Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 20 MARCH 2007
ROB EVANS
AND TIM
JONES
Q1 Chairman: Mr Evans and Mr Jones,
welcome. We are very glad to have you helping us this afternoon.
Although this inquiry, on the face of it, appears to be about
charges and fees, as you will both realise, that is not the reality
at all. What we are discussing is what would happen if the Government
placed certain restrictions on the operation of the Freedom of
Information Act, restrictions both as to the cost figure above
which they would not provide the information at all—not
charge you for it, they simply would not provide it—and
as to whether they will accept repeated requests from the same
individual or organisation and whether the Government have any
justification in taking these steps. I wonder if you might help
us to start with by each giving us some illustration of how you
have used the legislation and the public benefit you think has
resulted from it?
Tim Jones: From the World Development
Movement's point of view, we are a campaigning organisation that
seeks to hold the Government to account on issues such as trade
justice, debt cancellation, climate change and how it uses its
aid round the world. I think the most relevant way in which we
have used the Freedom of Information Act is in relation to the
Department for International Development, where we have been particularly
trying to monitor how they are spending their aid money in relation
to water provision around the world. I think over the last two
years we have submitted about 28 freedom of information requests
on this subject, which tends to be asking for details on specific
projects or programmes that they are funding or contracts which
they have let out to certain private companies. That worked out
at about three requests a month[1].
On the amalgamation of the number of requests that you can put
in, we think we would be severely restricted in how many requests
we could put in and far less than we would otherwise have done.
Obviously, when we are asking for this information on the projects
that they are funding, we are doing this because we do not know
what they are up to. I would be quite concerned already about
how DFID publish the projects and programmes around the world
that they fund, and because we do not know already, we have to
put in lots of requests where we think there might be something
happening that we are interested in. So, we do not always get
things out of it that we would use publicly but sometimes we do.
A most recent example is in Guyana where, over the last few years
since 1999, DFID have been funding a water privatisation process
which has recently involved paying the fees for Severn Trent Water
International, a British company, to run the water system in Guyana.
We were recently given access to an evaluation of that contract,
which showed that they had been missing five out seven targets
and actually were in the process of the contract being terminated.
This involved £13 million of Department for International
Development money.
Q2 Chairman: How much—13 or
30?
Tim Jones: Thirteen million pounds
over the course of last five years, I think, in Guyana, and involved
£1.8 million going to Severn Trent Water International. Our
valued judgment would be that this has been a big misallocation
of aid. The public interest case is that this is something that
the public should know about, but we would not know about this
evaluation if it was not for the Freedom of Information Act and
we would not be able to access these kinds of things and, because
we have to put in so many different request to initially get this
information, we have less chance of hitting it.
Q3 Chairman: Could not the Government
say that you engaged for a legitimate purpose but, nevertheless,
in an expensive fishing expedition calling for all sorts of information
which did not reveal anything like that?
Tim Jones: I think that if they
did that would be a very counter-productive argument on their
part, because this is UK taxpayers' money. At the moment, if they
were really concerned about looking at how this money was spent,
they could be far more open in what they reveal already. My comparison
is with the World Bank, who on their website publish all project
documents for every project that they fund round the world, and
DFID just do not have that approach at all. They leave it up to
organisations like to us do this investigation, and that results
in us having to use the scatter gun approach. From their point
of view, it would be far more effective for the Government to
be more proactive to begin with, but given that they are not,
I think this is not a costly exercise because it is the only way
to hold them to account on things that people are meant to be
most concerned about—how UK aid money is being spent around
the world—actually finding out: what are they spending it
on, what are the programmes that they are funding?
Q4 Chairman: Mr Evans, would you
like to give us some illustration?
Rob Evans: How we have been using
the Act?
Q5 Chairman: Yes.
Rob Evans: Yes. I sent a submission
into the Committee which showed 50 stories which had appeared
in The Guardian basically using the Act. I hope you have
got it there. I did not write this list out to boast about what
we were doing but to show that these are responsible stories,
examples of how the media has been using the Act responsibly,
and these are stories which, I think, are in the public interest.
This is the type of stuff that the public ought to know about
in order to enhance democracy. For example, the third story on
the list is a list of the biggest carbon dioxide polluters in
the UK. That was information we did not have before, and I think
that is a very good example of why this Act is a success.
