Meeting of the Parliament 17 February 2026 [Draft]
I thank Katy Clark for the way that she has gone about the business of progressing her member’s bill.
Trying to sum up my thoughts on FOI in four minutes will be difficult, but I will be brutally honest. I should mention at this stage that I was the minister in post when Katy Clark originally published her bill and was at an FOI conference where I proposed my ideas about how we could move forward and she proposed hers.
My opinion, which I have shared before, is that the current FOI regime, which has been in place for 20 years, remains fundamentally sound. It provides a strong and enforceable right to know how the Government and other public services operate, while at the same time including safeguards to protect genuinely sensitive information. I have said those things numerous times before.
I say clearly at the outset that I am not against the idea of openness or the reform of FOI—some media outlets would probably have said otherwise when I was the minister, but that was a them problem and not a me problem. The question before us today, as many others have already said, is whether the bill, in its current form, is the right vehicle to deliver change and whether Parliament has enough certainty about what that would mean in practice across the public sector.
The evidence heard by the committee repeatedly returned to the central issues of cost, burden and uncertainty. The bill goes well beyond making small technical adjustments to introduce new statutory obligations across the public sector, including requirements for proactive publication—which, incidentally, I always believed that the Government should have done anyway. It also includes compliance monitoring and the appointment of FOI officers. Whatever the actual intention behind those proposals is, there would be real consequences for staffing, training, governance and digital infrastructure, and we cannot pretend that those consequences would just disappear into existing budgets.
In the material it provided to the committee, the Scottish Government set out its case that the 2002 act’s section 60 code of practice provides good guidance but that the bill would introduce new statutory duties that would go beyond current practice, including creating a new legal duty of proactive publication under the enforceable publication code and the designation of FOI officers with defined responsibilities. My argument is that we are at a stage where public organisations already have people who do that. We often talk about culture change in organisations such as the Scottish Government, local authorities or other FOI-able organisations, but in order to have that culture change we must get beyond the idea that that is an addition to the job. FOI is not an addition to the job: it is part of the job, it is something that you have to do and it is a legal requirement.
At the same time, however, we have to strike the right balance, so that we do not take people away from their core duties and core jobs. I know the challenge that the Scottish Government faced during my time in post in trying to ensure that we issued the required 95 per cent of FOI responses in time. What does not help is that we live in a political environment where we have the likes of Douglas Lumsden using artificial intelligence to generate around 1,300 FOI requests over four months. There were 987 in January 2025 alone, and that cost £185,000. That is the kind of thing that we have to be very careful about.
Nobody in the chamber should be satisfied with the status quo in areas where improvement is needed. However, the question is not whether we should reform but how we reform. We must do that with the evidence in front of us and with the costs properly understood, and we must do it in a way that strengthens openness and practice, and not just on paper. That is the responsible and workable approach, and that is why I will not support the bill at stage 1.