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Jul 1, 2009 Articles, FOI in Parliament
Here is the statement I submitted in evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life on 30th June 2009. Tom Steinberg of My Society was also questioned with me. A transcript of our discussion with the committee members should be published shortly.
What keeps people out of power and out of politics is the lack of access to meaningful and useful information. My experience since 2004 has been that Parliament greedily hoards information as a miser does gold. And just as a miser’s hoarding means his gold does not benefit the wider economy so parliament’s insistence on hoarding information does not benefit civic society. Instead citizens remain ignorant about the very institution that is meant to epitomise democracy in this country. If this is happening in Parliament then how much worse is it lower down the scale?
Parliament sets an example to public servants and public bodies throughout the nation, which is why it is so appalling to see the way MPs and officials in parliament behaved when faced with a robust freedom of information challenge. They did not rise to the challenge but actively fought to obstruct it and to suppress information clearly in the public interest. They fought for four years and at great public expense. In the process they demeaned terms such as national security and privacy. Parliament is not, in my view, a system open to full participatory democracy. At least officials are now adopting the right rhetoric about democracy and transparency – which is a victory in itself – but the real victory comes when the practice changes. And that has not happened yet. I hope this committee’s recommendations will go so some way to ensuring that real, tangible change takes place so that we have a parliament suited to 21st century democracy.
I would like to talk specifically about my experience trying to access information from Parliament, in particular trying to get details of MPs’ expense claims. You may have read about my story in the Guardian which I’ve included with this statement, so I’ll be brief.
My battle began in 2004. I was working on a book called ‘Your Right to Know’, a guide for citizens on how to use the new Freedom of Information Act. It might be worth giving a bit of background on why I decided to write such a book.
I’d trained and worked as a journalist in America. First as a political reporter and then covering crime. The American style of journalism relies heavily on official public records. It may be why some British journalists describe US papers as boring and academic. In the US all states have laws on public records, open meetings and freedom of information. The default position is generally that any organisation receiving the bulk of its funding from the taxpayer must be directly accountable to the public. Of course there are instances where this ideal is not adhered to but for the most part I found that locally, information was widely and easily available. For example, doing the crime beat consisted not just of talking to various police officers but also looking through all the criminal incident reports, going to the jail to look through the booking sheets, scouring court documents, looking at fire inspection reports, etc.
These records are not available in the UK. In fact until October 2007 it was actually illegal for a fireman to let the public see the results of a fire safety inspection: done at public cost and in the public’s name. This is one of the 300+ prohibitions on disclosure that exist in the UK. The type of reporting I am used to doing is just not possible in Britain. Here a reporter has to rely almost entirely on people. Information is not available to all, no strings attached as a statutory right, but comes at the discretion of an individual. There is a kind of quid pro quo to accessing information in the UK that I find uncomfortable and I don’t believe it benefits society. I always find it odd how so many British politicians complain about the sensationalist British press and then refuse to provide any of the official data needed for a more serious, academic journalistic inquiry.
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Jun 25, 2009 Campaigns, FOI in Parliament, Freedom of Information
Readers of the blog may recall Alan Keen MP questioning my motives at a parliamentary inquiry held several weeks ago.
With his wife, Ann, the couple are known as ‘Mr and Mrs Expenses’ for using £175,000 of taxpayers’ money to help buy a flat near Parliament – while they already had a constituency home nine miles away. They claimed more than £300,000 between them last year alone.
Now it seems that flat in Brentford – the couple’s ‘main home’ – has been vacant for so long the council want to repossess it.
Jun 22, 2009 Articles, FOI in Parliament, Freedom of Information
It’s our data, make it accessible
Guardian, Friday 19 June 2009
By Heather Brooke
It was rather like trying to do a Google search and getting your answers delivered as a truckload of blacked-out telephone directories. The information age may have arrived some decades ago but from the format of yesterday’s publication of MPs’ expenses, Parliament is so last century.