Q6 Chairman: Do you have any more
of those, just to remind the members, if they are particularly
effective?
Rob Evans: There is another one
which I think is useful because it highlights what could happen
if these regulations come into force. We have a story here which
is about the first time that the Government actually released
the amount of EU farming subsidy that each farmer in Britain receives.
This had been a huge secret and, back in 2005, for the first time,
the Government actually released this data for about 100,000 farmers
in Britain, and we wrote a story showing that the Queen and Prince
Charles and other land owners, basically the big land owners,
got a large amount of money. You could say, "So what",
but I think the point about that is that it is, hopefully, informing
the public that this is what is going on and they can make their
own judgment. Our worry with the regulations is that some of these
stories are what I would call quite politically contentious or
complex, and the more that the information is complex or contentious
the more time the ministers will take over deciding whether or
not to release it. Basically, taking the story about the EU subsidies,
it did take quite a long time for the Government to decide whether
or not to release that information, and I think it was the right
decision but, I fear, with these new regulations, it could be
just the type of thing that they would refuse to release.
Q7 Chairman: Have you had occasion
to use the appeals process at all?
Rob Evans: Yes, I have.
Q8 Chairman: Have you completed it?
Have you been successful in using it?
Rob Evans: What do you mean?
Q9 Chairman: To appeal against a
government refusal.
Rob Evans: Yes, I regularly appeal
against the Government, and sometimes you win and sometimes you
do not.
Q10 Chairman: Have you got many matters
still outstanding?
Rob Evans: Yes, that is the problem
that we run into. Sometimes they take a long time to decide whether
or not to release the information on appeal.
Q11 Chairman: Does the WDM use the
appeals process?
Tim Jones: We have not appealed
beyond an internal appeal on anything so far. I am concerned about
this, taking the reading and consideration into account. I think
we said in our submission that of the 28 requests, 10 have been
considered to have some exemption and had a public interest test
applied to them, and often that is to do with international relations
or, when asking for contractual things with companies, commercial
confidentiality. Often they end up being given to us in part and
we get the information in the end, but it can sometimes take four
or five months for DFID to finally reach a decision to do that.
We have never had one so far which we felt was worth the time
and effort for us to appeal against when they have not released
it. I think five of the 28 have been refused outright.
Q12 Chairman: In general, the Act
has worked for you, because you have been able to get most of
the information you felt it right to get?
Tim Jones: Yes, eventually. I
think where we have not been able to is where we have not been
able to be specific enough in our requests because we have not
known enough about what they are up to. So, although there are
problems in the news we had to hand out, we did not think it was
worthwhile following an appeal process because we could see that
they were justified under the terms of the Act not to release
it, although we would have liked them to have done.
Q13 Jeremy Wright: Can you help us
with the number of requests that you make. Obviously, the practical
effect of these regulations, if they are implemented, would be
to reduce the number of times that you can make a request under
the Act, and, if you are restricted to something like one every
three months for a particular government agency, can you give
us an idea of how many applications you normally make in an average
three-month period, if there is such a thing, so that we can get
a sense of how restrictive this will be for you?
Tim Jones: As I say, with DFID
as the main department for us—we have worked it out—it
is 28 since January 2005, which is three a month. Obviously it
does not work out that we have three every month[2],
but we would have periods. At the moment I am waiting. I think
I have got four requests in at the moment since the start of the
year, two of which we are still waiting on DFID to get back to.
If we were restricted in our use, we would just have to try and
make judgments and say: "Which is the most important one?",
and when something came up immediately, you might think, "We
cannot put in a request now because we might want to save our
one for this period for later." So it cuts to a third at
least what we currently put in, I think.
Rob Evans: The Guardian
in a year makes around, I would say, 250 requests in total. It
depends. They are to all departments. It is difficult to judge
how many we would be stopped from making. The problem would come
if you were looking at a particular department. Often the value
of freedom of information for journalists is that you are putting
it together with other information that you are getting. You have
to dig away sometimes at government departments. The most interesting
information is often the most heavily concealed; so if you are
pursuing a department over a particularly long period of time,
that is when you would be hindered in particular.
