Information from the YRTK site will be moved across with re-directed links in the coming weeks.

Please check out my new site and let me know what you think. Thanks to Dave Uprichard at One Trick Pony for the new design.

I was blown away by the sheer number of journalists in attendance as I’ve never been to a UK conference with anything close to this number of journalists. In Scandinavia the tradition is for reporters to cooperate and share knowledge. In the UK we are still getting over the hyper-competition of Fleet Street where journalists tend to view each other with suspicion and the instinct is keep knowledge to oneself. While this has some advantages, in the current climate it makes more sense for journalists to band together, particularly when it comes to common interests such as libel, freedom of expression and freedom of information.

Most of the talks were in Norwegian so I can’t offer much enlightenment on them though I did hear about some amazing journalists: one of whom was exposing his ninth miscarriage of justice, another wrote a book about Norway’s most famous bank robbery.

The speaker who impressed me the most was Julian Assange. I tweeted quite a lot from his session (@newsbrooke) but one thing he said struck me: that despite releasing primary source material to anyone and everyone via wikileaks – the biggest scandals didn’t become stories until written about by an experienced journalist at a mainstream newspaper. He cited the release of a leaked US military manual in relation to Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo abuses along with a few others. An army of citizen journalists didn’t know what to do with this and passed it by. It was only the experienced reporters at big media institutions who wrote about it and made it a story.

It seems there is hope for the traditional Press after all.

1) There’s always the chance of a punch up between some rough-and-ready type from the tabloids.
2) Journalists have to pay to enter and so the awards are not so much about merit as the marketing spend of the newspaper.

I’m not sure if I’m up for anything but you never know. Stranger things have happened in the British Press I suppose.

But that is not all the book is about. In fact the expense expose is just one chapter. In the next excerpt, published March 28th, the focus will be on something else entirely. Give it a look.

In brief, I plan to keep the blog on wordpress but want to re-brand the site as heatherbrooke.org (I have purchased this domain name). I’d like to see more graphics and better navigation and more streamlined hierarchies. I’m looking at something along the lines of this site by the author Raj Patel: http://rajpatel.org/

If interested please let me know your daily rate and how many days’ work you think this rebranding would entail. Please also send me some of your previous work.

The final caveat is that this needs to be done quickly – before March 23rd.

Questions or offers gladly received at heather (at) yrtk.org.

Great to see it’s made pick of the day in most of the newspapers (even if my character was described by the Times’ parliamentary sketch writer Ann Treneman as ‘this side of loony on the bus’).

Well, if the shoe fits…

On Expenses (formerly Bringing Down the House) will have its first broadcast on BBC4 at 9pm on Tuesday February 23rd. Don’t miss it!! I’ve done an interview with Martin Bell for the Radio Times and will be in tomorrow’s (Feb 16th) Woman’s Own magazine for those who want a taste of what’s to come.

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.

I’ve been neglecting the dear old YRTK blog while I thundered through all the research and writing necessary to complete the manuscript of The Silent State. It was stressful but intensely exciting and I turned in the book on deadline. It’s since been to the lawyers, the editor and the copy editor. On Wednesday I met my wonderful editor Drummond Moir at Heinemann to go through the final corrections in an all-day editing session. Now the manuscript is being set and then it’s one more read-through before it heads to the printers. I can’t wait!

Publication is now set for the first week in April. You can pre-order a copy on Amazon for a special 30 percent discount price. I hope some of you will get your orders in early and often!

Perhaps these public servants hope that enough dust has settled from the MPs’ expenses scandal. Let’s remember that it was in secrecy that this massive abuse of public funds was allowed to operate. Transparency was finally acknowledged as the single best cure for preventing corruption. But now some officials are trying to bad-mouth FOI and go back to the old ways. I’ve seen claims that FOI is a waste of public money, that it diverts from the serious business of bureaucracy, that it might even be jeopardizing police investigations. All this is nonsense. FOI is the single best regulator of efficiency and probity. It’s certainly cheaper and more effective than the hundreds of regulators currently in operation.

