Transparency is not unworkable – it’s welcome
This week’s In Common examines the decision by the Scottish Parliament’s Standards Committee to reject meaningful reform of freedom of information laws and how it tells us less about administrative feasibility than it does about political instinct.
The committee concluded that proposals to strengthen FOI were ‘not workable’. Yet in the same breath, it accepted that Scotland’s FOI regime was outdated and in need of reform. This contradiction sits at the heart of the problem. Everyone agrees transparency is lacking; no one in power is willing to accept binding obligations to fix it.
The reforms, brought forward by Labour MSP Katy Clark, were not radical. They were pragmatic and overdue: a presumption in favour of disclosure, stronger duties for proactive publication, and extending FOI coverage to bodies spending public money. These are fundamental principles of FOI law. These measures were dismissed not because they are impossible, but because they would meaningfully shift power away from politicians and officials, and towards the public.
The committee’s most revealing line was its claim that it was ‘not convinced the bill is the right approach in its current form’. This is politics by evasion. What, exactly, is wrong with the approach? What alternative is being offered? And why is the default response to more openness always delay, dilute, or defer?
Instead of legal duties, the committee suggested that more effort should be put into ‘improving culture and practice within organisations’. This distinction between culture and regulation is entirely false. A presumption in favour of publication is a way of embedding transparency into everyday practice. Culture does not change through encouragement alone; it changes when incentives, defaults, and consequences change.
Anyone who has tried to use FOI in recent years knows that the real, lived culture is one ofresistance. Delays, exemptions, partial disclosures, and legalistic obstruction have become routine. The idea that this can be fixed through guidance and goodwill – particularly when the Scottish Government is currently being taken to court by the Information Commissioner for repeated failures – strains credibility.
The committee also leaned heavily on concerns about cost and resources. This argument deserves to be treated with the scepticism it warrants. Transparency is not an optional extra to be afforded only when budgets allow; it is a core democratic function. To suggest that the public’s right to know is financially ‘unworkable’ is to imply that democracy itself is a burden.
This is especially galling given that significant public money is routinely spent resisting FOI requests: on legal challenges, redactions, and drawn-out appeals. Openness is often cheaper than secrecy – particularly when information is published proactively, as existing best-practice guidance already recommends.
“To suggest that the public’s right to know is financially ‘unworkable’ is to imply that democracy itself is a burden.”
There are also practical alternatives that would make transparency routine rather than adversarial. For example, Common Weal would support a digital ministerial diary where all completed meetings would be made public. Automatic publication of correspondence, all minutes of meetings, and all submitted evidence is not burdensome when publication is automatic. This would reduce the volume of FOI requests, cut administrative costs, and normalise openness as part of how government works. It is not radical. It is simply systematic.
What is really at stake here is trust. We are living through an era of deep anti-politics, where people increasingly believe – often with good reason – that decisions are made behind closed doors by a political class that does not expect to be scrutinised. In that context, rejecting stronger transparency on the grounds that it is ‘unworkable’ is playing with fire.
The implicit message is that the public needs to be managed, not informed. That openness is a risk to be controlled rather than a principle to be upheld. That politicians should retain discretion over when and how they are held accountable.
The committee’s proposed solution makes this explicit. If reform is to happen, it suggests, it should be led by the Scottish Government itself – with parliamentary intervention only if ministers fail to act at some unspecified point in the future. In other words, politicians should be trusted to decide how they are held to account.
Recent history suggests that this is a poor bet. From the use of veto powers to the prolonged resistance to releasing high-profile documents, the direction of travel has been towards more secrecy, not less. Promises of training, cultural change, and ‘lessons learned’ have not delivered the transparency the public was promised when FOI was introduced more than two decades ago.
Freedom of information was one of the proudest early achievements of devolution. It recognised a simple truth: that democracy depends not on trust in politicians, but on the public’s ability to verify what power is doing in their name. Weakening that principle now, at precisely the moment trust is most fragile, is not cautious governance. It is reckless.
If Scotland’s politicians are serious about restoring confidence in democratic institutions, they must accept that transparency cannot be voluntary, conditional, or self-policed. It must be structural, enforceable, and routine. If they are unwilling to bind themselves, they should not be surprised when the public concludes that they cannot be trusted.
