FoI Live speech on 11

FoI Live speech on 11.6.09

Thank UCL for once again organising this conference.

Thank Richard Thomas [details] and all his team.

ACHIEVEMENTS

The last year has been a defining one for FoI - in many ways the year the Act came of age.

Parliamentary expenses - what happened impossible without FoIA, deeply uncomfortable, transformed politics, may have been sensationalised by Daily Telegraph but few will deny the effects will have been beneficial for the health of our democracy

It demonstrates the profound value of transparency

The Government's new approach, encapsulated in our view that we are not the owners of public information, but its custodians have begun to take root.

The appeals process has progressively helped to establish the boundaries of the Act and clarify for public authorities and the public when information should be released. And Government has been better able to identify where and when it should protect information. We have been assessing more rigorously carefully the strengths of its arguments and the weight of the public interest before committing to an appeal.

But we have also been prepared to act vigorously to protect information when we believed it was not in the public interest to release it. That's why we used, for the first time, the veto powers to prevent the release of Cabinet minutes.

We will shortly announce an extension of FoI under the section 5 power of the Act.

BUT we intend to do more in the coming months

We will keep under review the case for further extensions of the Act.
And we will continue to explore new ways of ensuring that the Act is entrenched in public bodies in ways that develop a culture of transparency

Central government is rigorously scrutinised for its perfomance in delivering the letter and the spirit of the Act. Key to that is transparency of performance. Statistics monitoring performance across central government are collected and published quarterly.

For example: 8,764 requests were received in the fourth quarter of 2008 of which 90% were processed at the time of monitoring: a 12% growth in the number of requests in a year. Of all resolvable requests received in that quarter, 57% were granted in full and 87% were processed within the statutory deadline or subject to a permitted deadline extension.

These statistics are not always comfortable for government. But they are a spur to improvement. MoJ example.

But the statistics are limited in their scope to central government and a number of other public authorities.

And we could do better. Many of the issues which most concern people fall within the remit of local government. And anecdotally, I know of local authorities where the reflex position is to withhold rather than publish and who fail to alert requestors, as they are required to do, of their right of appeal.

But there are also wonderful examples of good practice in local government. Here let me praise Greater Manchester. The Association of Greater Manchester Authorities which covers 13 local authorities has a system in place which allows individual local authorities to input onto shared webpages: the number of requests received; a breakdown of those requests; outcomes of those requests; the number of internal reviews; the number of appeals to the ICO; the length of time taken to deal with each request. The webpages were simple to create and set up using an off-the-shelf IT package and host spreadsheets into which local authorities are asked to input information. The initial start-up costs were covered by the Greater Manchester e-Government Project. The creator of these pages will be speaking later today in a session at 2pm and, I understand, using some of the information from them.

This is the sort of practice we now need to encourage throughout every organisation covered by the Act. I will now be writing to chief executives of local authorities and other interested groups encouraging them to emulate the monitoring arrangements used across central government, encouraging them to collect and publish their own statistics to help them identify where and how they need to improve compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. And crucially to help others, their voters and local media to judge how well they are complying. To this end we will be making the tools used by the Ministry of Justice available on our department's and the ICO's website for local authorities to use.

I have spoken to the Local Government Association, who have assured me that their members have embraced the spirit of Freedom of Information. The LGA sees the publication of monitoring statistics as a part of good practice, and will join me in encouraging this step towards greater transparency.

We're not talking about a duty enshrined in legislation at this stage because I hope and believe the great majority of local authorities who are not already doing this will respond positively to this encouragement. And if they do the laggards will then be shamed into following suit. Of course if I am wrong about this, then we may have to revisit this issue, but I hope and believe this won't be necessary.

And, depending on how this new inititiave turns out, we will be exploring other areas into which we can expand it.

FoI fundamental to health of democracy. We brought in the Act. We are developing it and refining it. And we will go on doing so.

[ENDS]

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