. It is now law, and it has been in force for about two years. It is utter nonsense to suggest that there has been any kind of summersault after that length of struggle. It is incorrect.
For the first time ever, a full statutory right to know was introduced. We must recognise how far we have come from the situation under the Tories, when the public had no right whatever to request information held by a public authority. The Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs was right to compliment the Government on a measure that has been what it called a significant success. I agree.
Will the Minister give way?
I apologise, but I do not have the time.
Individuals wanting to find out about the performance of the local NHS trust can do so; local newspapers wanting to know how their council is allocating money to local services can do so; and national journalists searching for information about the most embarrassing things—payments made under the common agricultural policy, or whatever else it might be—can do so. The Freedom of Information Act has contributed hugely to healthy debate. It covers 100,000 public authorities, and it takes in myriad bodies that affect our constituents’ daily lives in a tangible way. It is fully retrospective; 63,000 pieces of information have been released; and 60 per cent. of all applications are allowed and answered in full.
In an Adjournment debate recently secured by a Conservative Member, the House heard of failures in more than one health authority. My Department went out of its way to ensure that those health authorities knew that we intended those queries to be answered. That is how committed we are to the legislation.
When the fees regulations were debated in Committee, it was announced that they would be reviewed within 12 to 18 months of their implementation to see how they were working. That was right and sensible. Good governance requires us to review the practical operation of legislation and to make changes if appropriate. I am very much in favour of a great increase in post-legislative scrutiny, of which this is a good example.
The review, which was of course independent, was undertaken by Frontier Economics. The entire findings were published, which included suggestions of a far more draconian nature than the current one. If the changes were about enabling central Government and the wider public sector to avoid high-profile, contentious or difficult requests, we would impose a charge. That had a destructive effect in Ireland, which saw a 75 per cent. reduction in the number of applications, and we calculated that it would cut by about 44 per cent. the time spent by officials on these matters if we were to do that. Clearly and obviously, what is proposed is not about restricting the operation of the Act. It is about targeting the approach; a tiny minority of requests impose disproportionate burdens on the Government, some of which, frankly, take weeks to deal with.
Let me deal with some of the detail. We intend to increase the number of activities that will count toward the appropriate limit of £600 for reading, consultation and time. If that happens, it will be subject to guidance and a framework. It will be subject to principle, and the application of those principles will be subject to appeal. It is not a situation in which public authorities can cook up some means of extending the time that they take over an inquiry to obfuscate the progress of information that they want to conceal.
Cases will be fully appealable, and the framework will be totally transparent. It would take a huge leap of imagination to link that transparent way of considering the value of work on dealing with requests with trying to get rid of the most embarrassing, contentious or high-profile cases. There is no connection. I repeat that it is all subject to appeal. In addition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) is wrong—he will be glad to hear it—because there will still be a duty on the public authority, even in those situations, to try to help individuals to refine their requests so that they come within the time limit.
Another argument was raised about ministerial time, as if what is proposed is the thin end of the wedge to ensure that we do not give answers when we should. Ministerial time is frequently involved, but I have not heard a shred of evidence that it is abused. It is charged at the ludicrous rate of £25 an hour when it is really worth zillions. Truly, either there is evidence that we are abusing the use of ministerial time or people should simply accept what has been happening since the Act came into force, and that there will be no change in how it will function because it is part of the process.
It is mad that we do not charge for reading. All hon. Members ask parliamentary questions. There is no guidance to say that reading time should not be included when we come to the time limit on answering parliamentary questions. It usually is included. Why, all of a sudden, is it important to exclude reading from freedom of information requests? It lacks logic.
With aggregation, the applicant is pursued blindly—I mean that people do not refuse something because of who is asking. It means nothing more than that. Under existing legislation, public authorities have the right to aggregate similar requests. To do that, they need to know the identity of the requester. There is no new principle here as to identifying the requester.
The public sector is right to expect top-rate research skills from those whose jobs depend on them. The careers of journalists, professional campaigners and researchers are based on being able to ask clear, unambiguous and precise questions, but they do not seem to do it that often in freedom of information territory. I shall not give specific examples, but a reasonable analogy is a question about all the information since 1066 on the use of the wheel, when what the inquirer—the professional journalist—is really driving at is how many grants were given to car manufacturers in certain years. Such deliberately wide inquiries can take weeks of officials’ time, which is priced at £25 an hour.
Will the Minister give way?
I would, but I have very little time.
Of course, such activity costs the Government infinitely more than £25 an hour. Such open-ended trawling and unspecific and unfocused inquiry are the problem.
I have freedom of information in my blood—my blood group is not AO; it is FOI—but my blood gets hot when I think of my constituents in Redcar having to subsidise, on my Department’s estimate, the BBC’s research budget by about £1 million a year. That is the result of open-ended questions being asked in that trawling way. I get hot about the fact that the legislation was introduced with the intention of the Government being very open. Abuse is too strong a word, but it is not far from the truth when it comes to some requests. We are having to take the blame for trying to restrict the impact on public finances. That is completely the wrong approach. Our intention is to do no more than tailor how the legislation works so that it gives the best value to the most people in freedom of information terms, instead of concentrating a disproportionate cost on a few people who could get the information from anywhere else or could perfectly easily, by consulting the public body or working on their own, narrow the focus of their inquiries rather than take huge and disproportionate swathes of officials’ time.
We have had an excellent debate, which I welcome. The consultation process continues until 8 March. I would be furious with my staff if they had not fixed a date for the regulations, but that is no indication that the Government do not intend to take seriously into account everything that is put forward in the consultation. I have it in writing—I shall say so to put it beyond doubt—that the terms of the consultation are what they are, but the Government will take into account all that is put forward in the consultation process. We have so far received a rather small group of responses to the consultation—by 1 February, there was a total of 21. I fervently hope for a larger number. The responses so far are fairly evenly split, although that may not be the eventual outcome. I glad to have had this debate. Let us make the consultation hear everybody’s views, so that we can come to a measured decision.