Meeting of the Parliament 17 February 2026 [Draft]
It was the great French philosopher and civil rights campaigner Voltaire who warned:
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”,
and that is the crime that we are being invited to commit in the Parliament this afternoon.
I have grown tired of members opting for inaction and mediocrity in place of action and ambition, or saying that we agree with these universal and immutable principles of democracy, of openness, transparency and accountability, but not here and not now.
We know that the provision of public services has become a mixed economy and that outsourcing is rife. It is because of that that, if we are to update our freedom of information, improve the statutory right of access to it, advance the proactive publication of how public money is used, defend public interest journalism and challenge the existing structure of power, we need to pass this reform bill today.
Bodies, including many transnational private corporations that deliver public services with public money, should be covered by freedom of information—of course they should. In fact, maybe that should be a condition of receiving public money or being awarded public contracts in the first place. Information, including data, should be published not just reactively but proactively. It is not a burden, it is not red tape, it is not an inconvenience or a distraction—it is a democratic right.
What we should have learned down the years is that our security and our wellbeing spring not from surreptitious secrecy but from open democracy, which is why many of us see this bill as an important antidote to the corrosion of trust in public life.
I am speaking in this afternoon’s debate as a Labour Party representative, but my experience as the convener of the Parliament’s Public Audit Committee is that there continue to be persistent data deficits and chronic information gaps right across the public sector in Scotland. When we conducted our inquiry into the ferries order at Ferguson Marine, we found that the Scottish Government’s record keeping, up to and including meetings taken by the then First Minister, left a lot to be desired. We now know as well, because of the Covid public inquiry, of the deletion on an industrial scale of communications by SNP Government ministers, up to and including the current First Minister.
The culture change that the bill will help to drive is not just out there; it is in here—and we know that publicity is the best disinfectant. To the Minister for Parliamentary Business and Veterans, who tells us that the bill is timed out, I say: what about the Government’s Covid emergency legislation, which we passed in a matter of days in 2020? What about the Government’s deeply flawed Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill? Why is the minister pressing ahead with that and finding the parliamentary time for it? Why is it that the Government can find parliamentary time to pass legislation to collect rates on empty properties in days but there is no time to modernise our freedom of information laws in weeks?
Well, this is a member’s bill in the name of Katy Clark, who is to be congratulated for getting it on the Parliament’s agenda and for winning the argument, but let me make it clear to the Government, which seeks to wreck this bill today, that there is a movement out there demanding these reforms. It is a movement made up of campaigners who will not go away. If Parliament does not pass this legislation tonight—if the Government kills the bill today—it will return. We will see civil rights advance. We will see the veils of secrecy torn down by the people. We will see the triumph of hope and democracy. We will see the people empowered.