Cornwall is a truly magical place but it got me thinking about who owns this lovely landscape so favoured by artists. Land ownership is the primary means by which scarce resources are divided in society and as such in a democracy it is imperative that the people know who owns land. In the UK we don’t have a clear idea of who owns the land which is why I am keen to liberate the entire data set of the Land Registry. At the moment you can look up an address and find the owner for the cost of £4 per search but it is not possible to search by land owner.

We do know, however, who is the biggest land owner in Cornwall: the Duchy of Cornwall. But what do we know about this estate and the tax relief or benefits Prince Charles receives as a result of inheriting this vast land holding?

I asked one of my avid correspondents Philip Hosking who is a specialist in all matters Cornish. He’d been in touch several months ago seeking advice about using the Freedom of Information Act to get answers to questions about any public subsidies or benefits received by the Duchy.

He has found the Duchy to be less than transparent. Instead this feudal constitutional body of governance claims that it is nothing more than a private landed estate and therefore exempt from the FOI act. He did point me to John Cross who is using the FOI act to obtain as much info as possible on the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. You can find out about his work by visiting his blog Confirm or Deny.

For those interested in this subject, John Kirkhope, a Notary Public and Solicitor, has extensively researched the Duchy of Cornwall and is organising a series of public talks on the Laws of Cornwall.

I have one word of advice to all those seeking info on land ownership. Instead of using the Freedom of Information Act you might also try citing the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. This law is based on an EU directive and covers a wide range of information about the environment including land use and pollution. It also applies to any organisation conducting activities affecting the environment, not just public bodies (thus the Duchy of Cornwall IS covered under the EIR). For more info about using the EIR see the websites for the Information Commissioner, or the Scottish Information Commissioner. You should also look at the site of Rob Edwards who is an excellent journalist covering the environment and using both FOI and the EIR laws.

Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England, announced the new transparency in an interview with The Times.

Sir Martin says that taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent in the countryside. About £1.7 billion is paid to English farmers under the CAP, the bulk of it in farm support. About £320 million is allocated for green farming schemes and is paid to about 32,000 farmers, roughly a third of the total.

Apparently, users will be able to type in the name of a village, parish or postcode and find out which farmers in the area have signed up to environmental stewardship schemes and the cash received. The website will also provide a list of environmental work agreed to by the farmer. There may also be a feedback section where people can report on what farmers are doing.

The full EDU register of oil company hospitality

All in a day’s schmoozing for men from the ministry
Guardian, Friday July 6, 2007
By Elena Egawhary

The hospitality chalets at the All England Lawn Tennis Club have always been synonymous with public relations excess. But the identity of one unexpected recipient of the corporate Pimm’s and strawberries has raised eyebrows among green campaigners.

The giant oil company Chevron has provided an all-expenses-paid day out at Wimbledon for Jim Campbell, the civil servant in charge of regulating Britain’s oil and gas industry, including responsibility for pollution and oil spills.

The company says the invitation is an annual event – Mr Campbell went last year. Although it was coy about disclosing the cost, corporate hospitality firms quote up to £1,000 a head for packages that include the tennis tickets, drinks and meals.

The Wimbledon gift is only one example of the treats oil companies are showering on a single, sensitive, section of the Department of Trade and Industry – now renamed the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Documents obtained from the department’s Energy Development Unit (EDU) show that in the course of a single year, officials were given, among other things, a racing day at Glorious Goodwood. They also got private art views, a trip to the ballet, a golf outing, a party visiting the crown jewels at the Tower of London, tickets to balls, dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and a case of champagne from Shell for Christmas.

Officials were also invited to a more conventional round of company banquets, presentations, lunches and dinners, at hotels such as the Savoy and Claridge’s.

From May 4 2006 to April 26 2007, EDU staff received a total of 170 gifts and invitations from companies including Shell, Total, Exxon Mobil, Amerada Hess and Chevron. The hospitality has to be recorded in an EDU register, which has now been disclosed to freedom of information campaigners. It shows that Mr Campbell, the head of the energy unit, recorded receiving a benefit of some kind more than once a month.

The EDU unit, based in London and Aberdeen, has sections dealing with the award of exploration licences, mopping up oil spills, decommissioning of old oil rigs, inspection of offshore installations, permits for private electricity generators, and the encouragement of renewable energy.

A Green party spokesman, Derek Wall, said he disapproved of the gifts and invitations. “It is worrying that so much hospitality is coming from big oil. Clearly the DTI have enjoyed a long list of lavish days out and luxurious gifts at the oil industry’s expense.”

