What does a story about lack of planning for local government reform having in common with a story about warnings about rising energy prices due to AI data centres?
In both cases, the Scottish Government knew something that the public didn’t and is now getting embarrassed and defensive about the information coming to light due to freedom of information requests.
In the former story, a Labour MSP submitted an FOI to find out how much time John Swinney had spent in meetings with officials on the topic of his proposed local government structuring before he announced the initial version of the plans in the Programme for Government – the answer is just 75 minutes across just two meetings, followed by another two meetings totalling another 75 minutes shortly afterwards.
With one of our major concerns about the plans being the lack of forethought on very important issues like how to merge senior jobs in a fair, equitable and financially sound way or on how to merge complex IT systems between Local Authorities that have been developed independently and may not be cross-compatible, this does not seem like nearly enough time to develop a thorough plan of action (though presumably a Minister has spent more time on it than this).
The second story revealed that the Government was warned by civil servants in March that the push for more AI data centres in Scotland could result in a substantial increase in energy prices for all of us, but that this information was kept back from the public domain and has scarcely been mentioned in discourse by the Government or the Minister in charge of AI strategy. This information was also revealed this week only due to a freedom of information request.
It is clearly unacceptable that Government can and does hide information in this way. The information in question in both cases was cleared for release but only because someone submitted an appropriately worded question. In the case of the local government reforms, that person was an elected MSP. It should not be the case that even members of Parliament cannot know what the Government is doing unless they somehow come up with the correct question to ask.
Within FOI legislation, there is a provision that states that it is best practice that information that could be released under an appropriate FOI should instead be proactively released. Common Weal has campaigned for this to be the default approach to public information under our “Glass Wall” principle but when the chance came to legislate for it at the tail end of the last parliament, the Government opposed it on the basis that they thought that the current “voluntary” method of proactive publication was sufficient.
These two stories show that it clearly isn’t as does another of our recent stories where we won an appeal against the Government to force them to reveal information that they had wrongfully redacted from our own FOI request into the First Homes Fund.
The key thing to remember in all of these stories is that none of the information in question was ‘secret’. None of it is confidential or would be a national security threat if it was revealed. All of it was public information that was made public upon request but which was hidden because it required someone to make the request first.
This is secrecy by silence and results in our right to freedom of information being treated by Government as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a fundamental right to transparency.
So we repeat our call for a ‘Glass Wall’ approach to public information. All information that could be revealed by an appropriate FOI request – be it the number of meetings a Minister has and what was discussed in them, or internal guidance on how government policy will affect energy bills, or anything else that is public information – should be released promptly and in a manner that is easily searchable by any member of the public.
We shouldn’t have to ask to see the information that already belongs to us. Government shouldn’t be able to keep that information secret simply because we haven’t yet thought of the correct question to ask that will force them to give it to us.