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Mr. Allan Rogers (Rhondda): I have listened closely to what the hon. Gentleman has said about principles and about the information that is to be held, or not held, disclosed or not disclosed. Can he help me by giving an example of what information should be held for a longer period?
Mr. Hawkins: It is difficult to give specific examples, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman will understand. Under the Government proposals, something would normally be released after 30 years. I put the question back to him. Is it not sensible to have a public interest test, so that, if a company says, even after 30 years, that there is still a public interest in not disclosing that, it will not happen? It might severely embarrass someone's personal life.
As the hon. Gentleman and most hon. Members will be aware, family matters can be connected with the operation of family companies. Personalities are involved in such companies. Disclosure could be deeply embarrassing for that family, even after 35 or 40 years. A public interest test could be built in as an additional safeguard. We are talking about all companies, not just multinationals; that may be where the media focus, but it applies to all companies. I hope that I have given close enough to an example to satisfy the hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Rogers:
It is not close enough. I cannot think of any information that needs to be withheld, for example, with regard to a private family company and that might be subject to a public interest test. I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman could give a more substantial example of the information that could not be disclosed.
Mr. Hawkins:
I am not sure that I can help the hon. Gentleman any further. I was trying to deal with something that could arise, but it is not just the Opposition Front-Bench team that thinks that it is important. Those matters have been raised with us by the CBI on behalf of its members. I hope that he will realise that it is not doing that for the fun of it. It thinks that there is a serious purpose here.
In summary, the amendments deal with important issues and we hope that the Government will take them on board.
Dr. Tony Wright:
I come at the issue from a different angle, although I am trying to follow the arguments being made from across the way. To me, clause 41 looks like an extraordinary blanket exemption and, as a citizen and a consumer, I would like it to be tested more rigorously. Let me give a recent example so we realise that we are not talking about abstracts.
Before Christmas, I asked my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions a couple of questions: which MOT testing
stations were on a final warning from the vehicle inspectorate and which garages had lost their licence to carry out MOT tests in each of the past five years? I shall compress the answer by reading the essential sentence:
The problem is that the exemption is wholly unable to be tested against public interest considerations. Clause 41 applies to any information from any source. There is no sense that what is protected is information that belongs even to a particular company. A public authority could withhold test results obtained from its own laboratories or from independent sources. The information need not even be confidential. Information previously released by the authority or by the company could be withheld. A company might have disclosed information for one purpose and yet want to withhold it under that provision for another. The exemption would permit that, and it puts the avoidance of commercial prejudice above all other considerations. That is the fundamental point.
Of course, an authority could reveal exempt information if it chose to do so, but sometimes authorities fail to recognise that there is any public interest in telling the public what is going on, or they might have a direct incentive not to disclose because they could incur criticism as a result. The discretionary nature of the test opens the door to collaboration and collusion between regulatory authorities and companies.
The exemption is unsustainably broad when compared with similar provisions in other freedom of information legislation. Amendments No. 37 and 38 would simply insert a public interest test. Commercial interests are important and need protection, but they must be weighed against other matters. That is the sensible course to take.
Amendment No. 37 would raise the threshold--it would allow information to be exempted on grounds of commercial prejudice. To become exempt, information would have to be supplied in confidence and would have to prejudice unreasonably the commercial interest of the person who supplied it or of the public authority holding it.
Amendment No. 38--my preference--would ensure that information relating to the safety of goods and services or information that would lead to consumers making a more informed choice could not be exempted on commercial interest grounds. I am not one of those who thinks that commercial interests do not matter, but I do think that commercial interests and their protection need to be balanced against other interests--especially those that protect consumers or allow them to exercise proper choice based on full information. At present, the clause offers blanket exemption, but that needs to be balanced. The amendments offer that balance.
Mr. David Davis:
I reiterate the points that I made earlier. Freedom of information is about better-informed debate, a strong democracy and a better-performing Government. The amendments bear an important relationship to that.
I do not want to talk at length about the Conservative amendments, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins). He raised some important issues of principle. I am glad that he told the Minister that he would accept other draftings of the amendments. Although the principles of accuracy and reciprocity in freedom of information are significant, I shall not dwell on them.
Like the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), I want to make some observations in support of amendments Nos. 37, 31, 38 and 32. Earlier, I referred to my ministerial experience, but I was in business for twice as long as I was a Minister. If it is true that between two thirds and three quarters of what is claimed as secret really is secret, a large fraction of the remainder--what is described as secret merely to prevent embarrassment--comes under the category covered by these provisions.
When I was a Minister in the Cabinet Office, the use of commercial confidentiality in government prevented me from answering parliamentary questions and debates as I wanted to do. That was because civil servants said, "You can't say that, Minister; it's commercially confidential." I came to the view that, in many cases, it was not so much commercial confidentiality as avoidance of embarrassment.
That view was reinforced rather than weakened by my business experience. The demands made of Government by many businesses were greater than any made of a large private sector customer. I am talking not only about Great Britain, but about north America. In both cases, businesses supplying a major customer under contracts similar in size to those for Governments would fully expect that, for example, pricing information would be in the public domain, because that customer would need to be able to say to a competitor, "You have to beat this price, or this quality or this service level." There has been much disingenuous argument by businesses and it has not served them, the British economy or the British taxpayer well. It has become a serious issue for reasons that I shall come to shortly.
My point about an inappropriate exercise is not undermined by the Minister's comment that 60 per cent. of American inquiries on freedom of information are raised by commercial companies. We should understand that America is a different economy; it is much more vigorous on competitive issues than the British economy. Apart from being highly competitive, the economy has
different competition laws in which businesses are forbidden, on pain of prison sentence, to talk to each other. I operated in that environment and, in such an environment, any source of information on a competitor is chased vigorously. Therefore, the comparison does not apply here. It is clear that the freedom of information arrangements in America have not stopped it being the most vigorous economy in the world; the reverse is true. There are many massive contracts between business and government in the United States.
The principle behind the amendments is important. I hope that the Minister will respond constructively to the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends, but I do not wish to concentrate on them. I want to focus on the fact that the previous Government and this Government have taken on board the private finance initiative, contractualisation and a whole swathe of measures that put the delivery of public services very much more in the private sector than ever before. One danger of that is that it takes the delivery of public service out of the reach of Parliament and accountability to the House.
To publish the identities of Authorised Examiners withdrawn from the scheme could be prejudicial to any of their other business interests unconnected with the MOT testing scheme and therefore a list of those withdrawn from the scheme is not published.--[Official Report, 21 December 1999; Vol. 341, c. 530W.]
That is how commercial prejudice provisions operate in respect of something that might matter to us. Indeed, when I received the figures, I discovered that last year 143 of those establishments had their licence withdrawn and 1,058 were put on a final warning. Over the past five years, 767 had their testing licence withdrawn and some 6,701 had been warned. We are not having some arcane argument. We must consider whether an exemption for commercial interests should be extensive or blanket or whether that exemption should be tested.
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