Yet here’s the latest FOI gripe from Chief Constable Ian Latimer of Northern Constabulary in Scotland: He claims that the number of people making FOI requests is going up.

“There is concern that additional funding will be required to support this business area in 2009-10, diverting resources away from operational policing.”

Firstly, isn’t citizen involvement precisely what our leaders claim to want? Now they have it – and they’re moaning. Turns out they don’t actually want the public asking challenging questions about who does what, whay, and for how much.

On the matter of funding – let me remind readers of the vast amounts of cash police forces are spending on Public Relations (i.e. propaganda) departments. Re-read the investigation I did for the Times on police PR spending. We found that police forces across the UK were spending £39m each year on press and PR – enough to fund an extra 1,400 full time officers and more than enough to cover the annual police pay rise withheld by the Government. The ratio of PR to FOI officers was also striking; many forces having 12 PR people for every one FOI person (that’s them telling us what they want us to know as opposed to actually answering our questions).

Under Sections 40-44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 , the police can stop and search you without a warrant, or any grounds for suspicion, and can arrest you and hold you for up to 48 hours without any charge being brought. Any items in your possession can be taken in evidence.

Of course, these draconian powers haven’t caught many terrorists. But they have been used over and over again to harass photographers:

• Photographers snap over use of Section 44
• From snapshot to Special Branch
• I’m a Photographer, not a Terrorist
• PhotoRights.org
• Not A Crime Campaign

I was lucky to be endorsed by several influential blogs including Guido Fawkes, Left Foot Forward (two sites unusually united), the Daily Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan, and Devil’s Kitchen,

Thanks to these bloggers and to everyone who voted. Here is the press release from Reform.

Heather Brooke is “Reformer of the Year” for MPs’ expenses work

Freedom of Information campaigner wins Reform poll in landslide

Heather Brooke, the Freedom of Information campaigner, has won a poll to find the Reformer of the Year for 2009. Ms Brooke, who was a pivotal figure in unveiling the MPs’ expenses scandal, won the title in a landslide, securing over a thousand of the 1,157 votes.

She played a leading role in the MPs’ expenses saga, winning a High Court case against the House of Commons for the full disclosure of second homes allowances. The ruling was the driving force behind the resulting reform of the Parliamentary expense system.

Entrants to the competition gave a wide variety of impassioned reasons for supporting Ms Brooke:

“She created a totemic symbol of the sort of low-level corruption and waste that will need to be eliminated across government, and proved that the best way to do this is exposure and transparency.”

“Without access to information we are completely stumped.”

“She was the prime mover in the campaign to implement the citizen taxpayers’ rights to Freedom of Information, in spite of the continued apathy of the citizen body.”

“Politics in Britain will never be the same again, it has been forcibly reformed. That’s why she’s clearly the Reformer of the Year: no contest.”

“She brought about the first real serious talk, albeit since forgotten about, of reform to our politics in decades. Others on the list deserve honourable mention but Heather stands out.”

“She had the guts and determination to see through what must have seemed like crawling up Everest. Well done indeed.”

The strength of the public reaction helped Heather Brooke to take an incredible 89% of the votes. Second place was awarded to Douglas Carswell, the reforming MP for Harwich and Clacton and author of The Plan, with third place going to Michael Gove, who plans a big shake-up of the schools system if the Conservatives win power next year.

Reform’s Director, Andrew Haldenby, said: “Heather has shown how transparency can reform Parliament. Now the whole public sector needs to be opened up in the same way, to tackle the real waste that lies at the heart of government.”

Reform is an independent, non-party, charitable think tank (registered charity the Reform Research Trust, no. 1103739) whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity. We believe that by liberalising the public sector, breaking monopoly and extending choice, high quality services can be made available for everyone.

For those who haven’t been following the case: The Guardian was attempting to report on Trafigura, a multi-national oil and commodity trader, but received legal threats from Carter-Ruck. This led to an injunction stopping them from publishing their findings. Yet not only were they prevented from publishing their article but the injunction also prevented them from reporting about the injunction!

