By Martin Rosenbaum
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Source: http://www.bbc.com
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The Freedom of Information Act came in
10 years ago. It's led to the unearthing of a trove of facts.
Ten years ago, thanks to the actions of
a "naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop", the British people
acquired an important new legal right.
That anyway is how Tony Blair castigates
himself in his memoirs for allowing his government to proceed with introducing
the Freedom of Information Act. The law, which came into force on 1 January
2005, gives everyone the right to obtain much of the information held by public
authorities (with numerous substantial exceptions).
FOI has become a well-established tool
for finding out more about the workings of central and local government and the
rest of the public sector. So after a decade of freedom of information, what
have we discovered that we might not know otherwise - and what does that tell
us about the impact of FOI?
1.
MPs' expenses
The scandal over expenses that erupted
in 2009 led to prison terms for five Labour MPs and two Conservative peers. A
slew of others had to repay money.
Arguably the most famous of the claims
revealed was one which Commons officials had ruled "not allowable".
Sir Peter Viggers tried to claim £1,645 for a floating duck house in the garden
pond at his constituency home.
The whole episode was exposed as a
direct result of a series of FOI requests.
After losing a lengthy legal battle
about how much detail they would have to release under FOI about MPs' expense
claims, the Commons authorities were forced to collate millions of invoices,
receipts, letters and other documents going back over several years to prepare
them for disclosure.
This raw material was then leaked to
the Daily Telegraph, which in May 2009 ran story after story about highly
embarrassing, greedy, unjustifiable and sometimes criminal behaviour by
politicians.
It led to numerous resignations and
retirements, the repayment of significant sums, the creation of a new
parliamentary pay and expenses system, and a reputational disaster for
Parliament and the political class generally.
2.
Immigration
Some British diplomats initially
ridiculed suggestions that the accession of Poland and other east European
countries to the European Union in 2004 would lead to widespread immigration
into the UK.
One message, for example, from the
British Embassy in Warsaw reporting back to the Foreign Office in London had
stated: "One month after succession and the tumbleweeds are not yet blowing
down the streets of Poland. As experts had predicted the country has not yet
moved en masse to the UK."
By 2010 the number of Polish people in
the UK had
quintupled to more than 500,000.
Much internal government discussion is
still kept secret despite FOI, on the basis that disclosure would harm the
frankness of the policy formulation process. But sometimes such material is
released.
3.
A&E ambulance delays
Some patients taken by ambulance to
accident and emergency departments are kept waiting in the vehicle for much
longer than the recommended 15 minutes, with people having to wait for several
hours in some cases.
This report from 2013 is
one of numerous FOI-based surveys which have explored different aspects of the
pressures on hospital A&E departments and their consequences. It
exemplifies how FOI can often be used to monitor how public services are
performing, whether targets are being met in practice, and how badly they may
be missed in some cases.
The longest waits for ambulances were
in Wales, with a record of 6hrs 22mins and an average waiting time of 20
minutes.
4.
Unanswered 101 calls
Hundreds of thousands of phone calls to
the 101 non-emergency police number have been going unanswered
annually, suggesting that callers hang up rather than wait a long time for
an answer.
The data for nine months of 2012
covering 30 out of 43 English and Welsh police forces showed nearly half a
million calls were unanswered. For six particularly poorly performing forces
the average waiting time exceeded the target of 30 seconds. In some areas the
worst waits approached half an hour or even longer.
FOI makes it easier to obtain this kind
of performance data for public services, helping members of the public who have
a frustrating experience of calling 101 to discover whether their case is
isolated or all too common.
5.
Knife amnesty
In 2006 widespread concern about knife
crime and some particularly horrific cases led police to arrange a highly
publicised knife amnesty. Tens of thousands of knives that could have been used
as weapons were handed in.
A Metropolitan Police statistical
evaluation of the amnesty in London concluded that a few weeks after this
operation rates of knife crime were running at pre-amnesty levels. The amnesty
appeared to have no long-term impact on reducing this form of violent crime, a
fact which only came to light as a result of an FOI request for the report.
Thus freedom of information helped to
reveal whether or not a particular public policy was actually having the
desired impact.
6.
MOT failures
Figures comparing how different makes
and models of cars fared in MOT tests were released in 2010.
This followed an 18-month dispute
between the BBC and the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, part of the
Department for Transport. VOSA argued that disclosing the data would breach
commercial confidentiality, but were forced to concede by the Information
Commissioner, who backed the BBC's request for the data.
The data revealed that
Renault Meganes for example had a comparatively bad record of failure and
Honda Jazzes a particularly good record of passing. This compared cars of the
same age.
It's one of a number of cases where FOI
disclosures have only happened after requesters persisted in taking their case
to the Information Commissioner or the Information Rights Tribunal, which can
overrule public authorities who refuse to supply information.
7.
Policing the Old Firm
In the 2010/11 season it cost
Strathclyde Police over £2m to
police football games between Celtic and Rangers, the passionate derby
clashes between the "Old Firm". But the clubs only paid them £300,000
towards this.
This might be the area where FOI has
probably had the most far-reaching impact - discovering how much public money
is being spent on what. The circumstances in which it can be argued that
releasing this would be against the public interest are limited.
8.
Restaurant hygiene
Food hygiene ratings for hundreds of
thousands of restaurants, cafes and shops are now publicly available thanks to
FOI.
In the early years of freedom of
information, Bridgend
Council in south Wales refused an FOI request for a copy of a food hygiene
inspection report for a local hotel. But it was then overruled by the
Information Commissioner, whose decision effectively set a precedent that such
reports should be in the public domain.
Now food hygiene scores are routinely
disclosed (and many outlets display their own ratings themselves). Most of the
information is easily available on the website of the Food Standards Agency.
It exemplifies how information which
was once secret first went through a phase of being accessible only via FOI and
has now become open data, routinely published by public authorities without
anyone having to ask for it.
9.
Older police
Whether or not police officers look
younger to you, they've actually been getting older on average.
In 2013 it was revealed that the
number of police officers under 26 in England and Wales fell by nearly half
over a period of two years. In contrast the number of officers over 40 stayed
roughly unchanged. In other words the fall in police numbers has affected the
younger age range, at a time when there is concern about the fitness of police
officers.
The Home Office went to the trouble of
collecting this information from individual police forces. But it didn't
publish the figures until an FOI request asked for them - an example of how
freedom of information can bring into the open data that is already being
collated centrally.
10.
Exchange rate crisis
The Treasury calculated that the cost
to the UK government of the dramatic but futile attempt to keep the value of
the pound tied to European currency exchange rates in 1992 was about £3bn.
If that sounds like a lot of money,
it's a fraction of the estimates involving tens of billions that were
previously being made. The exchange rate crisis became the defining political
disaster of John Major's period as prime minister. But there are many who argue
the result of the crisis was a boost to the British economy.
This was one of the earliest high
profile FOI disclosures, coming out in February 2005 only a month after the new
law came into force. It illustrates how FOI can shed new light on recent
political history, years before the standard timing for the release of
historical government records would have applied.
Source: http://www.bbc.com
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