The 700,000 pages of scanned images put online in pdf were described by Sir Stuart Bell as a ‘great achievement’ for Parliament. And I suppose it is if you’re used to inscribing your words on animal skins.
If we truly aim to be an informed electorate then we need quick, direct access to the vast troves of information held not just within Parliament but all other public bodies.
We have moved on from static documents. For information to be useful it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible. We book our own holidays not through a travel agent but though search engines where we can compare and find the best value flights, hotels and car rentals. We no longer call up librarians with our questions but type them into Google or post them on Twitter. We can compare prices between shops and even between countries. We no longer have to rely on traditional media for our news but can graze for it across the entire globe via the internet and the postings of millions of citizen journalists.
People are used to having great swathes of information at their fingertips, yet parliament still believes it can control both the collection of information and its presentation. Officials want to lock-down documents so they can never be altered without specific written consent. You look at most government websites and the information is micro-managed to an appalling degree. There are a few exceptions – the Electoral Commission website springs to mind – but for the most part, bureaucrats and politicians are loath to allow people direct access to the raw data.
It is this loathing that lies behind officials’ reliance on the pdf document. It is a format that is fixed and static. It cannot be analysed. So we cannot, without a great deal of effort, see how many MPs are funnelling expenses into certain companies or overall food bill. This is why the Guardian set up its own crowd-sourced spreadsheet so the data could be unlocked and made useful. What that means is more taxpayers spending more of their own time and money to fix a system built badly under the instruction of the Commons officials. A better solution would have been to throw open the data from the very beginning and elicit volunteers to help in the publication.
There are no shortage of interested and skilled volunteers. Just look at the number who have helped on the Guardian’s expense website and http://whattheyclaimed.com/. Tom Steinberg and the developers at MySociety have been banging on Parliament’s door for a long time. They built the websites TheyWorkForYou and PublicWhip among others. But it’s always a struggle to get the public sector to release information. I can vouch for that.
It shouldn’t be like this. This is our data. It belongs to us. We paid for it and it was collected in our name. Isn’t it time we had access to it?
Jun 19, 2009 FOI in Parliament
It’s all there in black and white but it’s the black you notice.
The black costs money. It’s the single most expensive part of the operation to publish MPs’ expenses. It took over a year to produce yesterday’s disclosures but the delay and the cost were needless.
The expenses could have simply been put out for inspection in a Commons reading room at little to no cost. That’s how I looked at my local politician’s receipts in America more than 15 years ago. It was that exercise which prompted my five year campaign to bring transparency to parliament and last year I won a High Court victory in which the judges ruled for full disclosure of second homes allowances for a sample of 14 MPs.
The judges allowed for only seven types of sensitive information to be ‘redacted’. The Commons responded by announcing they would publish all MPs’ allowances for the past four years. Those records were scanned in by October 2008 yet numerous publication dates have come and gone. MPs even tried to pass a bill exempting themselves from their own law of transparency. Finally an insider got tired of waiting and leaked the raw data.
Now we’ve seen the censored version and it’s clear the Commons have not abided by the spirit of the High Court ruling. Instead of a presumption of openness they have opted for a presumption of secrecy in which only six types of information are disclosed. The rest are not for our eyes – even though we paid for it.
The censorship is random, inconsistent and unprofessional. It follows one guiding principal: the avoidance of embarrassment. And yet by exhibiting their censoriousness so boldly, MPs’ have only heaped more ridicule upon themselves.
The deletions we know about give the lie to the now-discredited ‘security’ and ‘privacy’ excuses. We see Gordon Brown’s Sky subscription blacked out along with Margaret Beckett’s plants and pergola.
But the blackness is a victory of sorts. It shows the full extent of the Commons censoring operation. I’m sure they would have preferred to drop all the deletions from our notice, pretend they never even existed. This is historically how disclosures are done in Government. The publication of ministers’ diaries for example only tell us what they want us to know. The censoring of the secrets is secret.