These ’superinjunctions’ are an incredibly draconian power and in a strong democracy they would only be used as a last resort in the most limited of circumstances – and when used this would be public knowledge. However, it now transpires that not only are these injunctions granted by judges with seemingly not a second thought for open justice, but there is no record of the judge’s actions either.

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Bridget Prentice said yesterday, in answer to a written Parliamentary question that the information is not currently available and the High Court has no intention to collate such data:

Paul Farrelly MP: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice if he will (a) collect and (b) publish statistics on the number of non-reportable injunctions issued by the High Court in each of the last five years. [293012]

Bridget Prentice: The information requested is not available. The High Court collects figures on applications, however injunctions are not separately identifiable, and there are currently no plans to amend databases to do so.

I agree with wikileaks: “Time for UK journalists grow some balls and start violating censorship injunctions”

It is bad enough that superinjunctions exist at all, but it is absolutely appalling that there are not even records kept of how often they are used. Pressure needs to be put on the High Court to record these occasions, and make the details public as a matter of urgency.

It’s long been an ambition to get a grilling from him. Oooh!

And it certainly made up for having to debate with Sir Stuart Bell yet again.

You can check out the online repartee on Youtube.

I received an email while away on holiday the other week: “The Committee having weighed the risks decided to publish the submission.”

It is available to view at: http://public-standards.org.uk/Library/MP_Expenses_E681_Heather_Brooke.pdf [PDF]

Journalism.co.uk reports it will now try and find out what happened to the other 66 submissions.

The FOI shows that the Department of Health has increased the number of its press officers (telling us what they department wants us to know) from 26 in 2006/7 to 31 in 2008/9. During the same period the number of FOI officers (what we actually want to know) was just 8. There is also a stark divide between resources with around £3 million spent on press relations and marking but just £300,000 on freedom of information.

A breakdown of the total publicity and advertising budget reveals:

Financial Year Actual Spend £ million)

• 2008-09 = 62.6
• 2007-08 = 50.3
• 2006-07 = 40.7

But as Tony Collins says, that’s only part of the story. That doesn’t include money spent by NHS Connecting for Health on PR firms such as Porter Novelli, Fishburn Hedges, Good Relations and its parent Bell Pottinger.

We’re not an informed electorate if we can’t access the raw information. Too much public money is being spent selling policies as if they’re products and not enough goes into giving us the information we need to make informed decisions about important (and costly) public services.

All requested ‘redactions’ are already in the public domain: Keith Vaz’s wheelie bin bill and train tickets are published on parliament’s own website along with Ann Widdecombe’s train ticket. The facts about Derek Conway and Michael Trend are widely published and appear in parliamentary reports and debate. If I’m missing something do let me know but otherwise this seems perfectly outrageous and I will not be agreeing to the requested censoring. And you thought Soviet Russia was bad.

Dear Ms Brooke,

Further to our telephone conversation yesterday, please see the list of suggested redactions below. When would be a good time to call you to discuss?
· On the second page, in the second paragraph redact from “That is how” to “Derek Conway”.

· On the second page, in the third paragraph redact the sentence “we do not know the full motivation of the person who exposed Derek Conway.”

· On the third page, in the paragraph under the heading “Reaction of travel information” redact from “Keith Vaz” to “based on reality”. Then redact from “it was precisely” to “blackout” at the end of the paragraph. [DN: This means redacting most of the paragraph, but leaves the basic point that redacting information on direction of travel makes it difficult for the public / media to scrutinise expense claims]

· On the third page under the heading “publish addresses” redact from “Keith Vaz” to “blocked toilet etc”.

· on the last page in the first paragraph redact from “when I heard” to “to view these receipts”.

Ruth Alaile
Secretary to the Committee on Standards in Public Life

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.

I’d heard rumours back then about MPs’ expenses. The problem was they were rumours. Lobby journalists heard rumours, sometimes they wrote about them, other times they didn’t, either for political reasons or simply to keep a source friendly. I’m no good at this sort of journalism. Maybe I lack the people skills. When I go for information I don’t want it to come with any strings attached. I don’t want to have to make deals or promise favours. I just want the facts. I found when it came to parliamentary expenses these were pretty slim on the ground. It’s worth pointing out that not one of the misuses of MPs’ expenses has been exposed through access to official information. It has always been via the press through leaks or whistleblowers. That is how the former MP Michael Trend was exposed which led to the requirement in 2003 that receipts were needed for claims above £250. It was an insider who led to the exposure of Derek Conway. This is, of course, how the Daily Telegraph got its information.