Ewa Jasiewicz, of the ecological campaign group Platform, said: “It seems inappropriate for business entities to offer gifts to public servants.”

But Total said it was important to develop “effective working relationships” between officials and operators who had to work closely together in the offshore industry. “Hospitality events are seen as a normal and universally accepted means of doing this, along with formal meetings.”

Shell sources said the gift of cases of champagne might have been against company policy. The company said: “We are now investigating the circumstances.”

Ode Ltd, a subsidiary of the Italian oil company ENI, declined to comment on their provision of a corporate day at Goodwood races last August for members of the department’s staff, an outing for which corporate hospitality companies charge between £270 to £350.

Days out at Wimbledon and the like are a sensitive subject in Whitehall. Some other government departments have a tough policy. Civil servants at Ministry of Defence buying departments have been banned since 1994 from taking tennis days from arms company suppliers.

Superintendent John Hume, then head of the MoD police fraud squad who was investigating bribery allegations at the time, warned officials: “The idea that you have to go to Wimbledon or the World Cup, or to dinner and then the opera in order to discuss business, is rubbish.”

In a separate case in 2004, the Guardian disclosed that BAE had been giving unauthorised holidays and treats to an official and his wife in DESO, the arms sales unit.

But at the energy division, where there are no allegations of corruption, and no allegations that rules on registration have been flouted, officials take a softer line. The department said yesterday: “The opportunity to have discussions with industry representatives at informal events is extremely valuable.”

A spokesman for the department denied there was anything improper about the invitations. Official guidance allowed “conventional, normal and reasonable” hospitality to be accepted. “It is the department’s view that officials have abided by this code.”
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Access to Information Unit

Departmant for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

3-8 Whitehall Place

London SW1A 2HH

Clive.porro@defra.gsi.gov

Tel: 020 7270 8883

Email: accesstoinfo@defra.gsi.gov.uk

Local authorities are required by section 8 of the Local Land Charges Act 1975 to allow any person to search in the Local Land Charges Register on payment of the prescribed fee, currently £11.00 per parcel of land.

In addition, any person is entitled by law to inspect free of charge any records open for public inspection held by local authorities. Such records include the planning register and the register of enforcement notices, stop notices and breach of condition notices (sections 69 and 188 of Town and Country Planning Act 1990).

Some other open public records that may be of interest:

• maps of public sewers (sections 199 and 200 of Water Industry Act 1991);
• publicly adopted highways (section 36(7) of the Highways Act 1980);
• conservation areas (Town and Country Amenities Act 1974);
• local common land and town and village greens (section 3(1) and (2) of Commons
  Registration Act 1965);
• hazardous substances consents (section 28 of Planning (Hazardous Substances)
  Act 1990);
• litter control areas and street litter control notices (section 95 of Environmental
  Protection Act 1990);
• noise abatement zones (Control of Pollution Act 1974; The Control of Noise (Measurement and Registers) Regulations 1976, SI No 37);
• public rights of way (section 57(5) of Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981);
• tree preservation orders (Article 4(2) of the Model Order in the Town and Country
  Planning (Tree Preservation Order) Regulations 1969; section 214 of Town and
  Country Planning Act 1990;
• DOE Circular 36/78 “Trees and Forestry” and Welsh Office Circular 64/78); and
• contaminated land (section 78 of Environmental Protection Act 1990).

The Department of Communities and Local Government has produced a booklet explaining people’s rights and promoting good practice and working relations between local authority staff and personal searchers of the Local Land Charges Register and other local authority records open to public inspection. It is worth having a look so you know what sort of reception you should expect.

The maps are likely to be in digital format and available through the Scottish Executive website and at public information points such as libraries.

I wonder what the copyright situation will be with these maps? Copyrighting public information is a uniquely European practice in relation to information created by public officials paid at public expense. I’ve blogged about this before and it is the subject of the Guardian’s Free Our Data Campaign.

The Scottish maps will be produced at public expense by Hamilton and McGregor consortium. This will most likely mean that other citizen mapping groups are excluded from accessing the raw digital data.

Buncefield Investigation – a collection of the main reports.

Buncefield latest news

“It emerged that the Health and Safety Executive had served an
improvement notice on one of the operators of the Buncefield oil depot, near Hemel Hempstead, four years ago amid concerns about the containment of an aviation fuel tank.”

This raises the question: why aren’t all such Health & Safety inspection reports and notices proactively published under Freedom of Information? Journalists and activists have concentrated their requests on food hygiene inspections, but now that these are being disclosed it’s time to move on to other reports that are still secret.

