It’s crunch time for Freedom of Information

This afternoon, Tuesday 17th, marks possibly the end of the road for a long campaign to improve Freedom of Information in Scotland.

The Members’ Bill promoted by Labour MSP Katy Clark finally reaches the Chamber and will either advance to Stage 2 (to be rapidly amended and voted through in the month and a half we have left of Parliamentary time before the election) or it will be voted down.

If you’ve been a regular reader of these Daily Briefings, you’ll know that the Parliamentary Standards Committee has already recommended against supporting the Bill on the grounds that provisions to make it illegal for the Government to interfere with the release of data, or to make it a legal requirement to pro-actively publish data rather than wait for someone to ask the correct question in an FOI request were not needed because the current provisions of making all of that voluntary were somehow enough despite also saying that the fact that the voluntary provisions were not being followed was grounds to reform the FOI process.

In short: ‘we need change, just not any kind of change that will actually change anything.’

This isn’t good enough and we’ve been precisely that for at least half a decade when we appeared in front of a Parliamentary Committee in 2019. That wasn’t even in this Parliamentary session, but the previous one and here we are at the close of this one, still saying that public information should be freely visible to the public.

The Government’s response to the Bill has been non-committal, saying that they are presently consulting on a completely separate piece of FOI legislation. That legislation – to extend FOI rights to private care homes in receipt of public money – would be superseded by Clark’s Bill – which extends FOI rights to all uses of public money, including private care homes – and is essentially a relic of the National Care Service Bill.

We hope that this isn’t the Government using the presence of two overlapping Bills to play each off against each other. Their lack of opinion certainly cannot be simply because they don’t want to unduly influence the consultation. Just last month, the Government did precisely that by announcing new Council Tax bands to cover high value mansions despite there then being an active consultation on reforming Council Tax bands with none of the proposals within that consultation matching the new policy.

This is the last chance for the Government to lay down its principles of Freedom of Information ahead of the election. It is also your last chance to write to your MSP to tell them that they should support Clark’s Bill this afternoon.

Every piece of public information that you have the right to see via an appropriately worded Freedom of Information request should be published without you having to make that request. Public information doesn’t belong to the Government. It belongs to you. You should have the Freedom to see it.