This may be how it is done in the UK and you may think ‘so what’. But I think this system is wrong. It is effectively a class system of access to information. The privileged and powerful get access, the common citizenry does not. Information comes into the public domain with unseen strings attached. We do not know the full motivation of the person who exposed Derek Conway. And really why should his constituents have to wait for this whistleblower to learn the facts? Why should the British people have to wait to read the Daily Telegraph to find out information which I fought for since 2004 and which the public paid for? The current system is unfair and undemocratic.

My battle for parliamentary information was not confined to MPs’ second homes allowances. I have sought a detailed breakdown of travel claims, the names and salaries of MPs’ staff (which was blocked personally by the Speaker), how expenses were scanned in, how parliamentary groups were set up, canteen subsidies, incidents within parliament, etc. Even trying to find out the date of the most recent publication on June 18th was mired in rumour and secrecy. No one took individual responsibility for the publication nor was there an official statement about the date and logistics of disclosure until the night before.

My FOI requests are answered on the last possible day or overdue. I believe I am treated as good as, if not better, than most requesters. I find the service overly formal though not impolite. Where a telephone call could sort out many problems, the Commons will always opt for a formal letter that often requires more time and effort from both parties. When I asked for the breakdown on MPs’ Additional Costs Allowances it was refused on the grounds it would cost too much to disclose the information for all MPs. At no point did the FOI officer provide the advice and assistance under section 16 of the FOIA so I could narrow down my request. Instead the first response to a complex request is refusal. Only after I appeal, do the Commons reluctantly enter into negotiation.

I don’t know whether this is due to outright obstruction. I get the sense there is also a huge amount of incompetence particularly in the area of technology. This might not be such a problem if the parliamentary officials were open and willing to accept offers of outside help. But they are not. As I said, they greedily sit on their information piles like a golum. Tom Steinberg I’m sure will speak more on this matter of technical problems in accessing parliamentary date.

Recommendations for change

It is one thing for a politician to say he or she is committed to transparency and direct accountability it is another entirely to act on those commitments. I hope the committee will be rightly sceptical of political promises made here and elsewhere by those in power.

Redaction of travel information
One of the more egregious areas of censorship in the official publication of MPs’ expenses has been on addresses and travel information. Keith Vaz, for example, put forward tube tickets with everything blacked out except the price. Is there some state secret in knowing if he’s on a single or return ticket to zone one or two? Ann Widdecombe’s train ticket for £30.90 is void of destination. This is silly in the extreme. We are here dealing with disaster-movie scenarios not privacy or security concerns based on reality. Some travel expenses cannot be claimed for travel between MPs’ homes and their normal places of work. Yet lacking the dates of travel and destination there is no way to police this. It was precisely the time and destination of travel that led to the resignation of two MSPs. Former Tory MSP leader David McLetchie was forced to resign when it became clear that his £11,500 taxi bill involved not just travelling to his constituency for parliamentary work but going to his own legal offices. Brian Montieth was forced to pay back £250 after admitting false claims for taxis not for any parliamentary work but returning home after nights out on the town in Edinburgh. Any similar abuses would remain hidden in the current blackout.

Publish addresses
We have only to see how the Commons authorities have handled the official publication to see the culture of secrecy remains relatively intact. Removing the addresses makes it impossible to uncover the larger scandal of house flipping for the avoidance of capital gains tax. Any publication devoid of main and second home addresses will keep the public transfixed by trivia: Keith Vaz charging the taxpayer for his wheelie bin collections, MPs’ ordering videos of themselves speaking on the floor, Gordon Brown’s blocked toilet, etc. The High Court judges ruled that publication of addresses was necessary to ensure the system was not abused and that ‘there was a legitimate public interest well capable of providing such justification’. The Committee needs to deal with MPs’ successful attempt to circumvent this High Court ruling. If full addresses are not published then at least the first section of a postcode could be disclosed for accountability purposes.