The Health & Safety Executive has a good reputation for openness. They provide a searchable online prosecutions database that includes details of all prosecution cases (which resulted in a conviction) and Crown censures since 1 April 1999. A Notices Database is also available online that includes details of all enforcement notices issued since 1 April 2001, excluding those under appeal or withdrawn. The A-Z subject index of industry research reports may prove valuable.

The HSE does not cover health and safety at offices, shops or the service sector. These are inspected by local councils who then report to the Health & Safety Commission. I do not know of any council proactively publishing these reports so the only way to get them is to file an FOIA request.

Crying terrorism is now the favourite pasttime of politicians eager to be free from the glare of public accountability. Tony Blair’s refusal to tell the British public where he was spending his summer holiday (and at whose expense) comes to mind. George W Bush trots out the terrorism wail any time he is asked to answer difficult questions.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in the US has released a newly updated edition of its report on the effects of the war on terrorism and the public’s right to know. See RCFP’s ‘Homefront Confidential’.

Reporters in the US are already making the connection between Bush’s intense secrecy and the effects of Hurricane Katrina. The Society of Environmental Journalists has criticised the United States Environmental Protection Agency for its delay in responding to requests about the environmental impacts of Katrina. The group’s report has lessons for all British environmental reporters and campaigners: ‘A Flawed Tool–Environmental Reporters’ experiences With the Freedom of Information Act’.

Another American citizens’ rights group, OMB Watch, has posted an initial compilation of potentially toxic sites in the industrial areas in and around New Orleans that may require remedial action in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Thanks to Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy News for these resources.

I found the website a little hard to navigate but the main site data is found at http://www.iggi.gov.uk/nlud/nlud_default.asp

You can select a council from the drop-down menu and take a look at the derelict, vacant or previously developed land. This might be useful if you’re wondering about a building in your neighbourhood. The ’summary’ gives actual addresses and general details about the land, while the ‘detail’ gives more information including the owner of the land (council or private), if the land has planning permission and what sort of development is suitable.

http://www.freedominfo.org/case/cap/index.htm

The Guardian focused on how much of the money goes to the Royal family and agribusiness.
Royal farms get £1m from taxpayers
David Hencke and Rob Evans

Leader: Another countryside
Agriculture subsidies: A little bit of history was made yesterday when the government finally published details of the £1.7bn in support payments that farmers and agricultural companies in England receive from the taxpayer.

The Times
Leader: Muck and brass

The Independent
Revealed: the rich landowners making hay on EU subsidies
By Danielle Demetriou

The Government’s right to keep us in the dark
By Heather Brooke

BBC News
Subsidies ‘help large farms most’

In a modern democracy we should not have to go begging for scraps of information

Yesterday’s publication of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) farm subsidies in England marks one of the first major successes for freedom of information. The public pays £4billion toward this system, so it might seem obvious that the public have an interest in knowing how this money is spent.

I campaigned for the release of these figures in my book ‘Your Right to Know’, but it wasn’t until formal requests were filed under Freedom of Information Act and the new Environmental Information Regulations that government departments took seriously the public’s right to this information.

The Rural Payments Agency, responsible for doling out cash to farmers in England, is releasing the names of subsidy recipients and the annual amount paid to them in the last two years. It will be supplemented in a few weeks time with information broken down by region.

This is admirable but the Scottish and Welsh agricultural departments are refusing to release even these basic details, citing the privacy rights of individual farmers. Without names, the subsidy information is neutered. Names are essential for gauging the fairness of the system. Are the richest landowners getting the biggest handouts? In England at least, the answer is ‘yes’. Is this the way we want our tax money spent?

The other problem is availability. If you want to look at the raw data you must contact the Rural Payments Agency (email atihelpdesk@rpa.gsi.gov.uk) and they will post a disc to your address. There are no plans to put the data on their website or make it widely available. The Agency says it is ‘looking into solutions’ but let’s be frank, in this day and age it is not rocket science to put two 8.7MB Excel spreadsheets online.

Detailed data on farm subsidies has been public in the USA since 1996 when the Washington Post, after being turned down on a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and appeals, won a lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture. Since then, the USDA has released whole databases on farm subsidies to the public. Non-profits such as the Environmental Working Group have taken this raw data and put it on their website in a way that is accessible and easier to search. (http://www.ewg.org/farm/).

Could we see Oxfam or Friends of the Earth doing something similar? Possibly, but Crown Copyright presents another obstacle in the way of freedom of information that the Americans don’t have to worry about. In the United States the people are deemed to own all the work created or paid for by taxpayer money so it cannot be copyrighted. Copyrighting government information stifles both democracy and business development.

If Oxfam, or anyone else, wants to use the farm subsidy data, or any similar type information, they first have to ask the UK government for permission.

