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Mr. Mike O'Brien: I am little concerned that the hon. Gentleman may be giving too much credit to the Liberal Democrats in saying that they have never said one thing in one place and another in another.
Mr. Hawkins: It seems that the alliance did not last very long.
I want to quote what my noble Friend Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish said. He was referring to the way in which the gaff had been blown on this squalid deal in The Guardian, which had the headline:
- See the Lib-Dem approach: complaint, abject and half-baked . . .
- turning into a conspiracy to gut true reform. From the Government, this has been signalled for a long time . . .
- I suppose that it was signalled the day that David Clark--
- was sacked and the White Paper was watered down to form the Bill.
- What is new and shocking is the willingness of the Liberal Democrat Peers to assist in the butchery . . .--[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 November 2000; Vol. 619, c. 141.]
- a conspiracy to gut true reform
I turn to the worthwhile work, to which tribute was paid on both sides when the Bill was last before the House, by the Campaign for Freedom of Information. Until the deal, the Government had been facing the prospect of being defeated in the Lords by an all-party alliance, including the Conservatives, which was ready to force through substantial improvements to the Bill. The agreement
with the Liberal Democrats, however, means that the Government are now safe from defeat. Mr. Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information said:
- This means the weak Freedom of Information Bill--
- will become law with all its serious defects intact.
- We cannot understand why anyone could believe that the limited changes represented by these amendments are the maximum that could be achieved . . . We find it incomprehensible that, in return for these modest concessions, the Liberal Democrats are proposing to abandon their support for essential amendments which would have given the public greater rights to safety information and denied Ministers the right to veto decisions of the independent Information Commissioner . . .
Mr. Simon Hughes: I will deal later with some of the other issues in the hon. Gentleman's remarks. First, can he give us two statistics? How many Conservative peers were there in pursuit of freedom of information, voting in the Lobby on the first day of the week two weeks ago when the Bill was in the Lords? How many were there the day before for the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Bill? Why did many more Tories oppose the age of consent than ever supported freedom of information?
Mr. Hawkins: My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) rightly says from a sedentary position that the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey is digging himself ever deeper. That is the same argument that was used with no effect whatever when it was suggested by Liberal Democrat peers that they were somehow justified in this squalid deal because they did not think that the Conservative peers would be there in sufficient numbers. However, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish dealt comprehensively with that matter. He said that in future when a deal is suggested by combined Opposition forces to defeat the Government, when dealing with the Liberal Democrats, he will know to sup with an even longer spoon.
There is no doubt that had the Liberal Democrats not done this squalid deal, the Government would have been defeated. The numbers were there, and the sophistry from the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey is already beginning, as we knew it would.
As for the substantive matters that Liberal Democrat peers have raised since the deal was done, Liberal Democrat Members in the Commons have disowned them and that deal. The right hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross has been quoted in the Financial Times as saying that his noble Friends were jumping the gun. He also said that there had been a failure of communication between Liberal Democrat Members and their peers. So Liberal Democrats really are in a terrible mess.
Lords amendments Nos. 12 and 13 deal with the time limit within which authorities are required to make decisions on disclosure in the public interest.
The first decision that authorities must make is whether the information requested is exempt. That decision must be made promptly, and, in any event, within 20 working days of the request. A second decision must then be made
on whether to disclose exempt information under the public interest test. There is no fixed time limit for that decision. It need merely be taken within
- such time as is reasonable in the circumstances.
9 pm
The result is that decisions may be taken in two stages over two entirely different time frames and with no fixed end point. That could lead to substantial delays. Some authorities may use the lack of a time limit deliberately to delay giving a final reply. Others may simply take their foot off the pedal in the absence of an explicit time limit. Our suggestion that those amendments be deleted would apply the Bill's 20-day limit to the decision on public interest disclosure. There would then be a single time limit for both decisions.
That would bring the Bill in line with freedom of information laws in other countries. No overseas equivalent Act provides extra time for decisions merely because a public interest test is involved. Nor, significantly, does the open government code of practice introduced by the Conservative Government of my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major). His code of practice is proving stronger in practice than the Government's watered down Bill, as the Campaign for Freedom of Information has repeatedly said. It is the Minister who has been guilty of sophistry on that point.
In our code of practice, the target of 20 working days is set for all decisions. The Minister's own Department's report on the code's operation last year revealed that 92 per cent. of requests were dealt with either within that limit or within the shorter limit adopted by some Departments. Why do we need the extra, longer limit suggested by the Government? If some requests may require more than 20 days, the likely cause will be the high volume of records involved or the need to consult third parties. It will not normally be the result of a need to consider the "public interest" in disclosure.
The lack of a fixed time limit for decision is not the only source of delay. Before an applicant can approach the commissioner, he or she will have to exhaust any internal complaints procedure that the authority involved has established. Guidance on providing such complaints procedures will have to be set out in the Secretary of State's code of practice, which will clearly add more delay.
Before a person can even go to the Commission, he or she must be prepared to wait up to 20 working days for a decision on whether an exemption applies, suffer a further delay for a "reasonable" time while a decision is taken on whether it is in the public interest to disclose the information, and wait for a further, unspecified time for the relevant authority to consider the complaint that must be made under that authority's own complaints procedure. Requiring the first two of those three stages to be taken within the same 20 days would significantly reduce the potential for delays. That would return us to the situation that 92 per cent. of applicants already experience under the code of practice introduced by the previous Government.
Why can the Government not see that our code of practice is better for applicants? It provides quicker decisions, and there is no doubt that the Government and the Liberal Democrats have lost all credibility on these matters.
Madam Deputy Speaker: I call the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Tony Wright).
Tony Wright (Cannock Chase): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I wanted to say but a word, and had expected to follow the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes). I shall instead precede him.
Throughout consideration of the Bill, there has been much discussion of the famous clause 28--the class exemption for investigatory bodies. The climate in which we have discussed that matter has clearly changed. Until recently, it could have been said that freedom of information was a matter for the chattering classes. Indeed, I am told that a Cabinet Minister said just that at some point. Since BSE, though, freedom of information is a matter for the eating classes and for everyone. It has come out of the cloister and into people's daily lives. People need to be assured that anything to do with safety, health or welfare will be available.
I listened carefully to the Minister's remarks. The point of tabling an amendment to the Lords amendment--to try to find a different way of dealing with the matter--is that there should not be a class exemption at this point, although there must be a prejudice test. That is the key issue--it always has been. However, the Minister seemed to say, in effect, "Ah, but there are implications for prosecutions. All kinds of problems would arise if this was allowed". I have heard that argument many times, but I cannot understand it. When the prejudice test is given in its proposed form, it is specifically to protect prosecutions. Those are precisely the matters that will not be caught by subjecting that matter to a prejudice test.
The Minister tells us that all public authorities must be treated in the same way. Surely the whole point of freedom of information legislation is that we can treat different matters differently. If we decide that health and safety deserve a particular priority, we can build that into the measure--we have the ability to do that.
The Select Committee on Public Administration took evidence on these matters from Jenny Bacon, the then director general of the Health and Safety Executive in July 1998. I take it that she knows what she is talking about. We asked her whether she needed a class exemption in her sphere. She noted that the provision was a class exemption and that the Health and Safety Commission felt that
- in respect of health and safety matters a prejudice tested exemption would provide sufficient protection for these matters.
Jenny Bacon believed that a prejudice test was enough in that context. She did not think that health and safety required a class exemption. Having listened to the arguments this evening, I do not think that the case for including one has been made. I hope that, even now in a
different climate, the Government will be able to give the assurance and reassurance that are needed on this matter to ensure that there is a prejudice test for health and safety.
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