BRITAIN:Review of British FoI Act labelled 'a new stealth tax for information', writes Frank Millar
British prime minister Tony Blair has promised to "consult very widely" about proposals to restrict the use of the UK's Freedom of Information Act barely two years after it came into force.
His assurance, given during an address to the Newspaper Society's annual lunch this week, follows charges of censorship and a government attempt to tear the heart out of its own "right to know" legislation.
Like Scottish and Welsh devolution and House of Lords reform, freedom of information was up-in-lights as one of the big achievements of New Labour. When Mr Blair arrived in Downing Street on his white charger back in 1997 the promise - if not the expectation - was of an end to Britain's culture of secrecy.
"A constitutional change of great significance," was how lord chancellor Lord Falconer described the Act providing a general right of access to information held by public authorities, subject to certain conditions and exemptions.
A presumption of openness had been created, he declared, in legislation producing a radical and permanent change in the relationship between the citizen and government: "Fears that the need-to-know culture would still triumph have not been realised."
Yet now, under cover of a review of the costs and the method for calculating the cost of meeting information requests, the lord chancellor is suspected of trying to curb the flow by way of "a new stealth tax for information".
His Tory shadow Oliver Heald levelled the charge back in the summer after Lord Falconer signalled changes to the cost calculation which would make it easier for government departments to refuse information. Under the Act, information requests are usually free, although a request can be refused if the cost of retrieving the required information exceeds a £600 cap for Whitehall departments and £450 for other public bodies.
The two proposed changes that have aroused media fire were first to enable ministers and officials to calculate the time spent reading, consulting and considering a request, so ensuring the cost cap would be breached more quickly.
A second proposal is to combine all requests made by an individual or organisation on any subject over a three-month period, and to count the combined cost of these requests against the cost cap.
David Leigh and Rob Evans explained in the Guardian last month how "aggregating" requests would breach the cost cap even more quickly and prevent similar inquiries for three months.
"If a BBC reporter at Radio Wiltshire sent a request to the education department, and the department considered it a time-consuming request for a lot of contentious information, it could refuse requests from anyone in the BBC for the next three months, whether from a different radio station, Panorama or the 10 O'Clock News."
Leigh and Evans seriously contested the Frontier Economics report commissioned by Lord Falconer's department claiming that £24million a year is being spent on "serial" requesters, while others like the Daily Telegraph's Philip Johnston have described their own attempts to prize documents that should be in the public domain from "the clenched fist of Whitehall obduracy."
The information commissioner Richard Thomas warned last month that he needed more funding to reduce the backlog in unresolved cases arising from appeals against decisions by government and public bodies to refuse information requests.
He also hailed the Act's success in inviting some 120,000 requests a year, while citing instances where he had ordered reluctant bodies to disclose information - for example about the dates of calls between Mr Blair and media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and a report on an outbreak of legionnaires' disease at a hotel.
Responding to last month's select committee report on freedom of information - one year on - Lord Falconer claimed the government was committed to building on the success of the Act, which he said had been "a magnificent success."
"The FoI Act has put citizens on a more equal footing with the institutions that serve them and brought government closer to the people," he said.
"They can access information about their local community in the UK as never before - information about the performance of their local hospital, local environment, local schools. Freedom of information has benefited the people - that's what it was intended for and we continue to build on its success."
However, he continued: "Freedom of information has to be balanced with good government.
"It would be wrong not to make adjustments in light of experience and make sure we get the balance right between the provision of services and the provision of information."