I went to my first meeting of the Westminster Skeptics (sic) on Monday to here a talk by Freedom of Information campaigner Heather Brooke and was impressed both with her enthusiasm for the topic and with her complete mistrust of any state institution. She was joined in both those qualities by a largely submissive audience who questioned her more on the practicalities of obtaining data than the benefit of her work. I feel it is impossible to deny the conclusion that in a democracy, particularly one in the middle of an information revolution, that information belongs to the public first and to the government second. But the talk was notable for not once touching on the limits of this freedom, for instance it was mentioned that spending on security for the Pope’s visit was not releasable but no discussion on why that was and whether that was acceptable. Nor was it discussed about what was beneficial to be released and whether any financial information should be secret. Is it ok for companies that fail to attain government contracts to know how much the successful company bid? Is it ok for them to FOI request the decision making process? There is an all too real chance that government spending could be driven up by having their criteria and current spend laid bare.
What the Skeptics seemed most unanimous on was that government is not to be trusted and anytime an FOI request is rejected it must be because someone, somewhere wants something hidden. It can’t be because the data is simply not collected, or is genuinely secret, or that it takes a huge amount of effort to collate it all, it must be ‘the man’ holding us down. It’s this attitude of complete mistrust that I find most objectionable and when the talk became less like a public meeting of adults and more like a group of sulky teens listening to Nirvana and planning how they would run the country. What the movement most forgets is that government is a collection of people doing their jobs, some well, some badly but no more badly and no better than most private companies and that some people stick to the minutiae of the rules of their jobs and some are more relaxed but everyone, everywhere is just doing a job. Even the name of the website Heather Brooke frequently referenced sums up the attitude, www.whatdotheyknow.com. In fact the main benefit anyone could name of uncovering information via an FOI request was simply that the information was now public. Not once in the meeting did anyone name a single example of policy being improved by this process, yet for the amount for of man hours spent recovering this information surely a justification is needed?
Similarly there was a question relating to the expense involved in collating information for publication of FOI and Brooke’s response was simply that she couldn’t believe complete information wasn’t collated. Indeed her only focus was on how you could then extract the information, not on the benefits of doing so. To peruse the annals of whatdotheyknow is to get a window into a sad and deranged world of vendettas and obsessions, as bad as any Have Your Say section. I would request the total amount of tax payers money has been spent on council officials responding to FOI requests but it would be depressingly counterproductive.
This information is also produced without context, how are we to judge how much is spent on the Pope’s visit if we don’t know the cost of other world leaders’ visits? Context is vital to understanding any decision, spending or otherwise, yet the FOI request system singularly ignores it. Similarly one FOI request is often copied to hundreds of public bodies and only the one result that turns up something mildly embarrassing is published.
The FOI request is not only a flawed system but a actively bad one, it inspires mistrust from the public, wastes officials’ time and only drip information into the public domain. Full disclosure is a necessary and inevitable policy, which the coalition government has made tentative steps towards with local council spending. However I doubt anyone will agree on the list of data to be published and whatever is published it is certain the Skeptics will question what’s left of the list, them and the person who has FOI requested information on ghost sightings and exorcisms from every public body in the UK.
*grin*
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