Expectation of privacy
Wherever a public official claims public money in the course of their public duties there should be no expectation of privacy but rather an expectation to account for that spending directly to the public.

Parliamentary Standards Authority
I have grave concerns about the Government’s proposed Parliamentary Standards Authority. This government has a habit of proposing more bureaucracy and legislation as the solution to any and all problems. Often it only creates more. Just because Harriet Harman says the Parliamentary Standards Authority will be independent is no reason to assume that will be the case. No new laws or bureaucracies should be created without all the details being known, published and debated. Listening to her testimony at the committee I found these details to be in short supply. It is not right that those with power are continually given the benefit of all doubt while those without power are increasingly not trusted to do anything without supervision by the state. More information must be published before any substantial expenditure of funds is made to create a new bureaucracy.

It is disingenuous for MPs’ to place the blame for the scandal solely on the Fees Office. The Green Book made clear that the final decision on expense claims rested entirely with individual MPs and all MPs had to sign their claim forms: “I confirm that I incurred these costs wholly, exclusively and necessarily to enable me to stay overnight away from my only or main home for the purpose of performing my duties as a Member of parliament.”

The problem wasn’t so much the Fees Office but the total lack of transparency and direct accountability. That is not going to change with the creation of a new bureaucracy. Isn’t it odd that it was only in the Information Tribunal hearing February 2008 that I finally discovered how the expense system worked and that the man in charge was Andrew Walker? For some reason this basic information was kept under wraps. Why are people’s names and responsibilities a state secret? This is perhaps the single biggest problem affecting efficiency and civic engagement in the UK. Citizens have no clue as to who is responsible for what. I believe this wall of faceless bureaucratic anonymity is there on purpose to keep the people ignorant and unable to meaningfully challenge those in power.

Conclusion
Any new system must have clear lines of authority. We must know by name who is responsible for what. And by this I don’t mean which minister but the name of the actual person doing the job. We don’t need more layers of bureaucracy. The most efficient way to keep politicians’ claims within acceptable limits is for the receipts to be directly available to constituents. This is how it was done in Washington state back in 1992. There, the receipts were a public record and anyone could go and have a look. It was this knowledge that I believe made politicians think very carefully about what they claimed on expenses. They very much understood it was not their money and because of transparency and direct accountability their claims were all above board. The public should be able to see expense data for themselves.

This brings me to the core problem of the culture in parliament. It is a culture that shows deep disrespect and distrust for the common person, the general public, the masses. We can’t pretend to be a democracy when we have this elitist mindset that the public can’t be trusted. When I heard Harriet Harman say ‘trust me’ about the creation of the Parliamentary Standards Authority what I thought was that she wants us to trust her even while she doesn’t trust us, the constituents, to view these receipts.

I understand this fear. It’s not irrational to fear the unthinking mob. But the best way to counter this danger is to ensure the electorate are educated and informed. That is why it is so ironic that such efforts have been made by politicians to keep the people uninformed and ignorant.

What must be kept in mind is that it is the people who gave MPs their power and so it must be to the people to whom they are accountable: directly and forthrightly – with no middlemen in between.

Well that’s not entirely true. As of yesterday, my submission went missing and I received the following email:

Dear Ms Brooke

Our lawyers have advised us not publish your submission due to the following reason:

“it contains statements about named individuals which are potentially defamatory.”

We are currently seeking their clarification and requesting suitable redaction.

Once we have this, I will forward them to you for your authority, in writing, to the redaction. We will then be able to publish your submission.

Anju Still
Business Manager
Committee on Standards in Public Life

You can read my statement yourself and decide. There’s very little about named politicians and what there is has already been published elsewhere. But more to the point – what sort of public inquiry is it where those giving evidence can’t speak freely and have to worry about being clobbered by the world’s worst libel law? I don’t think the take-down of my statement is necessarily the fault of the Committee and to be fair, lawyers are always risk averse. What is a disgrace is that it should even be a risk to publish evidence given to a committee set up to investigate parliament. There’s also the shameless double standard: That MPs and those giving evidence to MPs are protected from libel by parliamentary privilege, yet those giving evidence to a public inquiry investigating MPs have no such protection. A pretty scandalous state of affairs for a so-called democracy.