Q14 Jeremy Wright: Presumably, by
definition, if you got a certain piece of information from a department,
it might raise other questions to which you would also want to
know the answer, so there would automatically be a second request?
Rob Evans: Yes, exactly, you have
to pursue them. I do not think it is the case that often—.
I do not think we are in the position where Whitehall departments
or government will give you everything that you want straightaway.
I think the Act has been good and it has been a success in terms
of opening up. We are on the road, are we not, and we have gone
a certain way down the road towards openness.
Q15 Jeremy Wright: Can I ask this,
perhaps unfair, question, but in your judgment do you think there
is an element of the Government not having anticipated what the
effect of this Act was going to be in terms of the workload on
the government departments in question?
Rob Evans: They should have known.
The thing is that the Act was passed in 2000 and was not introduced—it
did not actually come into force until 2005. The reason given
back in 2000 why it could not come into force within two or three
years was: "We have got to have time to prepare." What
were they doing during that five years? I think they have had
ample time to prepare.
Q16 Chairman: This Committee examined
what they were doing and found that some of them were preparing
very well and some of them were not.
Rob Evans: Exactly. I think that
was wasted time really.
Q17 David Howarth: My question is
similar to one of Mr Wright's. Is your experience similar to that
of MPs asking parliamentary questions, that the answers you get
might be characterised as minimal compliance and sometimes over-literal
in the interpretation of the question? Is it your experience that
you have to make repeated requests just to, effectively, make
your first request in a way that the Government cannot misunderstand?
Rob Evans: There are two points.
One is that compliance is patchy. You get some departments who
are good, others who are not. I think what is crucial here is
the culture. If you have a department that wants to give out information
properly when it is in the public interest, then, yes, you can
work with that department and they give the information properly,
but if you have got a department that does not want to give out
the information, they will use any excuse or any exemption. You
have got to fight against that to prove that they are being unjustified.
So I think you are right, yes, sometimes you have to make several
moves just to get your first request.
Q18 David Howarth: And you suspect
that if there were opportunities for manipulation of the new regulations,
it would not be very surprising if they were used?
Rob Evans: I would not be surprised
at all.
Tim Jones: I just want to add
another example that we had on that where we requested the Secretary
of State's public engagements for the year, and they kept on extending
the public interest test on it. Obviously I made clear in the
request that we acknowledged there would be security issues potentially
just where they were really public engagements, and eventually,
five months in, we were finally granted the request, after which
time most of the public engagements on the list had already happened.
I tried questioning the people in the Department for International
Development about this: "Oh, they are very complex regulations"—you
know. I have never been able to understand how it takes five months
to adjudicate. That seems to me a waste of time. If they are spending
five months making these adjudications, that is where the waste
of money on their part is and not in terms of the requests that
we are putting in.
Q19 Chairman: Do you think that 35
million a year is too much for the cost of freedom of information?
That is the Government's claimed figure and the supposed basis
for their concern.
Rob Evans: I do not, for two reasons.
One is that £35 million is, I would say, quite a good price,
if that is the right price. There are two points. One is that
that figure is very small compared to the amount of money spent
on the Central Office of Information, which is all about all the
press officers, all public information films that the Government
is putting out, whose budget is over 300 million, and that is
information that the Government wants the public to know, but
freedom of information is about the information that the public
want to know, and I think it is a very good price. Secondly, I
would surely hope that freedom of information would lead to better
government and lead to cost savings in the long run.
Tim Jones: Obviously that is,
in the scale of things, a tiny amount of money and, in terms of
what these regulations mean, I think it is more about £11
million they are talking about being saved, which is even smaller.
Just talking from our own experience, the one case of Guyana,
£13 million is probably more than the £11 million, and
we would say that is £13 million that has been misspent,
but then beyond that, if you consider this is from a department
which is responsible for probably about 1% of government spending
and one request by quite a small organisation relatively from
us, it is clear that if you were able to gather together all the
freedom of information requests that have been made and the knowledge
that has been gained from them and the openness, you have saved
far more than that amount of money. The step that has been taken
with this legislation to try and make the governmental processes
in the UK more transparent has been very valuable, and it would
be a horrible mistake for that to slip back.
1 Note by witness: this should be "three
requests every three month period". Back
2
Note by witness: this should be "three requests every
three month period". Back
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