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Mr. Jon Owen Jones: I am delighted to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis), who is Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, and to support his point that commercial confidentiality is often cited as a means of avoiding embarrassment.

I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright). The definitions of commercial confidentiality in the Bill are too widely drawn and do not take into account the wider public interest. It could be argued that the Bill draws the definition more widely than the one that is currently used. However, commercial confidentiality often provides an opportunity not to answer a question, especially if that question has the potential to embarrass.

I shall use an example that I first cited on Second Reading. On 8 November, I put a parliamentary question to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport seeking information about sales of tickets to the dome--a matter of some contention, especially just before Christmas. The information was not available at that time, and I received a holding answer stating that I would receive a proper answer as soon as possible.

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On 21 December, in response to further parliamentary questions asking why it was proving so difficult to say how many tickets had been sold in various places, I received an answer stating that the Department had tried to answer my question in

as open a way as possible--[Official Report, 21 December 1999; Vol. 341, c. 562W.]

but that my questions could not now be answered because the matter was commercially confidential. It had apparently taken more than six weeks to determine that there was a problem of commercial confidentiality in answering questions about how many tickets to the dome had been sold in various parts of the country.

I received a letter, dated 26 January, that went into more detail about why the matter was commercially confidential. It stated that the New Millennium Experience Company

recognises its public remit and responsibility, but it is the professional judgment of its Board that . . . targets can only be met if the company operates in a commercial manner. NMEC is competing in the crowded and highly commercial market place of visitor attractions and its competitors do not publish detailed statistics of forward sales.

Taking that at face value, I wondered why the company later published a sales survey that illustrated where tickets had been sold and where they had not. I could not understand why the real figures were commercially confidential, but a survey illustrating where sales were most likely to be made was not.

Mr. Lock: May I refer my hon. Friend to a couple of provisions in clause 41 that illustrate how the structure works? Information that is commercially confidential under clause 41(2) would fall within the category of exempt information only if prejudice to commercial interests were also likely. Even if that were so, the ability to refuse to disclose would apply only if the company or the public authority overcame the second barrier set out in clause 13, of carrying out the balancing act between the public interest in disclosure and the public interest in confidentiality. The Bill, once enacted, will greatly enhance the chances of confidential information such as my hon. Friend describes--and to which, in my view, he is perfectly entitled--being disclosed.

Mr. Jones: I thank the Minister for that intervention, especially for saying that I am perfectly entitled to the information. I wonder why, in our joined-up Government, I am not getting it from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

I asked the Library for its opinion on whether the Bill would make my obtaining the information that I sought any more likely. The answer was that it was at least as unlikely that I would get the information, so long as the Minister concerned chose to agree that the information was commercially confidential. Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the Minister's intervention, which I will quickly quote to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, in the hope that the answer for which I have been waiting for five months will eventually be delivered. I am glad that the intentions of open government have percolated to the Lord Chancellor's Department, if not to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

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9.30 pm

Mr. Lock: I should not lead my hon. Friend to premature joy. Unfortunately, until the tests set out by the Bill are incumbent on Ministers, Ministers must operate under the present regime. That is more restrictive than the regime that we propose to introduce under the Bill. It is causing the blockage of which my hon. Friend complains, and I sympathise.

Mr. Jones: That is one interpretation of the difficulty in obtaining the information that I require.

My argument may be regarded as unduly cynical, but if the ticket sales for the millennium dome and the associated public expenditure--almost £1 billion, or possibly even more--[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) says from a sedentary position that that was lottery money, meaning that it is not public money. It is the public's money. If that is not a valid question to be raised in Parliament, I do not know what is.

If the figures showed an even distribution of ticket sales across the country, somehow I think that not only would I have got an answer, but it would have been published prominently. The real reason that I have not been supplied with the answer for such a long time is that it is publicly and politically embarrassing. The purpose of the Bill should be to ensure that Ministers cannot hide behind commercial confidentiality to conceal their embarrassment.

Mr. Simon Hughes: I shall be brief. I shall add one point to comments made by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis), and then say a word or two about amendments Nos. 31 and 32.

I refer to the protection that the Bill appears to give to the commercial interests of the private sector and to the public sector. The debate is about amendments to clause 41, which deals with commercial interests. The clause states:

Information is exempt information if it constitutes a trade secret

or

if its disclosure under this Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person.

That is the breadth of it.

Much more of what was the public realm is going out into private hands--for example, parts of the Prison Service are being run as private prisons. It is nonsense for the Government to promote policies such as naming and shaming--by announcing that school X is on special measures, school Y is not performing well enough, or the SATs tables for school Z are this, that or the other--but not to put into the public domain commercial information about a private organisation that may potentially run a school in the future or perform some other function in government.

The legislation is going in contradictory directions. Public policy is moving many more things into the private sector, yet we are giving the private sector greater protection than the public sector. That is fundamentally inconsistent. The examples given by the hon. Member for Cardiff, Central (Mr. Jones) and others are clear about the difficulties and the extremely subjective definition of what is in somebody's commercial interest and what the test is. I hazard a guess that the figures for the number of tickets

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sold for the Dome in different parts of the country may not have been available when the hon. Gentleman asked for them in a parliamentary question because they had been managed by the promoters and owners of the New Millennium Experience Company on a monthly basis, so that they could package them in other information. To some extent they have revealed the information, but in their own time and on their own terms.

Mr. Jon Owen Jones: No.

Mr. Hughes: The hon. Gentleman says no, but certainly the promoters and owners have tried to manage the information. They did not go as far as he thought, but they have been trying to control the information so as not to allow it to come out when the hon. Gentleman was seeking it. He may wish to correct me.

Mr. Jones: The information that has been released relates to total ticket sales. I was seeking information on regional ticket sales. There may be a good or better story to tell for the one but not the other. That is why we have only one piece of information.

Mr. Hughes: I understand that. There are two sides of a coin. We have information only on total ticket sales, but even that has been managed. Had the hon. Gentleman asked questions about the general and the particular, he might have found that he did not receive information about the general when he wanted it because it was being managed for a time that was convenient to the commercial interests of the company.

Mr. Hawkins: I must apologise to the hon. Member for Cardiff, Central (Mr. Jones) for not hearing what he said. I was briefly absent from the Chamber. However, a fascinating example has been given.

Does the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) agree that another form of packaging in this instance--it is often wise to stick to the same example--may be the difference between ticket sales that were at no cost and ticket sales that raised money? I suspect that, with school trips being brought forward and schools being offered free trips, the Government, in this context of managing information, are treating as ticket sales tickets that were offered free of charge, and that that will emerge later when the Dome accounts come to be examined. I suspect that information has been packaged in a way that is not really proper.

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