Politicians can’t be trusted to self-regulate

Yesterday the Scottish Parliament offered us a case study on why politicians should not be left in charge of ensuring democratic transparency. Politicians appear never to see proposals to improve transparency without thinking them 'unworkable' – and so it appears this time too.

The proposals were put forward by Labour MSP Katy Clark in a Freedom of Information Reform Bill. Common Weal has been working with Clarke on this proposed legislation for a while now. Yesterday the Standards Committee issued a response stating that it believed the proposals to be unworkable. We certainly don’t concur.

The proposed legislation would have resulted in a substantial strengthening of the Freedom of Information regime in Scotland. Clearly at this stage there was no chance that the legislation would be passed before the Scottish elections, but the Committee could have recommended that it be brought back in the next session. They chose not to do that.

There were three key components that the committee objected to. The first was that there should be a presumption of publication – that it should be the default position that everything be published unless a strong case can be made against. The Committee doesn't claim this is 'unworkable', only 'unnecessary'.

That does not accord with the experience of many people who have tried to use the Freedom of Information legislation of late. In fact there often appears to be a presumption against publication until absolutely forced.

The committee instead puts forward an alternative proposal of startling weakness – that it would be better if people in the public sector were were encouraged to do better. It is hard to see how the Committee could write this with a straight face. The culture and mindset of senior officials is what is wrong. Only regulation will change the culture.

The second objection is to pro-active publication. Pro-active pulication means FoI-able information should simply be published routinely before anyone asks for it. This is viewed as unworkable – and yet that is the advice that is the curent advice for organisations. Proactive publication schedules are used across government and were set out as 'best practice' when the legislation was first implemented.

Not only is this absolutely not unworkable, there is already official guidance on how this should be done. To wave this away with such blatantly insufficient explanation is poor policymaking. To claim that this cannot be done is wrong.

The third objection is equally weak and unsupportable. It claims that extending the number of organisations to which FoI legislation applies is, again, unworkable. Since it works fine with the organisations to which it currently applies, why is extending it unworkable?

It is likely that this is really about whether private contractors get to continue to operate in secret when they take public money. This is a convenient agreement between big business and public officials which prevent the public from being able to see how public money is being used.

So the Committree in effect dismissed almost every reforming aspect of the Bill – and yet goes on to claim that this has shown that there is need for reform of Freedom of Information. It seems hard to understand this other than that the Committee was concerned about the optics of telling the public it was uninterested in extending transparency.

But what reveals the reality of these Committee reccomendations is their proposed remedy – that it should be the Scottish Government which proposes how best it should be held to account. Only if the Scottish Government doesn't bring forward reform would the committee consider that at some unspecified point in the future it might intervene.

Of course, the Scottish Government is currently being taken to court over repeated flouting of FoI rules and the party of government has a majority on the committee. If the pattern is anything like usual this will result in some training courses and a promise that 'lessons will be learned'.

Politicians cannot be trusted to ensure their own transparency or probity. They have acted again and again to boost secrecy, not transparency. We need a democratic body to hold government to account which the government does not control. If Scotland's politicians are going to act with this degree of contempt for the public right to know, we needs a Citizens' Assembly to take it out of their hands.