Government Transparency

Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)
2.  What steps his Department has taken to improve transparency in government.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Matthew Hancock)
Over the past five years, we have opened up 20,000 Government data sets to the public and made expenditure data covering more than £188 billion of Government spending available for scrutiny. Through our leading role in the international Open Government Partnership, we will continue to be one of the most open and transparent Governments in the world.

Paula Sherriff
The Minister has admitted to me in a written answer that his so-called freedom of information commission is not itself subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Now he has reported that it will not commit to publishing evidence or minutes and that it may meet in private, ban journalists from naming its press spokesperson and even refuse to consider enforcing the Act on privatised services. Is it not time to end this farce and start again?

Matthew Hancock
No, the commission that is looking into how the Act has operated over the past 10 years is, rightly, independent, so it deals with the question of how it operates. Private organisations have not been subject to the Act, because it is about government information, so it is entirely appropriate for them to make the decisions.

Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
How will transparency in government be improved by the alteration of the code of conduct for special advisers, which now says that they shall be entitled to give instructions to communications staff in Departments?

Matthew Hancock
The transparency of Government information is absolutely aided by a combination of our open data and the use of press officers and communication teams to explain to the public what is going on. Making sure that that happens in an orderly and organised way, subject to Ministers’ wishes, is a very important part of it running effectively.

Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)
I make a genuine offer to the Minister: we would like to build on the progress of the past decade in opening up government to more scrutiny. But we are very concerned that the commission on freedom of information may roll back the FOI Act. It is not subject to the FOI Act and it has recently held a secret briefing to invited-only journalists, off the record. It is not very transparent, is it? Is there a reason for that?

Matthew Hancock
First, may I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his post and congratulate him on his resounding victory in the deputy leadership election? On this question, I also welcome his tone. I am a great  supporter of the Act, but 10 years after its introduction it is reasonable to see how it is operating and to make sure, as the Justice Committee said in the last Parliament, that there is a “safe space” for policymaking, so that people can be confident about giving frank advice to powerful people safe in the knowledge that that will remain private. It is about how this operates; it is not about the principle of having freedom of information in the first place.

Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
How can we have transparency in government when I, as an MP, cannot get a straight answer to a simple question? Let me give an example of that. I submitted a question to the Secretary of State for Scotland asking how many meetings he had had with the Treasury on a specific subject. The answer I got was that there had been many meetings; I did not get a number. I therefore asked a supplementary question requesting the dates of the meetings, because I thought that would flesh it out, but the answer I got back was, “I have had many meetings”. That seems to be the opposite of transparency, and we need to start here with ministerial answers to MPs.

Matthew Hancock
I am afraid I am going to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, because I do not know when those meetings were or how many there were—but I do know that by the sounds of it there were many meetings.

Mr Speaker
Put a note in the Library and everybody will be satisfied.