It would be very funny indeed if I were to receive a libel writ from an MP for my evidence given to a public inquiry investigating MPs.

Secrecy feeds suspicion of a boys’ club stitch-up. Chief constables need to be open on pay and perks

Secrecy can be sexy. It’s essential to any good mystery novel. But there should be no mystery surrounding the pay of top public officials. In October 2008 I made freedom of information requests to every police force in the country seeking the full extent of chief constables’ perks and pay. I’d heard rumours top cops weren’t just getting top salaries but all sorts of other benefits, from grace and favour homes to chauffeur-driven SUVs and private health insurance.

These perks may be perfectly acceptable – after all, it’s a tough job. What is not acceptable is the vault-like secrecy in which they are awarded. Several forces told me their chiefs refused bonuses out of principle. But of all those who accepted them only one force, North Wales, fully disclosed the amount.

Why the secrecy? The official reason is that disclosure would be an invasion of chiefs’ privacy. Here’s the response given by City of London police: “We do not believe that disclosing the exact value of the commissioner’s bonus will add significantly to the public interest. By contrast, given that the commissioner has refused consent to disclose and has a reasonable expectation that the exact value of his performance-related payment will remain confidential, we believe that disclosure would be prejudicial to the commissioner’s rights and freedoms or legitimate interests.”

What about the rights and freedoms of taxpayers to know how their money is spent? What about knowing the criteria on which these bonuses are awarded? Are chiefs paid for achieving political goals? For decreasing crime statistics? For increasing the number of ethnic minority officers? We just don’t know.

We saw what lay behind MPs’ cries of invasion of privacy. What might we find hidden behind police chiefs’ resistance? On Thursday we got a glimpse: the Belfast Telegraph published the results of a freedom of information request made by a former Police Federation chairman and member of the Northern Ireland policing board, Jimmy Spratt.

Spratt sought the compensation package of Northern Ireland’s outgoing chief constable Hugh Orde, who is now president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He managed to unearth a compensation package that included rent-free living in a £600,000 luxury home (purchased at taxpayer expense) along with the payment of all utility bills, including phone bills, electricity, rates, heating and property maintenance. This is in addition to a salary of £183,954 plus an annual bonus of up to 15% of salary. Other extras included £360 a year for broadband, £600 for private healthcare, and membership fees for Acpo and the Chief Police Officers’ Staff Association, estimated to be £1,000 annually. Another £8,294 was claimed for oil and £13,413 for rates, while £33,904 was spent to repair “defective combined drainage system” and to replace the kitchen.

Now you might think that a member of the police board (the Northern Irish equivalent of a police authority) would know exactly what comprises a top cop’s compensation package, as the board approves it. Not so. Spratt tells me that when you have a £1.2bn budget “you can’t really keep track”.

“What you’re presented with are accounts that are, well I wouldn’t exactly call them basic, but they’re not going into any great detail, and it’s only when you start probing into the detail that you find these things out. I wanted to know what I was signing my name to.” If only more police authority members did the same. As a former chief negotiator on police pay, Spratt thought he had a good idea what was on offer, but was “completely surprised” at the extent.

Where are these packages set? Spratt is finding that difficult to pin down. He’s been told they’re set by the Association of Police Authorities but its acting executive, Tania Eagle, told me that’s not the case. “It’s very unusual for one agency to be fully responsible for policy.”

That’s the problem. We need clear lines of accountability. We need to know who’s in charge of setting and approving these packages and we need to get them out in the open. Even Acpo is starting to agree. Spokesman Andrea Newman says: “Acpo is of the view that chief officers should be open and transparent about their remuneration and should be open to scrutiny – but disclosure is a matter for individual chief constables.”

If these payouts are to be respected then chief constables must come clean about their pay. Secrecy feeds suspicion that these perks are based on politics and boys’ club favouritism rather than effective policing.