All MPs had to approve their documents and the blackness very visibly reflects their real commitment to openness. So we can see that former speaker Michael Martin, who personally blocked my freedom of information requests, has some of the most egregious black outs. He’s gone so far as to black out the name of the council in his council tax bill!
One has to wonder what the officials in the Members’ Estimate Committee were thinking when they decided yet again to try and suppress information clearly in the public interest. They know the Daily Telegraph has a full version of this data so they leave themselves wide open to a cross comparison and no doubt we’ll see a full expose of the secrets of the black boxes in the coming days.
Just who is doing the Commons public relations? Is their remit to bring parliament into as much disrepute as possible? If that’s the case it seems they’ve succeeded.
Jun 18, 2009 Freedom of Information
They are on the House of Commons website.
The mechanics of this publication have been characterised by the usual chaos, confusion and obfuscation we’ve come to expect from the House of Commons and the Members Estimates Committee. No official statement was given as to the final date, time and format. Just rumour and speculation. There was a complete lack of leadership, no identifiable person responsible for the publication – just the usual phalanx of faceless bureaucrats avoiding accountability.
I’m now wading through the documents but I’m doubtful that the public – who paid for all this – will see anything like the full record given to the Daily Telegraph.
If you spot anything interesting please contact me.
More to follow…
Jun 11, 2009 Campaigns, FOI in the news, Freedom of Information
In the hoo-ha about the Government’s new plans to be more transparent we should not be surprised that these reforms also include attempts to be more secretive. In the same way the Zimbabwe Government shut down newspapers under that country’s Freedom of Information law, so this Government plans to make Cabinet minutes automatically exempt from FOI for 20 years under the guise of ‘improving freedom of information’.
Sometimes I wonder if the scriptwriters for ‘Yes Minister’ are secretly working in Gordon Brown’s policy unit.
It’s not only Cabinet minutes that will receive this special secrecy. The Royal Family, too, will become even more unaccountable. The democratic campaign group Republic today condemned the plans which would see a blanket ban on access to all royal documents for 20 years, removing the current public interest test.
The Royal Family costs the taxpayer a good deal of money and it’s essential in a democracy that people have a right to see how that money is spent. The Royals aren’t above the law and this attempt to make them so will not help their case if they are to remain a valid institution in modern-day Britain.
One wonders why the Royals need such special protection. Bigger moats to clean? The costs of running a house that actually is Balmoral? To maintain public trust they should be open and accountable.
Jun 11, 2009 Articles, FOI in Parliament, FOI in the news, Freedom of Information
Freedom of information? It’s a state secret
The Times, June 11, 2009
By Heather Brooke
Promises of more open government have been made before
When it comes to politicians advocating open government the best advice is to ignore what they say and focus on what they do.
Yesterday, Gordon Brown used the dreaded word “transparency”. I have been campaigning for five years on freedom of information and had to go to the High Court to force the disclosure of MPs’ expenses, so it is with some satisfaction that I now hear the Prime Minister issuing statements about the need for open government that I couldn’t have written better myself.
Mr Brown proposed extending the scope of freedom of information. The funny thing is that he suggested this once before, in October 2007. It must have slipped his mind.
Back then, in the first flush of office, he gave a rousing speech on civil liberties. He announced a public consultation about extending coverage of the Freedom of Information Act to institutions that received huge whacks of taxpayers’ cash but had no obligation to be publicly accountable, such as city academies, Network Rail, and private companies providing public services.
The consultation closed in February 2008 and the results were supposed to be implemented no later than November 2008. Need I say that nothing happened? In January I inquired about this phantom consultation. I asked the Ministry of Justice for a copy of the submissions and timelines of progress on implementation. Not getting a straight answer, I filed an FoI request (as I do).
You can guess what happened next. My FoI request about the progress of freedom of information was rejected. The ministry claimed that all the information was exempt as it involved the “formulation of government policy”. So much for Mr Brown’s airy claim that “this is the public’s money. They should know how it is spent.”
