Local Council caught hiding your information

Perth and Kinross Council has been called out by the Information Commissioner for attempting to conceal information from a Freedom of Information Request. This is the first time that the Commissioner has made a formal ‘practice recommendation’ of a Local Authority, though several such warnings have been handed down to the Scottish Government in recent years.

The council responded to a 2024 appeal to an earlier request where someone had asked for information about a management restructuring in the Council by saying that they held no information relating to the request.

The appeal found that the Council had interpreted the FOI too narrowly, and a subsequent investigation found that the Council had been concealing the information from potential FOI requests by holding meetings verbally and not keeping adequate records.

This is a massive failure of transparency and governance. Unless the public can see not just which decisions are made by the Government but also how they are made, we cannot hold our elected and appointed officials to account and cannot properly scrutinise their performance.

The problem of narrow-scoping of FOI responses is a pervasive one. In years past, it was not uncommon in our experience for an FOI request to be returned with the response “this department does not hold the requested information” despite the information actually being held in the department next door (good practice now mandates that if this happens, then the FOI request should be transferred to the ‘correct’ desk or the requester is advised where they should send their request instead). A more recent request we made of the Scottish Government came back full of redactions to almost an entire document under the guise of the information being “out of scope” of the question – a followup FOI request revealed all of that information, which meant that great effort was put into redacting a document that was full of information that could have and should have been made public but was only made public after the appropriate magic question was asked.

Worse in this story’s case, however, is the implication that information was being handled in such a way as to deliberately make it harder to release under an FOI request, such as by only discussing the matters verbally and by not minuting the meetings. The Commissioner was quite correct to state that this behaviour undermines our FOI rights.

It cannot be stressed hard enough that public information is OUR information. We, the public, have a right to see it and to scrutinise it. It belongs to us, not to the officials who want to keep it hidden.

But it is far too easy to keep that information hidden under current practices, and especially when said officials have a vested interest in hiding it. Just last month, the Scottish Government voted against a Bill that would have made the proactive publication of public data a legal mandate rather than the voluntary good practice it currently is, despite not following that good practice nearly well enough (which was one of the motivating factors for the Bill).

This is the key problem with current FOI legislation. Public information – YOUR information – is too easy to conceal because it isn’t required to be released unless you ask the correct question to unlock it. That question might be difficult to ask because to ask it, you need to have some idea that the information even exists. And even if it does and you do ask, it’s apparently easy for it to be hidden anyway by simply not writing it down until you’re caught not following the rules.

There is only one solution to this. Freedom of Information must be expanded to a “Glass Wall” principle where ALL public information is recorded and published without us having to ask for it. All meetings are not just minuted but recorded – especially lobbying meetings. All contracts with private operators must be published after being signed. Any public official caught trying to backchannel discussions to avoid release (such as via auto-deleting WhatsApp messages) must be censured.

Our very democracy depends on the public being able to hold our officials to account for their decisions. Freedom of Information means freedom for us too.