Infodumping is not the same as transparent accountability

Common Weal has often written in these Daily Briefings and in our weekly newsletter about the need for transparent accountability in Government. If we don’t know what the government has decided, how they came by those decisions and who influenced them to make those decisions, then we cannot hold them to account – our entire democracy rests on this foundation.

This is the final week of Parliament before it breaks up for the elections. Any legislation that has not been passed by Thursday will fall, and it will be up to the new Parliament in May to decide if any of it should be reintroduced. This means that this week is going to be particularly busy for our MSPs as they try to cram those last few votes through.

This week is also an important deadline for the fulfilment of a certain kind of Government promise. It usually takes the form of “by the end of this Parliament”, often followed by something like “we will publish a statement” or “the committee we set up will report back”.

If those statements and reports haven’t been published by the end of this week, that promise will have been broken (see, for a prominent example, the 2021 promise to hold a Citizens’ Assembly on Council Tax Reform that never happened and thus will not be published this week).

This leads to the major problem of bottlenecks and pileups. With only a few days to go to meet their publication promises, everything that hasn’t been published previously or dropped entirely is being published this week. Just yesterday, the Scottish Government’s official publications website dumped twelve pages of reports into the public domain. More than a hundred reports, likely totalling several thousand pages worth of material.

Some of these reports are of national importance. The Government’s Climate Change Strategy likely foremost among them, but also things like the Circular Economy Strategy, an new Environment Strategy, a Rural Support Plan for Scottish farmers, updates to the treaty on the relationship between the Scottish Government and local councils, the Government’s progress on implementing the deaths in custody action plan and a new national overview of Scotland’s care sector – the first published in more than a decade (which is TWO Parliamentary elections ago with no time to do anything about it before the next one).

Other statistical reports have also been published covering the cost of Scotland’s Public-Private Partnerships, the economic health of Scotland’s regions,

And that was just yesterday. The same pace of reporting can be expected throughout this week. Even as this briefing was being written, the National Care Service Charter of Rights was published, which was supposed to be the foundational constitution of the National Care Service and which underpins your rights if you receive or if you ever may receive care.

Scotland doesn’t have enough journalists, enough newspaper pages or even enough think tanks to wade through all of this material and to report on it. There is almost nothing about any of this on the front page of any of Scotland’s media today – not even the most cursory repeat of whatever press release the Government sent to them. It may take weeks for any of this to be held in front of the Government’s nose if any of it smells bad, by which point the Government may well simply shrug and say “that was the previous administration’s fault”.

Common Weal has staunchly supported proactive publication of government work rather than relying on lucky FOIs to hit the mark (there are plenty of those in yesterday’s release, too), but infodumping thousands of pages three days before Parliament closes and all of our MSPs cease to be MSPs until they are maybe re-elected does not allow for proper scrutiny or accountability of their work. Burying important work under piles of everything else is almost as bad as not publishing it at all.

Common Weal shall do our best. We’ve already started looking at as many of these documents as we can. If we find anything – good or bad – that needs to be given a voice, we’ll shout as loudly as we can.