Now Mr Brown has put in charge of the FoI reforms one Jack Straw, of the Ministry of Justice, (a department with one of the shoddiest records in answering FoI requests). He is to head a public debate on this secret public consultation. When it comes to making bureaucracies accountable this is the snail’s pace of progress.
How unlike the lightning speed with which new bureaucracies are created. Two were magicked into life just this week: A shiny new department for Peter Mandelson and the ironically-titled Government Democratic Council. I say ironic because in the true spirit of Yes, Minister its creation is shrouded in secrecy. It appears the members will be ministers appointed by the Prime Minister in secret and it’s unclear how transparently they will formulate reforms for a more transparent democracy. Here’s betting it will be behind closed doors.
Jun 11, 2009 Freedom of Information
The outgoing Information Commissioner Richard Thomas released a statement via his private PR company (paid for at public expense) this morning in which he urges Whitehall and the public sector to learn the lessons from the MPs’ expenses scandal and routinely publish more official information without waiting to be asked.
“The Freedom of Information Act has been seen as a somewhat fragile flower for most of its lifetime. It has now come of age and moved centre stage – a permanent fixture and a core part of the fabric of public life. The recent uproar over MPs’ expenses has cemented FOI’s reputation as a success story. Over the last four years a much wider range of other information has been disclosed up and down the country. It is a key channel for securing substantially improved transparency and accountability. The surprise is no longer the nature and extent of disclosure. What is astonishing is how much was previously treated as secret.
“There is now much talk of constitutional reform and re-connecting people with politics. Freedom of Information must be embedded within this debate. It is a defining feature of modern democracy – a stark reminder that those elected to power and their officials are accountable to the people. The public has the right to know what is done in their name and with their money. Transparency brings greater public understanding and less scope for impropriety or for decisions or activities to be taken behind closed doors which jeopardise public confidence.”
All very well but why has it taken him until now to understand the value of freedom of information? And on the eve of his departure? Everything Thomas says in this statement was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. In fact, this statement reads like a re-write from my introduction to the first edition of Your Right to Know – which is very flattering but as I always say: where’s the action?
The Information Commissioner still refuses to proactively publish his case log meaning that whenever anyone wants to know the extent of his considerable backlog they have to take time out of their busy day to file an FOI request. Why? The Scottish Information Commissioner has no such qualms and every case on his list is there for all the world to see.
If the Commissioner is to maintain his credibility he must proactively publish his case log now.
Jun 8, 2009 FOI in Parliament
Wow – the MPs’ expenses story has taken off in a way I never predicted. That’s part of the reason I’ve not been posting regularly (not that I’ve ever been a prolific blogger). But in the past month, I’ve been inundated with interview requests from all over the world. Apart from the British media, I’ve been in Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, CNN and the New York Times in the USA plus various other newspapers, TV and radio from Japan, Italy, Germany, Romania, New Zealand, Australia, Greece and Chile.
What’s amazing isn’t just the interest in the story but the way journalists and citizens of those countries immediately start to wonder: ‘What about our politicians? What are they doing with our money?’ And so the campaign for transparency and direct accountability goes global! Even while our House of Commons continues to work behind the scenes to block future disclosures (more on this soon), other countries are moving to greater openness.
Two political parties in New Zealand have announced proactive disclosure regimes for their politicians. Apparently, our scandal has a ring of familiarity for New Zealanders as explained in this article:
…back to 2001 in New Zealand when ministers Phillida Bunkle and Marian Hobbs were put through the wringer over their accommodation allowances, they were both registered as Wellington residents on the electoral roll in Wellington Central where they had contested the 1999 election but were both receiving out-of-towners accommodation allowances.
And in the United States, Congress announced last week that the volume called the Statement of Disbursements will now be published online. The quarterly records show how members of the House and Senate use their personal office funds. This information is already available but previously only in the form of a large paper book. It still contains a good deal more information than MPs are willing to disclose, most notably the names and salaries of their staff.
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