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Mr. Hawkins: My right hon. Friend is raising an important point. Does he agree that what he is saying about the Government's trickiness and secrecy reinforces the point that we have made throughout--that the Government seek to restrict information that, as the Campaign for Freedom of Information has repeatedly said, would have been more freely available under the previous Conservative Government's code?

Mr. Lilley: My hon. Friend makes a good point, and sets out the situation precisely. Under any previous code, under a strict interpretation of the present code, and under what we thought was the intention of the clause and the amendment before us, we would assume that such information would be made available.

The Post Office document provides some numbers. That being so, it cannot be claimed that they are confidential. For example, it states:

Over £80 million per year towards the Post Office network's fixed costs

will come from the

Government General Practitioner Services.

That implies that that will somehow save the Government money elsewhere. I asked the Minister what the savings would be elsewhere, if there were any, or whether there would be a net cost to taxpayers.

Again, the Department of Trade and Industry refused to answer the question. By no stretch of the imagination could the information be commercially confidential.

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We know that the Post Office is to get £80 million. What we do not know is whether there is to be any offsetting saving in the public sector; the Government will not tell us that, on the grounds that the document containing the full business plan is commercially confidential. Again, I want the Minister to tell me whether that is how the legislation, as amended, is intended to operate. Is that how the Government intend the public interest test to be applied?

The document goes on to say that the Post Office has submitted

a clear and transparent formula to calculate a Social Network Payment--

that is, the subsidy at taxpayers' expense--to support non-viable sub-post offices. I asked what the formula was. It has been submitted by one public body, the Post Office, to another, the Government, and each Member of Parliament has been informed of the existence of the formula--so what is it? The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry refused to publish it, on the grounds that the Post Office gave it to him "in confidence". Is that how the public interest test is to be applied? If it is inconvenient for the Government to reveal the cost of subsidising the Post Office following their foolish decision to remove the automatic payment of benefits through post offices, they will avoid answering questions on the grounds that the information is confidential between a nationalised industry and its sponsoring Minister.

Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet): I am interested in the thrust of my right hon. Friend's argument, and I merely offer another example that he might choose to use--one that I am sure will be of great interest to the Minister. The Home Office has made great play of the number of asylum seekers that the Government are dispersing from the south-east of England throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. Last week, I tabled a question asking how many had been dispersed from east Kent since April. The answer I have just received from the notice board is that the information requested is not available. Are the Government seriously saying that they cannot provide that sort of information--or is the truth that they will not?

Mr. Lilley: I am pretty sure that my hon. Friend's suspicions are well founded, and that the Government do not want to answer his question, rather than that they cannot answer it, or that it would be too costly to do so. If it were too costly they would have said so, as that is one of the grounds for non-disclosure.

Mr. Bercow: My right hon. Friend has made considerable play of the potential interaction between the requirement to disclose under the Bill and the manner of answering--or not answering--parliamentary questions. Is he aware that in the other place on 19 October, as is recorded in Hansard at column 1270, Lord Falconer helpfully pointed out that the terms of the Bill did not apply, and were not intended by the Government to apply, to the relationship between a Member of Parliament asking a question and a Minister answering it? Does not that prove our point conclusively--game, set and match?

Mr. Lilley: My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. I do not have his encyclopaedic

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knowledge of the Hansard reports of both Houses, and I had not seen that reference. It is important that the Minister present today tells us whether the Government intend to give less information to Members of Parliament than they are required in law to give to members of the public. That is a clear question, and I shall be sitting here alert, waiting for an answer--although it would appear from the words of Lord Falconer that our fears are well founded.

I have another example drawn from my latest batch of questions--it is random chance that those are the questions I am using; they simply followed on from the publication of the document. The document refers to the performance and innovation unit's study of post offices, and says that the PIU recognised that the proposed

programme would mean merging outlets to ensure their . . . viability.

I asked how many mergers the Government estimated would be required. The answer was significantly phrased: it was not that the PIU had not produced an estimate of the likely number of mergers, but that the report of the PIU

did not contain such an estimate

--a typically tricky side-stepping of the question. I tabled a further question, asking whether the Government had made an estimate. They told me that I would have to wait and see, so they were trying to think of a tricky answer to that question, too.

The Home Secretary gave us a clear test of the way in which the Bill is intended to work, and said that the Government were already behaving according to that test. However, Members of Parliament know that the Government respond to requests for information slowly and trickily, and give the minimum, rather than the maximum, amount of information. They do not seem to apply the public interest test--which, allegedly, they have written into the Bill and amended and strengthened in amendment No. 21--as we were entitled to expect.

In practice, the Government are not even applying the rules laid down by Lord Justice Scott in his report, or those laid down by the Prime Minister in his guidance to Ministers. In practice, the Government make a fetish of restricting and controlling information, and have introduced a Bill with 25 categories of information that can be restricted and controlled. That gives us little confidence that we will have better access to information if and when the Bill becomes law than we had under the old code of practice.

Mr. Nick St. Aubyn (Guildford): I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) on the passion with which he has supported the principle of open government, both in government and in opposition.

Mr. Patrick Hall (Bedford): Are you sure?

Mr. St. Aubyn: I share my right hon. Friend's conviction, and as a Member who has been in the House only since 1997, I will not accept lessons from Government Members on commitment to freedom of information. In the past, a few Conservative Members did not see the light in relation to freedom of information. Surely, however, we should welcome a few sinners who repent, and reserve our contempt for the bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites on the Government Benches who preach freedom of information while practising a veto on information.

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In his opening speech, the Minister used language typical of a barrister to assure us that he would replace the culture of secrecy with a culture of openness. Frankly, the only open thing about the Government is their open contempt for the House, which we have seen yet again in the guillotine motion under which we are debating the amendments. The Government have not acquired a culture of openness, but have been infected with a culture of delusion since the day they came to power with such an exaggerated majority.

I shall give an example of how that delusion reaches to the very top of the Government. We have just heard that the Bill will not even apply to questions that we put to Ministers in the House. Only 12 days ago, I was the first Member to raise in the House the sordid deal that was struck between Liberal Democrat and Labour peers in another place to remove the Bill's teeth. During Prime Minister's questions, the Prime Minister graciously agreed to respond to an issue of concern to my constituents, and answer my question about how open officials in the Environment Agency, the Department of Health and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions are about the health risks of incinerators. That case study is a prime example of why the Bill will fail in its purpose, and why the public interest disclosure that we are being asked to accept does not go far enough.

Mr. Simon Hughes: I remember the hon. Gentleman's question. If he is so interested in ensuring that environmental health matters are in the public domain, I assume that he will support amendment (a) to amendment No. 4, which has cross-party support. Presumably he will accept that that would be a further improvement on what is already a positive change, and that no provision affecting that issue has worsened during the Bill's passage.

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