The differing levels of openness between England, Wales and Scotland also highlights the flaws of the UK freedom of information law, based as it is on numerous, vague and mostly subjective opinions about what the public have a right to know.

The Data Protection Act has become one of the most oft-cited reasons for refusing information to the public. Remember this is the law that led police in Humberside to destroy records of sexual allegations made against Soham murderer Ian Huntley. British Gas believed it would have been a violation of DPA to notify social services when they cut off the gas supply to an elderly couple (both of whom subsequently died, one of hypothermia). More recently the law is being cited as the reason for removing the names of patients’ names from hospital beds and local councils are finding it a convenient way of hiding the names of staff from the public for whom they supposedly work.

As early as 2002, the European Ombudsman warned that the EU data protection rules (on which our Data Protection Act is based) were ‘being used to undermine the principle of openness in public activities.’

And so it has come to pass. The DPA was meant to protect the rights of private citizens going about their private business from powerful organizations such as the Government and corporations. Instead, the powerful have hijacked the law using it as a shield to hide from public accountability. With no hint of irony, the Government is now introducing more ways of collecting, storing and sharing information about us, the private citizen going about our private business, while we are left in ignorance about how billions of pounds’ worth of public money is spent by Scottish and Welsh agricultural departments.

These are not small sums, either. One farming business in Scotland received more than £950,000 in subsidies in 2003, and in total, 64 businesses, received more than £250,000.

Farmers are private individuals but when they accept such huge chunks of public cash they cannot expect to remain anonymous. This is called accountability. In the United States, the USDA made exactly the same argument for withholding subsidy data to protect farmers’ privacy. The courts were not convinced that ‘this relatively generic information about thousands of similarly situated businesspeople could lead to clearly unwarranted invasions of their personal privacy. Indeed, it is precisely because the list is so large and the information so generic that the individual privacy interests are so small.’ (The Washington Post Company, Plaintiff, v. United States Department of Agriculture et al., Defendants. Civil Action No. 95-0656 (PLF)

Too often, politicians and bureaucrats view information they collect and pay for with taxpayer money as their own, utterly failing to appreciate the people’s right to know what their government is doing in their name and at their expense.

Battles are currently raging for the release of the thousands of food safety inspections that local councils conduct on supermarkets, the food industry and restaurants. After BSE, foot and mouth and the Sudan-1 food dye scare, it boggles the mind how public authorities can persist in their arrogant belief that they know best. Clearly they don’t, yet they are putting up a fight to keep secret such important public health documents.

Such secrecy shows a profound disrespect for the British public. In a modern democracy we should not have to go begging for information scraps from the table of government.

Tesco misleads shoppers on salt and sugar labels
Richard Fletcher

Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, is being accused of misleading customers over the nutritional and health benefits of a series of products in stores throughout the country.

Trading standards officers have found more than 20 alleged failings in an eight-week period after testing Tesco products. Some that boasted specific health benefits were found to contain excessive amounts of sugar or salt or significantly less vitamins than claimed.

Food labels of confusion at Tesco
Richard Fletcher and Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas

…The misleading Boulders [a brand of cereal] blurb is one of more than 20 incidents of suspected mislabelling that trading standards officers have found in an eight-week period after testing Tesco products. All were recorded in December and January by Hertfordshire trading standards, which collects reports from other trading standards offices around the country. The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; similar reports for other supermarket chains have yet to be released.

Two of my requests came to fruition Tuesday. One positively; one positively Kafka-esque in the level of bureaucratic unhelpfulness.

First, praise for the handling of my FOI request for the borough’s waste management contract with private contractor SITA. I met with Peter Ramage, Head of Waste Management to view both the current contract and the working copy of the new contract, which will take effect 1 April 2005. By all accounts, I am the first member of the public to view the contract. But Mr Ramage said he would not have a problem making the contract available to all members of the public in its electronic form once it is finalised in the next few weeks. I hope this will be the case.

So why would you want to look at a waste management contract? Firstly, these contracts are paid for with your taxes. Kensington & Chelsea’s contract costs £12.2 million annually, not including the cost of running the waste management building, collecting abandoned vehicles, etc. Here’s a brief rundown of the contract:

• Street cleansing specifications – this section lists the number of employees that clean streets plus a listing of every street and minimum cleansing frequencies. You’ll also find in this section which streets must be cleaned of chewing gum and how often they should be cleansed. Clearing away abandoned vehicles can sometimes be found in this part of the contract, but in RBKC clearing away abandoned vehicles is covered by another contract.
• Location of all litter bins. As of 31 March 2004, the borough had 700 litter bins across the borough.
• Listing of all the manned public conveniences in the borough (just three!). Unmanned public toilets are managed by the outdoor advertising firm JCDeceaux under another contract.
• Number and location of winter vehicles (snow removers, salt bins, etc)
• Notting Hill Carnival & special events – 200 tonnes of waste was generated at the last Carnival, much of it was unsold food abandoned on the streets. This section of the contract outlines the cleansing schedule for the Carnival i.e. when residents should expect the area to be back to normal. The contractor also cleans the area outside basement flats after Carnival.

