Meeting of the Parliament 20 June 2018
It is surely for the minister to ensure that his answer to an FOI request is right because, ultimately, the Government is responsible. If a minister needs to depend on a special adviser to help them to hide information, that is not good for governance or transparency.
If the answer to a request will disclose information that embarrasses the Government, it is the Government’s job to answer that request and to put right the wrong that has been uncovered—not to seek to hide it, which would be not only underhand and evasive but illegal. If poor record keeping is being used to disguise such an approach, that is even worse. The question also arises whether the additional level of scrutiny delays answers to journalists, MSPs and MSPs’ staff or whether there is a culture of deliberately delaying the provision of information to such people to kill a story or a line of inquiry.
The report talks about the lack of training for staff who deal with FOI requests. There appears to be no formal training, which is surely untenable. Those staff need to be trained in meeting their legal obligation to ensure transparency, and surely they must also be trained in how to provide the information in an accessible way. It is unbelievable that more than 1,000 people in the Government are involved in FOI work but have no formal training. We strongly suggest that that should be put right as soon as possible.
All those problems stack up to create a pretty damning report. There is little that is good in the report—the only thing that stands out is that an improvement has taken place, but it happened only after the Information Commissioner stepped in, and it does not go far enough. If that is what improvement looks like, we can only imagine how bad the situation was previously.
The catalogue of errors reflects poorly on the Government. We expected the report to describe some failings in the system, but it shows failing after failing. Those failings might not always have occurred with intent, but carelessness is hardly an excuse when it prevents proper governmental scrutiny by Opposition parties, back benchers and the press.
The Government’s amendment would remove from our motion the concerns that are expressed in the report. That is disappointing, because it shows a lack of understanding of the findings’ seriousness. The Government talks of consulting on extending FOI legislation to companies that provide services on the public sector’s behalf. We support that extension, but the Government must go further than consulting—it must commit to legislating on the consultation’s outcome. It also has to put its house in order, so that we have confidence in the system and in its extension to non-governmental service providers.
We need a new approach to FOI—one that we can be confident about; one that can withstand independent scrutiny; and, most important, one that adheres to the letter and the spirit of the law.