Now onto food safety inspections.

Before I went on holiday, I telephoned the Borough’s FOI officer to see how my request for environmental health reports was progressing as it was the last of the 20-working days. I was pleasantly surprised. The officer said he would be able to answer my FOI/EIR request after I narrowed it down for him by stating I was interested specifically in just the food safety inspection reports.

However, when I turned up at the council offices Tuesday, I was told that, in fact, they would not release these reports. Some of the difficulties are technical – it appears the council operates on an antiquated system where each report is scanned in without any key field recognition or identification. It is simply an electronic version of the actual document. But these could simply be put on disc. No – “We need to go through every inspection report on an individual basis looking for exemptions”, said Janet McCrae, the council’s food and training manager.

All exemptions in the FOI and EIR are discretionary so it is within a public authority’s power to disclose these documents and a public authority should not be hunting around for exemptions to restrict access. I have written articles about how such reports are made public in other countries and it is outrageous that citizens of the UK are routinely being denied information about the safety of the food they eat. How are we to make informed and educated choices about the food we buy and consume if this information is kept hidden?

Amazingly, Janet McCrae refused to even disclose the Harrods food hall inspection report – a document already in the public domain after it was FOI’d by the Sunday Times. It was actually on the table right in front of us and I’d already looked through its contents. Nothing amazing! But she demanded it back and refused to make a photocopy. I was stunned by this willful obstruction. McCrae said I would have to file a written request for the report (which I have since done).

I will be writing a longer article about this shortly. In the meantime, if you would like to add your support to my campaign to get these food safety reports made public, please write to:

FOI Support Team
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Room N111
The Town Hall, Hornton Street
London W8 7NX
Or email foi@rbkc.gov.uk

Quest for answers
John Vidal and Rob Evans

John Chapman, an anti-pollution campaigner of Loddon in south Norfolk, wrote to his local council two weeks ago to try to obtain some very specific information. He wants to see the data on benzene emissions from a local plastics factory, and also the contract between the company that has been monitoring the emissions and the council.
Read the full article on the Guardian’s website.

Friends of the Earth have published their own online guide to using the Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations that you can access via this earlier post.

Download the guidance here (pdf 20 kb)

New guidance published last week aims to make the food business more open and transparent. Some noteworthy points of the new guidance:

Article 18 (Traceability)
20. Under this Article, food businesses are required to:
· identify their suppliers of; food, food-producing animals and any other
substance for incorporation into food;
· identify the businesses to which they have supplied products; and
· maintain appropriate records and ensure that such information is made
available to competent authorities on demand (i.e. when asked for).
21. As a minimum, these records should include; – name and address of
customer or supplier, nature of products, and the date of transaction delivery.

It would be worth making some requests under the new Environmental Information Regulations 2004 to make sure this information gets into the public realm and is not confined to local councils or the Food Safety Agency.

Much of the raw material comes from the book, but Wightman says he’ll be setting a new standard with the website, including searches of every title in the Registers of Scotland.

The site also includes:

• Analyses and overviews of landownership in Scotland
• Reports of land for sale in Scotland
• Resources and further reading including various third-party reports and papers on the topic of landownership
• Guidance on how to undertake further research in the Registers of Scotland and other public sources
• A list of links to other useful sites

Wightman says that most of the information on his site is already in the public domain in the Registers of Scotland but it is not in a format that permits easy access by the citizen. It is not online and omits much of the helpful information he provides such as addresses and telephone numbers.

The Registers of Scotland have helpfully cooperated with Wightman’s project, providing access to their records on an academic/research basis.

Readers may also be interested in Wightman’s blog, which often features news on land ownership:
http://andywightman.blogspot.com

So where is the ‘Who Owns England’ and ‘Who Owns Wales’? Kevin Cahill made a start in his book Who Owns Britain but as yet no one has embarked on a systematic analysis of land ownership in the UK. European governments usually opt to sell information over which they hold a monopoly, ostensibly (although often unsuccessfully) to cover costs – the Land Registry being one example. This creates barriers for businesses and campaigners who could develop commercial and civic products on the back of such data.